> My immediate reaction in my head was: "This is impossible". But then, a teammate said: "But we're Google, we should be able to manage it!".
Google, where the impossible stuff is reduced to merely hard, and the easy stuff is raised to hard.
This is probably the most accurate statement possible.
“I just want to store 5TiB somewhere”
“Ha! Did you book multiple bigtable cells”
What are peer-bonuses?
The idea is if someone helps you in a really big way that you’re able to reward that. So you can ask the company to give the person either credits for an internal store, or a direct addition to their salary for one month.
Obviously, there are limits to how many pay bonuses you can give out and if it’s direct money or store credits.
Directly asking for a peer bonus’ is not very “googly” (and yes, this is a term they use- in case you needed evidence of Google being a bit cultish).
There are companies who help do this “as a service”; https://bonusly.com/
My last workplace had a similar institution, only the reward was candy bar or similar that you could go grab from a bowl in the kitchen (working on an honor code basis), in addition to getting some praise on Slack for general warm fuzzies. It was more of a symbolic gesture for recognizing small everyday things, of course, but it was nice IMO.
> The idea is if someone helps you in a really big way that you’re able to reward that
It never ceases to amaze me how (early) big tech embraced and even promoted things that would have been considered "career limiting" in traditional big corporations.
By systematising/gamifying this stuff you actually help distract people from participating in the realpolitik going on within the executive team. If you stop other non-exec level realising the real way power is exercised within the company with these distractions it removes a potentially very large pool of competitors for power within the org.
Don't know about your flavor of 'traditional big corporations' but my banking megacorp has internal reward system across various 'virtues' for a decade+ at least. Its not direct reward -> money link (thats rather for hiring success), it just helps you create sort of karma, and when bonuses, raises and promotions are considered then this is taken into account.
Since that process is invisible to those being measured you never know details (and shouldn't as long as management is sane, and if isn't this the least of your concerns), but its not ignored and in this way it helps keeping people motivated to generally do good work.
Big bank. Management theory at the time was to create competition between the silos for resources, time, budget, headcount, good desk locations in the bi-annual room desk shuffle, bonuses and even time of day from management. Even sales and trading - the most symbiotic of functions competed.
> would have been considered "career limiting" in traditional big corporations.
How so?
I was in Kindergarten and watching my fellow classmates get gold star stickers on their work. They were excited when it happened to them. I saw it as being given nothing of real value and person could just go to the store and buy them for $1 or $2.
It is a social engineering technique to exploit more work without increasing wages. Just like "Employee of the Month" or a "Pizza Party."
Company I work for does this with gift cards as rewards. I was reprimanded because I sent an email to HR that this " gift" is as useful as a wet rage in the rain. I don't eat at restaurants that are franchises or have a ticker on Wall Street. Prefer local brick and mortar over Walmart and will never financial support Amazon.
If you want to truly honor my accomplishments, give me a raise or more PTO. Anything else is futile. That gift card to Walmart has 0 value towards a quality purchase like a RADAR or LiDAR development kit to learn more or such.
At a previous company I worked at, peer bonuses literally resulted in a small bonus at the end of the pay period. No gift card, just an email notification and money credited to your account. Most motivating form of peer appreciation I've seen.
Basically a way to "tip" people for going out of their way to help you, except that the "tip" comes out of the company's pocket, not yours.
To prevent obvious abuse, you need to provide a rationale, the receiver's manager must approve and there's a limit to how many you can dish out per quarter.
You can give someone a $175 bonus for being particularly helpful or going above and beyond. Everyone can give 20/year so it doesn't have to be that crazy of an effort to get one (although most people don't give out all 20 and the limit wasn't even enforced for a while).
It technically requires manager approval but it's kind of a faux pas for a manager to deny one unless it's a duplicate.
Something designed to remove all intrinsic motivation from employees
Bonuses make a lot of sense in the financial sector, because the whole endeavor is about making money. Intrinsic motivation and making more money align. Historically it got introduced in order to mitigate cheating customers for personal gain. Also it helps that individual contributions are trivially quantifiable to a very large degree.
Obviously there are other professions that share some of these characteristics, like sales. Or if you narrow down a goal or task to "save us money".
Or "How many MDB groups do I need to get approved to join over multiple days/weeks, before I can do the 30 second thing I need to do?"
Do not miss
“the difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer” WW2 US army engineer corp
>“the difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer”
This was posted in my front office when I started my company over 30 years ago.
It was a no-brainer, same thing I was doing for my employer beforehand. Experimentation.
By the author's distinction in the terminology, if you consider the complexity relative to the complications in something like Google technology, it is on a different scale compared to the absolute chaos relative to the mere remaining complexity when you apply it to natural science.
I learned how to do what I do directly from people who did it in World War II.
And that was when I was over 40 years younger, plus I'm not done yet. Still carrying the baton in the industrial environment where the institutions have a pseudo-military style hierarchy and bureaucracy. Which I'm very comfortable working around ;)
Well, the army is a massive mainstream corp.
There are always some things that corps don't handle very well, but generals don't always care, if they have overwhelming force to apply, lots of different kinds of objectives can be overcome.
Teamwork, planning, military-style discipline & chain-of-command/org-chart, strength in numbers, all elements which are hallmarks of effective armies over the centuries.
The engineers are an elite team among them. Traditionally like the technology arm, engaged to leverage the massive resources even more effectively.
The bigger the objective, the stronger these elements will be brought to bear.
Even in an unopposed maneuver, steam-rolling all easily recognized obstacles more and more effectively as they up the ante, at the same time bigger and bigger unscoped problems accumulate which are exactly the kind that can not be solved with teamwork and planning (since these are often completely forbidden). When there must be extreme individual ability far beyond that, and it must emanate from the top decision-maker or have "equivalent" access to the top individual decision-maker. IOW might as well not even be "in" the org chart since it's just a few individuals directly attached to the top square, nobody's working for further promotions or recognition beyond that point.
When military discipline in practice is simply not enough discipline, and not exactly the kind that's needed by a long shot.
That's why even in the military there are a few Navy Seals here and there, because sometimes there are serious problems that are the kind of impossible that a whole army cannot solve ;)