The quasi dollars are actually squared up in Yen at the end of the quarter though. Which means there absolutely is a huge potential for unintended consequences.

I'll pick a contrived example, but bear with me. Imagine you've been thinking about some tricky problem for hours and have written in pen all over a printout of some architecture diagram, scratching things out and rewriting them back in, and so on. It's getting pretty messy, and it would be kind of nice to just start fresh with another printout. But you (or the team) have to pay 10 yen to print services to get the copy. Now personally in this situation I would be strongly inclined to just deal with the sloppiness and focus harder to try not to lose my train of thought. I don't really want to be in the habit of randomly shelling out of my own pocket if I can just work a little bit harder for the same result. But this is irrational - a clearer head when working on a hard problem is absolutely worth 10 yen to the business. This seems like a small cost, but that's all that the business was going to save through this scheme anyway! Every single item has this same problem, from "I'll just do it myself instead of paying Joe to do it at $90/hr" to "I'll just walk down the street to get a cheap lunch instead of splurging on the office snacks."

This is a really, really hard psychological problem, and you can't expect everyone in the org to adapt. This is like telling people that instead of washing their car or walking their dog or whatever, they should hire a service to do it for them, because amortized over decades a programmer's spare time working on side projects is probably going to be more profitable than the time of a car-washer or dog-walker. It just feels bizarre and wrong to shell out cold hard cash in order to avoid a little bit of work, for a difficult-to-quantify long-term benefit.

And beyond the difficulties faced by people honestly trying to change their instincts for the benefit of the company, there's the problem that in reality the employees are rational actors whose interests do not align exactly with the company's. You could scarcely imagine a system more tempting to game. It's impossible for any company to exactly pin down the value of each engineer and compensate them accordingly, so success for everyone depends on good faith and aligned incentives. But under this system, every decision becomes: pay personally out of my own pocket, in exchange for a roughly-equal value returned through the benefit of the company as a whole. It's right up in your face every single time, every single day. Think about the dollar cost of some proportion of employees sometimes failing the daily ethical pop quiz and putting their own interests ahead of the company. I bet the employees are thinking about it- and wondering how much they should change their own behavior to compensate. This scheme has then transmuted the tragedy of the commons into the prisoner's dilemma, where everyone has to renege in order to avoid getting screwed. And think about the toxic effect it would have on engineering teams if the usual currency of social credit were replaced with cash. A favor suddenly takes on all of the interpersonal implications of a $250 cash loan out of your own wallet, because it literally is. No thank you.

The cynical side of me also notices that employees are effectively paying out of their own pocket to conduct everyday business, and they get paid back by other employees also conducting the company's business, but any net gain is necessarily due to billing out externally- i.e. the business's overall profitability... like equity holders! Equity holders understand full well that they're responsible for tolerating the ebb and flow of business profitability but conventionally employees are not expected to bear the same level of risk. I wonder if this is a micro-optimization by management at the workers' expense. Whether set up this way deliberately or not, the non-employee equity-holders seem to profit from the fact that the employees likely don't realize how much that risk premium is really worth. (And to address another commenter's point that these are all bonuses anyway and the employees don't stand to lose any money, I think that if bonuses are regular and expected then a sudden drop in compensation due to emergent book-balancing is not any different than straight-up docking their pay.)