When to trust co-workers with your income?

[Rover]

Hey DC'ers.  I come asking this here (as opposed to /., reddit, etc.) because I know the culture here.  Good people, with varied views, trying to promote good welfare for all.   I'm proud to be a part of this community for a while.

While I don't always agree with everyone's views (who can?) I do respect (and have been equally respected) the views of members of the great culture.

Here is my situation:  I started working with Hadoop Administration a few months ago.  I'm now on the Center for Excellence Team for a Fortune 20 company (1 of 4 key members (as defined by our VP)).  I'm working with some brilliant men.  I'm humbled to be a part of the team.  I think we have a chance to produce some potentially significant improvements to Hadoop in general (Yeah, these guys are that good.). 

My problem is this: (get ready to laugh)
We could bust our asses, work for the man, update our resumes (CV's) and go somewhere else and make +x% income.  Or, we could start a pizza & beer franchise. 
College campuses would never be the same if we went that route.

How do you decide something like this?  I'm not joking, the business model we have should be wildly successful.

[Tinman57]

  Just....Follow.....The....Money

[mitzevo]

Umm.. so what is the question? If you take risks you need to be able to handle possible consequences. If you don't take risks, well then nothing to worry about, is there?

[tomos]

I'm confused by the change from 'I' to 'we'.
Have you talked to the others about things/ideas/possibilities?

[Paul Keith]

The reason

The reason to use Planning Poker is to avoid the influence of the other participants. If a number is spoken, it can sound like a suggestion and influence the other participants' sizing. Planning Poker should force people to think independently and propose their numbers simultaneously. This is accomplished by requiring that all participants show their card at the same time.

http://en.wikipedia..../wiki/Planning_poker

Since people usually do not behave in ways consistent with axiomatic rules, often their own, leading to violations of optimality, there is a related area of study, called a positive or descriptive discipline, attempting to describe what people will actually do. Since the normative, optimal decision often creates hypotheses for testing against actual behaviour, the two fields are closely linked. Furthermore it is possible to relax the assumptions of perfect information, rationality and so forth in various ways, and produce a series of different prescriptions or predictions about behaviour, allowing for further tests of the kind of decision-making that occurs in practice.

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Decision_theory

Account planners have often been called 'the left side of a creative brain'. Their primary function is to find consumer truth and insight that helps the creative teams to create work that is not only entertaining and highly memorable, but that is relevant to the consumer and effective in the marketplace. Creative ideas that drive business are more typically the result of a strong collaboration between creative teams and account planners. Account planners (sometimes also called brand planners and strategic planners) use primary and secondary research to inform their strategic thinking and are ultimately responsible for the work that informs, and the penning of, the creative brief. If the creatives are closest to the idea, and the account manager is closest to the client, the account planner is closest to the consumer. The account planner is the person on an advertising team who is most likely to have spent time with consumers (for B to C) or customers (B to B), observing the consumer's path to purchase, by using research such as ethnographies, focus groups or quantitative/social studies, asking consumers how they think about and use the product or service.

http://en.wikipedia....iki/Account_planning

Product Backlog

The product backlog is an ordered list of "requirements" that is maintained for a product. It contains Product Backlog Items that are ordered by the Product Owner based on considerations like risk, business value, dependencies, date needed, etc. The features added to the backlog are commonly written in story format (See terminology below). The product backlog is the “What” that will be built, sorted in the relative order it should be built in. It is open and editable by anyone, but the Product Owner is ultimately responsible for ordering the stories on the backlog for the Development Team. The product backlog contains rough estimates of both business value and development effort, these values are often stated in story points using a rounded Fibonacci sequence. Those estimates help the Product Owner to gauge the timeline and may influence ordering of backlog items. For example, if the “add spellcheck” and “add table support” features have the same business value, the one with the smallest development effort will probably have higher priority, because the ROI (Return on Investment) is higher.

The Product Backlog, and business value of each listed item is the responsibility of the Product Owner. The estimated effort to complete each backlog item is, however, determined by the Development Team. The team contributes by estimating Items and User-Stories, either in Story-points or in estimated hours.

http://en.wikipedia....opment%29#Core_roles

DC app: Reimbursement Tracker:
https://www.donation....msg189062#msg189062

What's My Share:
http://krishean.dcmembers.com/myshare/

Gainsharing is a bonus incentive system designed to improve productivity through employee involvement, with the gains from "working smarter" shared between the employer and the employees according to a predetermined formula (AFSCME, 1995). It includes (1) a financial measurement and feedback system to monitor company performance and distribute gains in the form of bonuses when appropriate, and (2) a focused involvement system to eliminate barriers to improved company performance (gainsharing.com, 2004). Gainsharing, in one form or another, has been around since the 1930's.

http://edweb.sdsu.ed...ns/gainsharing_2.htm

Profit sharing, , refers to various incentive plans introduced by businesses that provide direct or indirect payments to employees that depend on company's profitability in addition to employees' regular salary and bonuses. In publicly traded companies these plans typically amount to allocation of shares to employees.

The profit sharing plans are based on predetermined economic sharing rules that define the split of gains between the company as a principal and the employee as an agent.[1] For example, suppose the profits are x, which might be a random variable.[1] Before knowing the profits, the principal and agent might agree on a sharing rule s(x).[1] Here, the agent will receive s(x) and the principal will receive the residual gain x-s(x).[1]

http://en.wikipedia..../wiki/Profit_sharing

Besides this, there's always the moral fairy tale of the movie Social Network and how to not trust lawyers and always be on the alert for when a group is positioning you out of the pie. There's also the tale of how Jobs got back into Apple through NeXT. There's a branch of pop science headed by Dan Pink I think which states that after a certain amount of salary safety, people would rather work in a place they love and in start-ups this is often parrotted as culture before profits.

Being in a huge company, you probably all know this but unfortunately this is everything I know and I have zero experience so it could just all be feel good.

Edit:

For the paranoid but skilled:

[Rover]

Man, I hate when I forget about my own threads... that's embarrassing. 

[40hz]

So...is that discussion still ongoing for you - or have you already made your move?

[Target]

if you're still looking, I can introduce you to a nigerian prince...

[mahesh2k]

or you can get help from nigerian generals wife..

[Rover]

    Love the support I get from DC.

Yeah, I trusted a couple of folks.  It turned out pretty well.  I'm set up for a 15% bump in base pay  with my transition to Hadoop Administration.  Best pay raise I've seen since the late 90's when everyone in IT was making 10% increases/year.

At least I feel I've earned this one.  I've been @ the company for 4 years, saved them 100's of millions of dollars* and have lived thru 1.5% or less increases annually.  I know economic times are tough, but I never understood failure to reward those who are helping the company survive.

So, in the end it's good news. 


*documented by others, not me.