Algorithms Interviews: Theory vs. Practice
&gt; Some companies will give very large out of band bonuses to people, but that work wasn&#x27;t for a company that does a lot of that kind of thing, so there&#x27;s nothing the company could do to indicate that it valued additional work once someone did &quot;enough&quot; work to get the best possible rating on a performance review. From a mechanism design point of view, the company was basically asking employees to stop working once they did &quot;enough&quot; work for the year.<p>and<p>&gt; This also happened in another way. As is common at a lot of companies, managers were given a team-wide budget for raises that was mainly a function of headcount, that was then doled out to team members in a zero-sum way. Unfortunately for each team member (at least in terms of compensation), the team pretty much only had productive engineers, meaning that no one was going to do particularly well in the zero-sum raise game. The team had very low turnover because people like working with good co-workers, but the company was applying one the biggest levers it has, compensation, to try to get people to leave the team and join less effective teams<p>are pretty important points to note.<p>Accepting that organizations are incentivized to extract the maximum amount of value from you means you should be:
1. Aware of the value you produce
2. Know how to sell it<p>This also comes up during promotion season in places that require that you perform at 50%+ of the next &quot;level&quot; to be eligible for a promotion. The unsaid part is that you will be under compensated for that 50% &quot;next level&quot; and when the promo comes, you&#x27;ll be at the bottom of the comp band at the new level (no wonder people tend to quite shortly after a large promotion)