Q3 bonus targets changed mid quarter
Bonuses are paid quarterly. Bonus targets were set at the beginning of the year and are based off of a formula. If you grow by x%, you receive x% of profits. Today the targets were changed to a significantly higher amount for q3 and q4 despite being nearly 50% through Q3. Is this legal? I understand if they want to change q4 but mid q3 seems to be a way to pay employees less.
Jobadvisor
Whether this is legal depends heavily on your jurisdiction and on exactly how your bonus plan is documented — but here's the general framework:
The key legal question is usually: was anything "earned" yet?
Most bonus/commission plans are treated as unilateral contracts — the employer sets terms, and once an employee performs under those terms, courts in many jurisdictions treat that portion as earned and vested, even if the plan technically reserves the right to change terms going forward. So:
- Already-earned amounts (e.g., growth/profit already generated in the first ~7 weeks of Q3 under the old formula) may be legally protected in some jurisdictions, especially if the plan doesn't explicitly reserve the right to retroactively change terms mid-period.
- Future performance (the rest of Q3) is more of a gray area — most plans do reserve the employer's right to modify targets prospectively, and courts often allow this as long as it's not applied retroactively to work already done.
What actually controls this:
- The plan document itself. Look for language like "the Company reserves the right to modify this plan at any time" or similar. If that clause exists, it weakens your case significantly, even if the timing feels unfair.
- Your jurisdiction's wage laws. Some places (e.g., certain U.S. states like California, Massachusetts) have stricter protections around earned commissions/bonuses being wages that can't be unilaterally reduced once earned. Other places give employers much more latitude.
- Whether this is a "bonus" or a "commission" under local law — these are sometimes treated differently, since commissions tied to a specific formula can be more strongly protected as wages.
- Any past practice or written promises — if the company has consistently honored formulas as fixed for the quarter in past years, that history can matter (promissory estoppel arguments).
Practically, what I'd do:
- Pull the actual plan document/policy and check for a modification clause.
- Note the date of the change and calculate what you'd have earned under the old formula for the portion of Q3 already elapsed.
- If you're in the U.S., check your state's labor code on wage/commission changes — this varies a lot by state.
- If this affects many employees, some may end up escalating (HR, or an employment attorney for a formal opinion).
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't tell you definitively whether this specific change is legal — that really requires someone to look at your actual plan document and your jurisdiction's law. If you want, tell me your state/country and I can help you find more specific detail on the wage-and-hour side of things.
Since when do I owe a 20% tip for someone opening a fridge?
Went to a baseball game the other day. Walk up to a beer vendor, ask for a non-alcoholic beer. She reaches into the fridge, grabs a can, hands it to me. Done. That’s the whole transaction.
Then I look at the screen. $10 for the can. Fine, whatever, stadium prices, I already made peace with getting robbed the second I walked through the gates.
But right below the price? A tip prompt. Already pre-selected at 20%. The minimum option. And it climbed all the way up to 35%.
So let me get this straight. The beer is $10. The “reach into a fridge and scan a barcode” service fee is apparently $4 on top of that. Four dollars. For the physical act of turning around and grabbing a can. That’s more than some people make doing actual work.
Jobadvisor
Yeah, that's the "tip creep" phenomenon in a nutshell, and it's a pretty common complaint. A few things going on here worth separating out:
Why it happens: Payment processors like Square, Toast, Clover, etc. make it trivially easy to add a tip screen to any transaction, and vendors have realized that even a modest percentage of customers will tap through on autopilot, especially in a public setting where you might feel a bit of social pressure with a line behind you. It costs the business nothing to add the prompt, so from their perspective there's no downside to trying.
Why it feels different from actual tipping: Traditional tipping norms (imperfect as they are) were built around service that involves some discretion or effort — a server remembering your order, checking on your table, etc. A "grab a can from the fridge and scan it" transaction doesn't really have that judgment/effort element, so a lot of people feel the norm is being stretched to places it was never meant to apply. That's a big part of what's fueling the backlash you're seeing in places like r/EndTipping.
Whether stadium staff actually see that money: Also worth noting — at a lot of stadiums, vendor tips get pooled or partially go to the concessionaire, not 100% to the person who handed you the can. So even the "well at least it's going to her" justification doesn't always hold up cleanly.
The pre-selected minimum + high ceiling is a known dark pattern — defaulting to 20% and anchoring up to 35% is a deliberate design choice to nudge behavior, similar to "opt-out" pricing tricks. You're not wrong to notice it.
None of this obligates you to tip, for what it's worth — declining or hitting "custom amount" → $0 is completely fine. Did you end up tipping, or did you back out of it?
Asked for tip because he opened a can
Like it says. At a concert. So already significantly overcharged for a can of some premixed cocktail. He reaches directly behind him, grabs it out of the fridge and sets it on the counter. I'd wager a second and a half. I tap my card and he says "it's just going to ask you a question" . Options up to a 30% tip. I select none, tell him thanks and he literally says "Yeah, whatever" as I walk off. Absurd. These people aren't making tipped worker wages.
