I agree. Having worked in the military, where there were no bonuses whatsoever, and salaries were based on a standard scale, I found that what made the good employees good was that they were proud of / enjoyed their work, and not money (a different problem was that people could not be easily fired (to say the least), which did lead to some slacking). I personally believe that people whose main motivation is the bonus are not the employees one should look for.
I think this only works in a situation like the military, where the "industry standard" as it were, states there are no bonuses. The introduction of bonuses are a perk, but in our culture of software development its also par the course at most places. From the company perspective, this can be seen as a somewhat salary cap. Instead of requiring I pay all workers x + 5%, I can get them to gladiator it out for that bit of money I don't really want to pay them. I can also correlate this to our US tip culture where its expected to pay people abysmal hourly rates and let the stack ranking of good tippers make up the difference.
I do think the military system would be preferable but it requires a huge industry shift and divorcing the idea that x gets a bonus so company y is more attractive, which seems near impossible. I'm also for abolishing our tip culture to replace it with Euro's but there would be some in that culture that make good money and would balk because their employer would never make up the difference in a million years. Its definitely hard not to see either as a form of extortion but some play the game really well in spite of it all. You can still enjoy the work you do and play the game though, but it just becomes that much more difficult due to outside pressure.
