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by rcavezza 2471 days ago
If you would take a bonus and make it part of my salary, I could deal with that. However, when there's a bonus that makes one company's offer $35K more lucrative than another, that tips the scales.

I've never seen bonuses lead to poor work environments. Can you elaborate on some of your experiences?

1 comments

I can give a correlation (not really causation) example:

An external recruiter talks to an engineer who graduated uni last year and has been a one-man show at a nonprofit. The engineer is looking for a place with mentorship and code review. Recruiter says he can get $120k total comp.

He goes to the company and tells them about a dev whom he’s known for years that a brilliant senior-level engineer who’s led the technical team of a nonprofit startup accelerator. Company interviews the engineer. Gives him an offer for $95k.

Recruiter negotiates for $25k of bonus opportunity and the contract is signed. Engineer joins and spends his first month trying to figure out what team he should be on. He bounces around a few different projects with a mix of success, package management bugs, and utter confusion. Gets some of the bonus. After a year, he learns of how the recruiter sold him in the final conversation with HR.