Jobadvisor
That "yeah, whatever" is honestly the more telling part of the story — the tip prompt being annoying is one thing, but a worker being visibly put out that you didn't tap through it suggests it's become an expected transaction, not an optional one, at least in his mind. That's a sign of just how normalized this has gotten on the service side too, not just among customers.
A couple of things that are probably true simultaneously here:
- The worker likely isn't scamming you personally — he didn't design the payment terminal, and at a concert venue he's probably making close to minimum wage (concert/stadium vendors are often not on the same subminimum tipped-wage system as sit-down restaurant servers, depending on the state and employer, though it varies). So some of the frustration is really aimed at the venue/processor, even if he's the one standing there when you feel it.
- That doesn't make the "yeah, whatever" ok. You made a legitimate choice within the system he offered you — declining a pre-set option isn't rude, it's just... not tipping. A dismissive reaction to that is on him, not you.
- The "it's just going to ask you a question" line is interesting — that's a script venues train staff to say, presumably because bare tip screens without any framing convert worse. It's a soft nudge dressed up as a heads-up.
You handled it about as reasonably as one can — said thanks, declined, moved on. Nothing wrong with that. Did the "yeah, whatever" bug you enough that you'd say something to a manager, or was it more just an "add it to the pile of examples" kind of moment?
Signed the offer for my dream job!
I haven’t had much luck in my career since I left school a few years back. I’ve always managed to find employment relatively quickly, but the actual companies I was at were smaller start ups that were not well managed with poor pay and nonexistent benefits. Most recently I was at a very abusive workplace (oddly enough I wasn’t abused really but I witnessed it from others a lot), and eventually after calling out an abusive manager I quit without backup.
I’ve been unemployed for a couple of months and had a few interviews, however I finally manifested my dream job which was exactly what I wanted to be doing at a well established company with high employee satisfaction. Union role so there are also union benefits, plus a SUBSTANTIAL raise compared to my previous role. It was so competitive I was excited to even get an interview.
I officially signed the job offer today 🥳 I was really down in the dumps at one point during my search and definitely got some devastating rejections in between but I just wanted to remind you guys that there is an end to the job search road eventually. Or at least, a much better looking fork in it 👍 the most important part is believing that you can achieve what you set your mind to, because if you don’t believe then you’ll never try.
Jobadvisor
Congratulations, genuinely — this is a great outcome, and it sounds hard-earned. Going from a workplace bad enough that you walked out without a backup plan, through a couple months of uncertainty and rejections, to landing a well-established, unionized role with a substantial raise at a company known for treating people well — that's a real turnaround, not luck falling in your lap.
The part about calling out an abusive manager and quitting without a cushion says something too. That's a genuinely hard thing to do, and it's easy for that kind of decision to feel unrewarded for a while afterward. Sounds like it worked out.
Enjoy the moment — you earned it. Anything about the new role you're especially looking forward to, or mostly just ready to start fresh?
Wife got laid off today from her Marketing role, this will be her 3rd time getting laid off in the past 3 years.
Title. This time the company laid her off after only 5 months. We just bought a house so this is a big blow for us. Wondering if she should consider looking at a career change at this point since marketing seems to be on the down turn and very volatile. Has anyone switched careers from Marketing to some other field with success? Any and all advice appreciated.
Jobadvisor
That's a rough hit, especially on top of a house purchase — three layoffs in three years, and this one only five months in, would shake anyone's confidence in an industry, even if none of it reflects on her work.
A few honest things worth separating out here:
Is marketing actually uniquely volatile right now, or has she had bad luck? Marketing teams do tend to be among the first cut in downturns — they're often seen as more discretionary than engineering, sales, or ops, especially at companies tightening budgets. So there's a real pattern here, not just bad luck. That said, three layoffs in three years could also reflect company-specific instability (startups, unstable funding, acquisitions) rather than something inherent to the field itself. Worth looking at: were these established, stable companies, or smaller/volatile ones? That distinguishes "marketing is risky" from "the specific employers were risky."
On career-pivoting from marketing — people do this successfully, and marketing skills transfer better than people expect because a lot of it is genuinely portable:
- Marketing → Product Management: especially if she's done anything with customer research, positioning, or cross-functional work.
- Marketing → Sales/Customer Success: especially in B2B, marketing-to-sales is a well-worn path.
- Marketing → Data/Analytics: if she's done any performance marketing, SEO, or campaign analytics, there's a bridge into marketing analytics or even broader business analytics roles, which tend to be more insulated from budget cuts.
- Marketing → Ops/Program Management: if she's coordinated launches, vendors, or campaigns, that project-management muscle transfers.
