Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnsaff2 | Hacker News Reader

So I had a buddy, he was a junior-ish very talented dev in this big retailer where I was working as well.

This retailer obv had massive campaigns for black friday, but also obv very shitty and inflexible systems.

This buddy of mine found that the black friday promotions pricings import failed 5 min before midnight. Meaning that not only would there be no black friday pricing, there would be no pricing at all on the site for 24h until the next pricing run.

He pulled some heroics and managed to fix the import in time and black friday was a success.

So he saved the company 5M GBP in profits, singlehandedly.

As a thanks he got a 25 GBP gift card to the same site.

View on HN

Let's say he was giving 500,000GBP. 10%

Great right? You have just given folks incentive to plant problems and reap the reward. You might say, they can audit and if you caused the problem, you don't get the reward. Great! Now, let's collude with another team mate, I cause they problem, they fix it, we split the rewards.

Once you give monetary incentive, folks start figuring out ways to game it.

There was an agreement on how much he was paid, the company paid that. Doesn't matter if he saved 5M in profits or not. What if he had failed? Or what if he was the reason the pricing import failed? Would it be okay for the company to penalize him by clawing back some of the money he had been paid in the past?

> Great right? You have just given folks incentive to plant problems and reap the reward.

"Just given"? Doesn't this incentive already exist in the world with or without direct cash bounties for fixing problems?

Inversely, next time that they asked me to fix the site during such a situation, I would pretend like I didn't see the alert.

jeez. really?

the COMPANY was run really shittily already, there was absolutely no effing reason to plant anything. all the people tried to make the company better, for shitty effing pay.

have you ever seen a world where people take some kind of pride in their work? want to have a positive impact?

I think giving 25 pounds was strictly worse than not giving anything at all. This was an insult.

Yeah my take on this is that the only appropriate response is a thank you from top level leadership and serious consideration of your heroics when it comes time for salary adjustment.

A thank you without a gift is way less insulting than a thank you with a paltry or trivial gift.

I don't necessarily think he should have been compensated based on the (theoretical) loss of money. He was employed after all. And properly someone else would haved saved the day early enough anyway.

But 25$ is quite an embarrassment. Nothing would have been better in that case.

I mean, if you want to do it on the cheap, it only takes a few minutes for the dev's boss' boss' boss' boss' assistant to handwrite a note saying "Nice work saving the company, you are officially my hero" or words to that effect.

It's tricky to reward outstanding work for salaried folks, since it can mess with intrinsic motivation or misalign incentives. Here it's probably appropriate to have a five figure spot bonus for the line employee who made the fix, and a promotion, if they still had the junior title.

And also a very long uncomfortable conversation with whichever architects or seniors decided it was okay for Black Friday pricing to only be uploaded five minutes before midnight - what the hell is that about?

Salary is literally extrinsic motivation. The problem isn't bonuses, the problem is when bonuses become so regular and frequent that they turn into an informal part of the salary and not paying them becomes equivalent to withholding part of the salary.

If you pay a one-off bonus for outstanding work, make sure you tie it to something specific the employee can understand. If it's a reward for a massive deal decide in advance if you want to pay out similar bonuses for similar deals in the future and what the rules are.

An employer-employee relationship is not a friendship no matter how much you like each other. It's a dependent relationship and it needs rules to protect both sides. A five figure bonus is a big deal for many employees so treat them with the dignity they deserve by making sure they can understand the conditions. If you think there aren't any that just means you haven't spelled them out or don't want to be held accountable.

> And properly someone else would haved saved the day early enough anyway.

According to the story, no. The regular employees in the regular system failed, and OP person decided to act like an owner and save the company, outside of job responsibilities, covering up for management's failure to build and test a reliable system. Did the OP person get paid like an owneror promoted to a leadership position for being a leader? No.

OP's friend didn't get paid like an owner because he wasn't an owner. If you want to be an owner you have to take on the risk as well. If they had missed it, and lost the 5M, you wouldn't support them taking back half of this guy's pay for the next 6 months to help make up for it.

It sounds like he went above and beyond the call of duty.

> So he saved the company 5M GBP in profits, singlehandedly.

This is true, but he didn't make that 5M. If you count every contributing factor to that 5M, you end up with a vast amount of money. The power not going down saved the company 5M. The people who made the goods made the company 5M. The people who set the prices made the company 5M. Or, they were all doing their jobs, and 5M was made.

Sometimes the lack of reward indicates a cover up. I've seen my manager turn white while in a room with his boss and he made a joke about the cost of pizza he was providing and I replied with "take it out of the million or so I saved you last week". He didn't tell his boss that I worked 48 hours straight to resolve a problem my manager created.

That wasn't necessarily the company being cheap. If it was heroics, it could be someone else took credit, or that someone else wanted to keep the mistake quiet, and so the thanks came out of some accounting bucket for tiny rewards.

Personally, that might've been a time I'd look and whether it was time for a promotion, even though I think rewarding heroics is tricky for engineering culture (better to celebrate work that means heroics never required).

The company was cheap beyond belief. This gift card was just stupid.

The real problem obviously was that the company was so shittily run that heroics were needed to save the day. Also my buddy was junior enough to care and do it.

It's pretty sickening to see that people in this thread seem to focus on the moral hazard of thanking via a monetary means, where will this stop? One should not get paid? Not the management that led to this and also to the top level post of totally inept token gifts.

I’ve had innumerate similar experiences, where my actions saved or made clients millions.

I did not get a thanks - gratitude is meaningless, as whoever expresses it for whatever reason will be perfectly happy to turn around and rip your face off five minutes later having entirely forgotten that you just saved their bacon - however I also did not get a kick in the nuts, so that’s good enough for me.

So it was a bug that he could fix in only 5 minutes that solved everything? It sounds like he fixed a wrongly defined variable. Probably should have gotten something better but also someone should have excoriated the QA team/system and whoever wrote the code.

Whoever made that mistake should have just taken your buddy out for a nice dinner.

Also completely agree with everyone on the misaligned incentives.

Did your buddy continue to work there?

Gift cards are the worst, because they just get deducted from my paycheck anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com