We're making wild guesses about the pay scales there. I've worked at places where employees make 30,000 and the boss makes 35,000.
Also, the bonus system sounds like it was based heavily on quantity, where it is believable that one automated system could substantially out-perform the sum of the other employees. In a system designed to split a bonus more normally (say 10% for 10 employees) it's not hard to imagine that in the scenario described it could have gone 90% for 1, and 10% split among 9.
According to reddit commenters, the reddit poster was making 6 figures (in Euros) for a data entry job (another HN commenter put this number at 250,000, but I couldn't find anything on reddit to support that). The manager was apparently only making 5 figures.
I'm willing to believe that managers can make less than their underlings (for example, project managers can make less than programmers depending on experience, sales managers can make less than salesmen once commissions are factored in) but I am not willing to believe that an entry-level data entry position pays 6 figures. Especially not in the Netherlands.
If data entry was that expensive then they'd have outsourced it to Poland pretty quickly. Or have invested in one of the many document scanning and OCR companies.
I've worked in The Netherlands for 6 years now (5 as consultant in this area), and am pretty sure that this story is bullshit. I've seen nothing like it.
I agree that level of bonus for data entry smells funny.
Although, the one exception could be some kind of government or hospital data where it cannot be exported out of the country, and therefore the only option is to pay local wages. Even then though, the bonus does sound bogus
Here in The Netherlands, it's very hard to sack people. For that reason you don't see the kind of salaries that you do in the US. An employer has less insentive to offer massive salaries, because with the massive salary comes an even bigger liability.
There's no way he's earning 250k a year in a data entry position. Or even as a developer.
Additionally, I've read nothing on the biggest dutch-language IT/Developers community. I can't believe that someone would boast about this on reddit and not on tweakers :)
I still find that odd, perhaps I should quit my current job and do exactly what he does? after all automating data entry has to be a lot simpler than most programming jobs.
Lets play with the maths of this, lets say that he is generously making 40 euros, which is a lot for data entry (think like double what specialist data entry people are normally paid)
That leaves us with a bonus pool of 2100000, the claim is that he was taking 90% of the bonus, that would make the bonus pool 233333, lets round up to 250000
Ok so lets split this evenly across several employees
5 clerks = 50,000 bonus each on a base salary of 40,000 = 90,000 each !
10 clerks = 25,000 bonus each on a base salary of 40,000 = 65,000 each !
20 clerks = 12,500 bonus each on a base salary of 40,000 = 52,500 each !
Thats a stunning salary ! really, I would be motivated myself to get my bonus, even if I was only taking my _equal_ share of the magic pot.
Ok lets assume that his department is huge say ....
50 clerks = 5,000 bonus each on a base salary of 40,000 = 45,000 each
Sounds reasonable right? but the 50 clerks would be costing the company
2000000 Euros ! At that cost even the most stupid of organisations would be looking at automation (human via india or say the meat-cloud), or computers)
Now you might say that 40K is generous for the type of work, that he would really be earning something like 25K, still a lot for data entry which is a low skilled job that is typically hourly paid; a fine argument but if that is the case then the bonus pool becomes larger which still makes all the numbers look suspect.
Maybe he got a raise (and didn't really declare it, for some reason), even then that is somewhat higher than a basic internet search gives me for someone in Holland as a programmer (http://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Country=Netherlands/Sala...). Now the company he works for might be clueless, but I would be surprised if they did not do a wage equivalence as most companies are low that way.
So colour me extremely skeptical, the _only_ way it makes sense is if he misplaced a zero