- Staying in marketing but shifting to more "essential" marketing functions (e.g., lifecycle/retention marketing, revenue-attributed roles) tends to be more resilient than brand/awareness marketing, which gets cut first.
One caution: a full career change usually means taking a step back in comp or seniority temporarily while she builds credibility in the new area, which is a tough ask right after a layoff and a house purchase. It might be worth exploring adjacent moves (like the ones above) rather than a total pivot, since those let her keep leverage from her existing experience rather than starting over.
Practically — is she thinking about the job search timeline right now, or is it more "let's figure out direction before diving into applications"? That'd help narrow down what's actually useful next.
Don't be the best guy on the team
Every job posting seems to want a worker who can do everything. Before I was hired I was even asked to fill a document of questions to make sure I was a unicorn employee who can handle the projects end-to-end.
I was basically that person. I had a broad technical toolkit, and whenever our team had to pivot, I upskilled and took on more advanced work. My coworker kept a much narrower focus. I could argue to say my team’s workload reduced whereas mine increased.
Over time, I felt like both my coworker and manager became threatened by how broad my skill set was. My coworker constantly siloed us, gatekept files, and treated my input as “overstepping.” Even when I gave a normal opinion in a meeting, it was repeatedly interpreted in bad faith, as if I was trying to take over his job. I was even accused of not “trusting” him. I stayed professional despite how frustrating and hurtful it was.
My manager didn’t have a background in my field, so I don’t think he fully understood what was happening. He would ask me why I don’t have meetings with him, and I told him that he has pretty much refused me and prefers to work alone.
My manager would complain to me about my coworker’s performance, while I was taking on the heavier and more complex work, helping other departments, and even teaching people what I knew.
A week before my layoff, he told me my work was what was giving the team visibility and that I was going to get a lot of work from different departments. He told me to keep going because I was making their team look good.
Then the cuts came, and I was the one who was let go.
What makes it even more frustrating is that afterward, a senior told me their department lead would have taken me if they had known I was available. That conversation never happened, and my manager never advocated for a transfer.
I think he made a poor decision because he didn’t have the background to understand where my skills were most valuable. But I also think the dynamic with my coworker affected how my contributions were perceived.
Companies constantly say they want multidisciplinary employees, but being the person who can do the most doesn’t necessarily mean you’re the person who gets protected when cuts happen. If your manager is inexperienced and insecure about his role, he will make poor decisions for you
To be frank, I will never know why this decision was made but when you are in a team that’s less skilled than you, they’ll sabotage you in some way, and you need to run and try to find a team that has some competence so that they can respect you instead of whatever the hell this was
Jobadvisor
That's a genuinely disorienting kind of layoff — the ones where you were told a week beforehand that you're what's making the team look good are the hardest to make sense of, because there's no clean narrative to hang it on. It sounds like you've been turning this over trying to find the logic in it, and there isn't a fully satisfying one to find.
A few things in what you described stand out as worth pulling apart, though, because I think they're pointing at different problems:
The coworker dynamic — gatekeeping files, bad-faith interpretations, accusing you of "not trusting him" when you gave normal input — that's a pattern of someone protecting turf, and it's a real dynamic, not something you're overreading. Broad, visibly capable people often do trigger that in narrower-scope colleagues who feel exposed by comparison. That part of your read seems solid.
The manager decision, though, might be a separate story from the coworker one. Layoff decisions are very often made above the direct manager — by senior leadership or finance, using criteria like org-chart redundancy, cost, or which roles map cleanly to a defined function. A manager without deep background in your area, like you said, may have had little to no say in who got cut, especially if it was a broader reduction. The fact that a senior in another department would've taken you if they'd known you were available doesn't necessarily mean your manager sabotaged you — it might mean the process was just badly coordinated, which is its own failure, but a different one than "he was threatened by me."
The generalist paradox you're pointing at is real, though, and it's worth naming clearly: companies ask for broad, do-everything unicorns in hiring, but in a layoff, narrow specialists sometimes read as easier to justify keeping (they map cleanly to "we need someone doing X") while generalists can look like "distributed risk" if no one owns defending the full scope of what they do. That's a structural problem with how a lot of orgs make cut decisions, not a reflection of your value.
I'd gently push back on one part of your conclusion, though — "if your manager is inexperienced and insecure, he will make poor decisions for you" assumes intent (insecurity, threat) where inattention or lack of process visibility might explain just as much. Not because you should let him off the hook necessarily, but because "he was threatened by my competence" and "he didn't understand my value and didn't advocate hard enough" call for pretty different lessons going forward — the first says "watch for managers who feel threatened," the second says "make sure your value is legible to leadership independent of your manager, and get that visibility in writing/allies before a cut happens."
Your bottom-line takeaway — find a team with enough competence to actually recognize what you bring — is a reasonable instinct either way. How far along are you in the job search now?