In one of my first jobs, I came up with a novel idea to automate a big chunk of work, during the early days of ML. We A/B tested it and it increased the company’s revenue by like a third while decreasing costs (and this wasn’t a tiny company). It took a whole team a few months to implement the idea, as it involved a few different skill sets.
To your point, who deserved to capture the value here? Well there was an A/B test to clearly show what caused the boost, and a simple trail from my research (done on my own initiative) to the team's implementation to the revenue, so we at least knew that this group of people was collectively responsible. Nobody got raises, bonuses, or anything. If we had captured that value it would have had to multiply our comp many times over. So why should I have ever gone above and beyond in the first place? Meanwhile my manager repeatedly complained to me that I only worked 9-5.
This early experience was formative in my workplace opinions. Go figure.
To your point, who deserved to capture the value here? Well there was an A/B test to clearly show what caused the boost, and a simple trail from my research (done on my own initiative) to the team's implementation to the revenue, so we at least knew that this group of people was collectively responsible. Nobody got raises, bonuses, or anything. If we had captured that value it would have had to multiply our comp many times over. So why should I have ever gone above and beyond in the first place? Meanwhile my manager repeatedly complained to me that I only worked 9-5.
This early experience was formative in my workplace opinions. Go figure.