Bounty Norms

When I got a new job via a friend's tweet, I originally thought the org was going to give her a referral bonus (equal to about a week's salary). It turned out they wouldn't, so I sent her that money instead.

(Confession: I was dumb about this and didn't think about the pre-tax/post-tax issue, so effectively ended up sending her twice as much money as I should have – remember your taxes!).

This was a lot of money to me, and I hadn't yet earned the higher salary, so the decision was expensive, but it felt morally right. I want to reward people for sending me good things, and in the long run the job should have been worth a lot more to me than the referral cost.

I want there to be more of a norm of social acceptability for paying post-hoc bounties for good things people send your way: new jobs, lovers, places to live. I'm not sure how to make that norm happen.

I think in most situations it wouldn't make sense to have a formal contract around this, or to declare a fixed amount in advance: we probably need the flexibility to differentiate the bounty value of an offhand reference that leads accidentally to a job, from a warm introduction but no followup, from someone who holds your hand through the whole application process.

I think a lot of damage has been done by rules of thumb like "when you go to a wedding, give a gift that equals the cost of your plate," rather than some complicated formula of your income and their incomes and how close you are and how unnecessarily expensive the weddings was. Similarly, I think a fixed % bounty for introductions would be bad.

But I don't think it would be crazy to have a norm that if someone sets you up with a great job/partner/home, you're expected to send them something substantial at some point in the future as a thank you.

I do think there's something complicated here where under-compensating someone can feel much worse than not-compensating them at all. I have twice now been in situations where I set people up with career opportunities that have netted them millions of dollars in expectation, and where their response was "cool, I owe you dinner!" And, you know, I don't object to the dinner in theory but in both cases the way they said it made it clear to me they thought the dinner was fair recompense for the connection, and I was like.... no?, I'd rather get nothing, because previously I was a generous guy who did someone a nice favour, and now I'm just a chump who makes hilariously bad trades. (Similarly, I'm happy to do things and receive nothing but gratitude from people who are actually nice and actually share gratitude).

I also wonder if there's some way to signal to strangers that you're an adherent of the Bounty Community. For example, many of us get emails from near strangers asking to Pick Our Brains for job opportunities. I would feel more positively about these emails if the person had a line in their email signature affirming that they were a Bounty Keeper, who would actually give me something if my help was helpful to them, rather than (say) wasting my time with questions they could have answered online, inartfully transitioning to asking me for job leads, and then ghosting me after that.