Isn't it an incentive for working less as you become a "dinosaur" in the company? I mean, we can't make the time stop - this is actually an automatically increasing prize, regardless of your performance or any other thing whatsoever, and I'm a little uncomfortable with automatic prizes.

Besides, seniority is already reflected in the salary. Additional prizes should be a direct consequence of productivity, which again, have nothing to do with seniority.

In general, I'm very much in agreement with Peldi's ideas and admire the openness he cultivates but I just don't get this one.

The seniority portion is based on time working for the company, not on time as a developer in general.

Isn't it an incentive for working less as you become a "dinosaur" in the company?

Presumably there are other checks on that, like performance reviews. If my performance gradually degraded year after year, I'd expect to be talked to about that, and fired if I didn't improve.

Besides, seniority is already reflected in the salary.

Sorta -- they base salaries on average where you live for a similar job + a little bit. That's a different kind of seniority than the bonus depends on.

I question how "fair" a bonus structure really can be. At my last company bonuses were entirely random, and weren't always fair: I received several bonuses (that I do believe I deserved), but there were many others who should have been recognized as well on different occasions who weren't.

The bonus here is sort of a macro performance level. Everyone gets to share in the profits of the company when the company does well, and they share somewhat proportionally based on how long they've been with the company. Assuming the company is doing a good job of making sure everyone is performing well and not allowing people to slack off, it's a reflection of your loyalty to the company. And for a startup, it's also maybe a reflection of the amount of risk you took on (employee #1 took on loads, employee #75 took on much less) when you joined.

Then again, maybe I'm just jealous; I've never worked for a company with a profit-sharing plan, but would like to. It feels much more equitable than the traditional stock-option route most companies go for. Though the upside is that for stock options, you just need to stick around until they vest, while with profit sharing you need to stick around until the company is profitable, and you only get payouts while you're still there. Pros and cons to everything, I guess.

Bonuses are incentives, and they only work if they make you work differently that you would if there wasn't any. That's not what happens with seniority.

Maybe the incentive is not to work better but just to retain the seniors in the company. But retention is a completely different problem altogether. Bonuses tied to profits may not be the best way to retain people if you have a bad year (no profits). I think competitive salaries are a much better incentive for keeping people in the company (better pass the message that you want them to work with you, regardless of how well the company's done on that year).

And sure, performance reviews can be unfair but that's not a reason for dismissing them - just keep improving the way you conduct performance reviews. At a certain point, you'll have to have some kind of peer review, better start now. There are many companies where these reviews actually work well.

The problem is that almost everyone who had bad experiences with performance reviews in previous companies (which seems to be the case of peldi) tend to dismiss them instead of improving them.

But it does seem like a poor method to retain people... I feel like my bonus growing over time wouldn't be much of a motivator to stay if the work wasn't keeping me super interested, and my base salary wasn't growing enough to remain competitive. Maybe that's just a bias of mine, though, not to consider the bonus as a top criterion? Dunno.

If you pay / compensate above market, and the employee knows this, they're less likely to 'just take a look' at the competition or other employers offers, as they know it'll be difficult to even make an straight transfer.

I don't know that I'd even call it a golden handcuffs style 'benefit' - it's just greasing down a small, possible source of friction for an otherwise happy employee.

Does it, though? Is this based on anything more than gut feelings?

My impression is that it just raises the offer level of poaching, and no company is going to overpay to the degree that it becomes prohibitive, except for positions where secrecy and/or thieves' honor is paramount (see: finance).

If companies are only ever changing groups of freelancers properly gathered to accomplished certain tasks, what will differentiate them? The ability to recruit and pay the most talented freelancers? I'm not sure that will work out on the long run.

As someone already mentioned, many companies are already facing erosion of employee loyalty but not the most successful ones. I 'd argue that those companies that are market leaders don't suffer so much from that problem (mostly) because they are able to instill a set of values and principles across their workforce and this is very hard (maybe impossible) to achieve with freelancers, who easily come and go and are probably much more emotionally detached from their current employer.

I actually believe in this freelancer world, but I also believe there has to be a reinvention of the way companies work in which setting the right balance between culture/brand identity and decentralization/individualism will be critical.

Remember that one of the advantages of URLs is the ability to easily share them, however I'm not sure I'd be comfortable sharing content that could show up translated to some recipients, based on the language of their browser/application/computer. For example, most CMS systems assume that the content can be completely different between languages (for the same article): you can have the full text in English and only a teaser in other languages.

Maybe not a pure REST approach but using '/en','/pt','/fr' in the URL has proven to be much easier and safer, from my experience.

ST makes navigating the code more quick and smooth - the minimap takes away the feeling of looking at code through tunnel vision, you can preview files much more quickly, and view more code at once with minimalist full-screen mode settings and multi-column layout. The regex search with active highlighting in both the minimap and the file is also nice, and multi-select is pretty helpful for refactoring repetitive code.

That said, ST is just a text editor, not an IDE - while some features, like autocomplete, are partially compensated for, it doesn't do type checking or follow references across files, so other features that stem from those will be missed; e.g. refactoring across multiple files is usually faster in Eclipse. I would usually do most of my editing in ST, and then type-check, compile, and debug in Eclipse.