I'm not questioning the profit-sharing, that's a great incentive (the best IMO) and I'm actually working in a company with that incentive. I'm questioning automatic prizes.
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.
The impact of seniority in the profit sharing program is way too big, in my opinion. I don't even exactly understand what seniority has to do with it, and I'm a (very?) senior developer, working professionally for more than 10 years.
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.
Although not mentioned in the article, I wonder what will be the role of companies in this freelance world...
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.
While I generally agree with the principles underlined in the article, using the Accept-Language header is definitely not the right way to control internationalization.
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.
How does it compare with powerful IDEs like Intellij/PyCharm or Eclipse? I mean, does it make sense to have an editor that is both good at "code, html and prose" (debugging and refactoring comes to mind...)?
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.