I don't care about bonuses and they are counterproductive.
Worked long and hard on a understaffed technical project at a Silicon valley tech company. Went “the extra mile” to hit all my bonus goals. Expected a $15K payout, but NOPE because the company didn't do well financially so no bonus was paid out. What's worse, the economy and industry sector were growing. As long as the company isn't going to guarantee a payout, I'm never going “above and beyond” to meet goals. F* upper management.
The incentive goals are set once a year, and are seldom updated to match changing business conditions. This has the effect of people doing useless work just to hit their goals and get a payout. During the fiscal year, project 'X' started looking less and less feasible and everyone knew it was going to be discontinued. Well, the engineer who had the goal to design a circuit board for 'X' keep working on it for 3 months even though we knew it was never going to be used. So bonuses have a perverse effect of encouraging wasteful work.
Another example is that a manager wouldn't release engineers on another doomed project until after the fiscal year rolled over. Reason, he had to hit certain milestones for his bonus regardless if the project was obviously dead in the water. This effectively delayed staffing up other projects with better prospects.
Incentive bonuses just incentivizes the individuals to game the system to get their own payout, which doesn't always align with the best interest of the company as whole.