[dstorrs]

You get more for fixing the thread dispatcher:

"Everyone in the company sees [your] plaudits and can pile on more unicorns if they agree that [you] did an awesome job."

The only person who will be impressed by you helping Bob upload to SharePoint is Bob. Total score: 1-3 unicorns.

Every engineer will be impressed that you fixed the thread dispatcher. Total score: 1-3 unicorns * # of engineers.

[emelski]

Sounds great in theory, but that assumes that every engineer is spending time every day monitoring all of the accomplishments by every other engineer just to make sure everything gets valued appropriately. I suppose the answer to that is, "Well, you (or somebody) could tell everybody that you did this wonderful thing," but then you're right back in the position of having to do self-promotion to get recognition for your work.

[blairbits]

Shopify intern here.

I've worked Unicorn in to my daily workflow. I can't say everyone (or even anyone) else uses my system, but Unicorn is my first stop of the day when I sit down at my desk. I look over all the unicorns from the previous day, distribute points as I see fit, and move on with my day. Rinse and repeat daily.

It takes all of ~2-3 minutes out of my day. I can see how this technique wouldn't scale well once employee numbers get too big, but it seems to work well at ~100 employees.