Comment Re:Management bonuses (Score 1) 533
Bonus targets are set by level and there are equivalencies between engineers and managers. My manager classification corresponds to a Staff Engineer (which I was, prior to becoming a manager). Bonus targets are a percentage of salary, and my salary is only slightly higher than the rest of the team (though, again, my salary hasn't really gone up much since I switched to management). There is a concerted effort to ensure that the pay structure and career path doesn't force people to stop being engineers. An engineer maxes out at Fellow, which is a VP-level equivalency. The bonuses are really pretty transparent and it's the same for managers and engineers, everyone knows their bonus target percentage, salary and then the formula takes into account company performance, BU performance and the rating that the manager submits based on his/her own assessment and peer reviews. The bonus targets for each level aren't made public, but once people get bumped up once or twice, it's pretty easy to extrapolate.
The one area where there is an almost complete lack of transparency is in equity awards. The annual equity awards are based on two manager ratings, only one of which is shared with the employee. The other rating, retention, focuses not on how indispensable, how hirable and how likely to leave an employee is. This is kept secret because it could encourage counter-productive employee behavior like threatening to leave and siloing (trying to horde knowledge of a particular component rather than sharing it with coworkers).
Is that what you were looking for?