Back in the day I worked at a company that if you came up with some long term cost saving measure, they gave you a bonus of 10% net savings for the first year.
A co-worker in the early 90s (he was a tech writer) told me of a cost savings device he invented in the 80s at Texas Instruments to fix a process where occasionally a mirror on a very expensive piece of military camera gear got scratched (I think it was during field disassembly). It was basically some forceps with more metal welded on to make them longer and that allowed you access via a different route than where the mirror was installed. TI gave cost savings awards as a percentage of money saved and he did very, very well with that little invention.
They sure don't do that anymore... At least not at any of the Dallas factories. Even patents reap little money. You practically sell your soul when you join the company and all your ideas are theirs.
This was in Dallas, I believe. But this was in the 80s before the Peace Dividend when there was a lot of defense money sloshing around. I met him in Chicago in the 90s and he, and a lot of TI folks, had left Texas as the defense related work dried up. The team I was on in Chicago was working on the flight data recorder for the F-22 which still had funding.
Oh... I believe it.. Times have changed though. They cut back on travel, corporate crédit cards, etc. We would have no less than 2 cost marathons per year of all day meetings.
I would say blanketed bonuses are a bad idea, or I'd make some partnership deals with other engineers. However, this was a pretty clear cut "give this man a medal" situation, in a clearly toxic company. This is why my reaction is what it is.
There was an old thedailywtf post about how a company thought they'd incentivize fidning and fixing bugs. Suddenly every engineer had a QA buddy, and they'd make like 50 spelling errors, which QA will find, and enigneering will quickly resolve. They took down the bounty within a week.
There's a name for this anti-pattern, the Cobra Effect[0]:
The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdotal occurrence in India during British rule. The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
(There may be some question as to whether these events actually occurred or not, but there are similar examples of documented pest-control campaigns (and others) on the Wikipedia page[0] where similar things happened).
Yeah I've been looking into the cobra effect in the current youtube adblocking thingy... It certainly got me to use primarily adnausium which fixes the problem since ads are served, just... you know... maliciously clicked on.
I did save one company enough money to finance my salary for the year I worked there, just by removing dead servers provisioned but no longer used. Seems like my predecessors were blind to both cost and the past.
I felt bad for leaving so soon, but good for not having cost them a dime.
AWS architecting class years ago. Awesome instructor said if you want to save money, start deactivating servers. The ones people use... the admins will contact you right away. The others... people started up and forgot about.
I have seen higher splits than that. You have to remember this is bottom line cost output saving so the 500K if you look at it on the sales side is like completing a +/- $2M deal in terms of net margin added to the business.
that NEVER happens anymore. and I've only ever heard stories of it, no one I've ever spoken to has ever gotten anything like this.
when I have made large improvements like the article/blog describes, I am pulled off of that and put on something far worse, immediately, except without the autonomy. "why can't you succeed here?"
