Superlative

To quell the rumors: yes, I am still alive.

I still keep in touch with my friend Matt, a former coworker of mine. At the company where we used to work together, we would have annual meetings for a variety of subjects, including meetings to brainstorm about establishing yearly company goals and discussing company profits.

It should come as no surprise that we usually ended up finalizing our annual company goals for any given year sometime in late August or early September of the year in question.

We would also pile into the conference room in order to get the company's financial information. If the company turned a profit, some convoluted formula would be applied to the excess revenue, and 25% of one-fourth of half of an eighth of a hogshead of the remainder would be divided among the full-time employees according to some contrived system of merit.

One alleged reward consisted of employee superlatives that would add an extra 1% of off-the-top profits to your slice of the profit-sharing pie. There was the coveted "Employee of the Year" award, which only ever went to the one guy who put in 60+ hour weeks (slightly less when he went on vacation). And he was usually the same person who'd get Most Billable Engineer, which was another 1%. The Most Billable Engineer is the person who logged the most hours for his client and thus, aside from the periodic rockstar sales agreement, generated the most revenue. After I joined the company, the percentages were retooled a bit, so some 1% superlatives turned into 0.5% and some 0.5% superlatives turned into 1%. I was hands-down the leading candidate for Most Billable Engineer 2007, right up until I quit at the end of September.

So last week, Matt gives me a call. They had their superlatives meeting. Guess who was MBE 2K7? And I didn't even contribute in October, November, or December. This means that with 3 months of time to catch up, I still beat out everyone else's numbers by, as Matt tells me, a gap of almost 100%. Of course, you forfeit the employee profit sharing program if you stop being an employee, so there's no money love coming my way because of this. Nonetheless, I did almost twice as much billable work in nine months as any one person there did in twelve.

And those guys are not lazy.