Most of you on this forum have very likely read Monkey Business. In this book, after the bonuses are given out, every analyst/associate put his number on a piece of paper and dropped it into a bucket. Then, one of the analysts calculated the average and sent the result to everybody. Seems like an awesome idea to me. You don't have to share your number with anybody, but you still get to find out if you really are paid the top money after you've been told you are the top of the class.
I was wondering, does this work in practice too? If so, did you ever get caught doing this?
Thanks for all the responses.
Of course the analysts do something like that. Sometimes they'll be a bit open about it, usually they'll do anonymous slips of paper. Why would anyone care if you got caught doing it? Sure the mucky-mucks might like to keep down rumbles of dissension among the rank and file, but it's not like you couldn't just meet up at a bar (to enjoy a bottle on your enormous good fortune) and do it there if you were that desperate.
The reason being, everyone tries to game the system. We always discussed collaborating between a large group to have everyone put in blanks, except the person who's bonus we wanted to find out. In reality, we never did it, seemed like too much work. All of the top people knew who the other top people were and what we all got. Everyone else, well, who cares? It's not your money and seriously if you didn't get top and you didn't get bottom will a few K more or less than the average make you feel better?
So, no people don't usually actually do this.
two things 1) i've never heard of this slips of paper nonsense 2) there is a much, much easier way to figure out averages. if you have 5 people, you can easily figure out the average without anyone knowing the other people's bonuses. I leave that to you to figure out, as a brainteaser.
and actually a third thing...the higher ups dont want you to know the market...think about that...
I just thought it would be a good way of knowing that not everybody is told that he/she is the top of his class but everybody's still being paid the same bonus. That's what happened in Monkey Business. That doesn't seem to be a very fair thing to do from the management, but I guess those things happen anyways..
"2) there is a much, much easier way to figure out averages. if you have 5 people, you can easily figure out the average without anyone knowing the other people's bonuses. I leave that to you to figure out, as a brainteaser."
please tell me how.
It happens, or at least, it used to happen.
A principal at my PE fund used to do this with fellow analysts when he was an analyst in the M&A group at Morgan Stanley. Of course, this was like 10 years ago.
""2) there is a much, much easier way to figure out averages. if you have 5 people, you can easily figure out the average without anyone knowing the other people's bonuses. I leave that to you to figure out, as a brainteaser."
please tell me how.
"
give it a shot first...let's say there are 10 people at dinner. they want to know the average of their bonuses but no one wants his bonus to be known. how can they figure out the average without anyone actually divulging his own bonus.
this is asked in interviews from time to time, by the way.
Yea, this could be a nice brainteaser indeed. The approach to solve it is more from computer science, though - in that area its pretty much a standard stuff afaik
tough brainteaser.
I'm kind of stumped. Without anyone divulging their number to anyone else, and assuming no neutral zone/uninterested party (e.g. a hat) I don't see how this is possible. Unless you are assuming the use of a computer/calculator that can take entries without displaying them to the next person?
Interesting that Jimbo originally said "there is a much, much easier way to figure out averages." Is putting paper in a hat that hard that the process needs to be "much, much easier?" Also, are you only interested in the average, or the distribution as well? i.e. in MB I think the distribution was something like: $217K $217K $217K $217K $250K
Which tells you a lot more than just an average of $223.6K
no idea. asking each person to write down what they think the person next to them received, and taking the average of that? That way, you're not divulging your number.
That might work if everyone is on the same grade level and because you would probably put a number close to what you made yourself.
I'd be much more interested in seeing the distribution than I would the average - seems like the hat method would work quite well for this purpose.
Here's a kind of solution:
Everyone takes their number and adds an arbitrary number to it. Then you drop those values into a hat, take the sum of that.
Everyone takes their arbitrary number and then drops that into the hat. Take the sum of that, subtract from the above.
You can suspect certain bonus numbers, but you can never tell for sure and certainly can't match them up.
It is much easier than that. without anyone disclosing his number in any way, it is easy to figure out the average.
there is a much more elegant way to decide - your option actually makes people come too close to disclosing numbers, as its easy to compare hadrwriting on 2 sets of papers and thus come to such conclusions. but the idea about arbitrary number is of course correct - implementation might be different :_)
In that case, just say the first number out loud. Then you won't have anything to compare it to.
Seems like you could just have analyst #1 whisper their number plus or minus a random number to analyst #2. Analyst #2 could then add his bonus to this amount plus or minus a random number, and so on.
The last analyst would provide a figure to analyst #1, who would then net out (or add back) his random number and whisper the resulting total to analyst #2. Once the figure gets back to the final analyst, you should have the cumulative total of the group's bonuses (that is, assuming the bottom bucket analyst didn't fuck up the math).
jimbo: so is smuguy's way the one you had in mind? i'm curious..
I really wanna know what the right answer is!
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