Is there any working bonuses-schema for developers?

Question

Any suggestion how financial bonuses for developers should be calculated. It seems to be easy -- take things like:

• effectiveness/performance,
• code quality/bugs count,
• experience,
• teamwork,
• engagement,
• Over hours,
• some others.

and count some score.

But we all know (i.e. http://gojko.net/2008/08/07/paying-programmers-are-bonuses-bad-and-what-to-do-about-it/) it doesn't work in real world.

People have really different performance, they are the best in various areas, work on different stuff, etc.

I've read about some bonuses system (i.e. based on points for performance/quality/over hours), but all of them seems to be really unfair.

In my opinion no bonuses at all seems to be reasonable solution -- of course it would work if both, base salary and employ standard, have to be high enough.

Is there any bonuses-schema for developers which works and keeps morale high?

Answer 1

At my work we do quarterly bonuses, in which we are just given a task list of things that are nice to have. We're expected to get the mission critical stuff done, but if we go for the nice to have things, and complete them, then we get a bonus.

Seems like a simple system to me and works out well for us.

Answer 2

Just don't. Indeed, there is a great article by Joel regarding this, called Incentive Pay Considered Harmful.

Instead of bonuses, hire great people and pay them what they're worth. Give them a great workspace and free coke (a-cola). If you have to bonus out, bonus out equally across the whole team.

Answer 3

Here's one that works:

Profit-sharing based on sales. At an old job, somebody would figure out some metric of how profitable the company had been, and everybody got a piece of that. It was based on your salary, so the bonus might be "6 weeks" or "8 weeks", meaning your bonus check was equivalent to that many weeks of your paycheck.

I was just a junior guy at the time, but it's a big boost to get a check worth a couple of months of your salary.

Answer 4

Thanks for all answers.

All of them are very useful and are pretty similar to my thoughts :).