Balsamiq and profit sharing. Should be read alongside Balsamiq on salary.

Seems fair except maybe for the part where compensation takes living expenses into consideration.<p>If an employee decides to live somewhere cheap and it works out well, then they should see the benefits of this decision. If it means the employer must make certain sacrifices to accomodate this (telecommuting issues), then the employee should bear some extra cost to cover that, but it shouldn't be related to his living expenses.<p>If an employee chooses to live in Manhattan so they feel plugged in or w/e then they're responsible for covering their exorbitant rent.<p>Only if the employer demands they live somewhere specific should living expenses be taken into consideration.

Read this alongside the <i>salary</i> article that was posted <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2986379" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2986379</a><p>Balsamiq is a fairly unusual business and Peldi has grown something pretty extraordinary. This is a highly profitable business that has made a conscious decision to be great on its own terms, not on the terms that a Silicon Valley venture capital firm might impose on the business.<p>If you want some more background, go and watch this video of the talk Peldi gave at Business of Software last year. There is also a transcript you can speed read if you don't have an hour to spare.<p><a href="http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/08/do-worry-be-happy-peldis-brilliant-talk-about-keeping-sane-as-a-software-ceo-video-transcript.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2011/08/do-worry-be-happy...</a>

I've never worked at a startup that was consistent about giving out it's bonuses. Usually they did some variation of the "making our numbers" policy usually in place at larger corporations. As a startup, you hardly ever make your numbers. So I've come to discount bonuses altogether (along with worthless stock options) when negotiating my salary. Now that I'm at a bigger company, having a consistent bonus every year is quite nice. There are tradeoffs to be made though...

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

Back-of-the-envelope math:<p>Suppose Google were to implement the same policy. Their quarterly profits last quarter were $2.5B, and had approximately 30,000 employees. So 10% of $2.5B split among 30k employees means an average quarterly bonus of $8,300, or a yearly bonus of $33k.<p>This seems like a pretty good bonus, particularly since if Google used salary.com to define their salaries, an incoming software engineer in the Bay Area would make $70k.

Have you guys considered opening up the books to the public as well?<p>Note: This question is partially relevant to the adjoining article "Balsamic: Salary Policy"