cleetus 5 years ago

I worked for a retail clothing company called Steve & Barry's which was very much like The Office. One year the bonus was a novelty 5 pound Hershey chocolate bar. I ended up with 20 pounds of chocolate because several people in my department had no idea what to do with them. Another year they gave Miracle on 34th Street DVDs and popcorn because earlier that year we opened a location on 34th St in Manhattan. There were no bonuses my third year because the company filed bankruptcy and downsized.

At company-wide meetings, stand out performers were given 'top-banana' awards, which if I'm remembering correctly were actually bananas. I think one of my buddies actually kept his on his desk and let it rot until some poor cleaning person threw it away.

The company would order pizzas for lunch to encourage people not to go out, but charged a dollar a slice. Leftover pizza was wrapped individually in tinfoil, frozen, and available for sale the next day, still for a dollar. I remember several rounds of company wide emails chastising people for not paying for frozen pizza.

Shortly after that first bankruptcy filing, the company filed again and liquidated. Steve and Barry were bought out after the first filing and will never have to work again.

  • function_seven 5 years ago

    Oh God I forgot about that place. I went there once after hearing about the hype from a coworker ("Dude, great selection and cheap as hell!").

    The place was miserable. Dirty clothing strewn all over the place. I bought a couple shirts for like $8 each. Neither of them fit all that well. They disintegrated after one wash. One was cut crooked.

    Seems like the whole company was a thin (and I mean thin) quick fashion veneer over sweatshop labor?

    • hackerbabz 5 years ago

      Sweatshops can do a good job though. They must have have used particularly poor workers for some reason.

      • datashaman 5 years ago

        Poor workers. For some reason. ISWYDT.

ThinkBeat 5 years ago

I worked at one of those companies that earned ridiculous money refinancing peoples homes during the run-up to the financial crisis. (Yes, I now know it was quite unethical)

They had a boiler room team of salespeople who made an insane amount of money. We are talking six figures a month. They were not at all highly skilled or had any financial background or degree.

Their bonuses could be a luxury car. (or once a horse).

I worked on the IT side. We made the software that basically did all the work. It included instructions of a spiel to sell loans, how to get around various excuses and such. And it did all the work with filing the required paperwork ensuring all the required information was there, sending out information to the people who refinanced all that crap. You could, in practice, take someone from the street, set them up with this software and they could sell loans. (this is not as far fetched as it may sound).

I have so many stories about my time there but anyways, the IT team was not at all highly paid, nor very appreciated. One Christmas we knew we were getting a bonus, and given what we knew about bonuses being handed out we were kinda excited.

Wanna guess what it was?

A $50 gift card for a ham.

  • WorldMaker 5 years ago

    There's something about that particular (shady) business model of ethically questionable work that over-values "commission activity" and under-values technical achievement that makes it possible.

    A past employer used the software we built to create a commissions lottery [1] for a call center floor, and paid huge commissions to an "R&D team" that "value added", but really just created idiotic Access reports from the software's databases (sometimes bringing the Production databases to their knees until we started forcing them to use clones and BI data lakes), but software development was a "cost center" ineligible for commissions, despite doing all the "real" work (including any and all efficiency gains). At one point the executives convinced themselves despite huge turnover that they were somehow magically hiring "better" call center staff.

    I feel somewhat confident that that companies misplaced ideas of work/efficiency/how it was profitable were directly correlated with its misplaced sense of ethics. The "R&D team", for instance, seemed representative of the sort of bottom feeder scum that play political games well but don't actually have any skills of their own, and arguably at the end of the day that was roughly what the company as a whole was, a bottom feeder parasite playing politics well enough to make a ton of money surviving in an ethically dubious evolutionary niche.

    [1] We had proof that it was a really bad lottery, too. The software was something like 95%+ accurate in how much money was likely associated with each item that went out to the call center. To make things "fair" we kept getting a lot of feedback to make it as "random" as possible.

  • radcon 5 years ago

    > A $50 gift card for a ham.

    Sounds like they were a little too inspired by National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. I guess the Jelly of the Month Club was all sold out though.

  • lttlrck 5 years ago

    Thanks! now I feel better about my $50 Amazon Gift card...

arkades 5 years ago

I’ve got two from the hospital:

After a couple of trainees in our area committed suicide, there was a cry and a hue about attending to trainee mental health. Our hospital took this to heart, and decided: they’d hold a resident mental health day!

This took the form of an iced cream party for the residents. Specifically, it meant they got some tri-flavor cartons of iced cream and stuck them in the physicians lounge. They did not give the residents any protected time to take a shit, much less go down to the physicians lounge for iced cream. None of the residents got any, and the attendings ended up eating it. They subsequently sent out an email patting themselves on the back for the efforts they were making to keep any more residents from jumping off the fucking roof.

Another time: it was physician day. I hadn’t actually seen this before, most hospitals don’t bother praising physicians, but this was a safety net hospital with shit salaries. The trainees on the psych floor were encouraged to go down and get some of that free salad and pizza.

All the patients had been seen, nothing was going down, so they handed off the floor to the nurses and mid levels to go get some of that fancy pizza the folks in charge kept telling them to go get. This is normal; multiple staff qualified to run a code remained on the floor (a code is basically an algorithm for administering cpr, with attendant drugs).

A medicine attending waited for them to leave the floor and go downstairs. The moment they were good and gone, he called a fake code. When the mid-levels, nurses, and med students arrived, all trained in running a code, the attending put them aside, and kept waiting for the residents to arrive. Eventually, of course, they did.

They then proceeded to get ripped new assholes for having had the temerity to go downstairs for lunch after having been told by their seniors to do so, and leaving their patients appropriately covered. They got sent to lunch just so they could be scolded for getting lunch.

But that sort of shit only happens to psych residents. Other residents would never be told to take 20 mins to grab lunch.

7402 5 years ago

At the end of a project death-march (at one point I turned in a >100 hour timecard), the division director had a celebratory thank-you dinner for all the managers involved in the project.

My direct supervisor was at first puzzled as to why I wasn't coming with him to the dinner at the end of the day, and then he was quite appalled - I think he later had words with the director about the whole thing.

  • hinkley 5 years ago

    I'd bet money that most of those managers weren't even in the building for most of that death march.

    I have a standing rule. If I work overtime it's because I fucked up. I said something would be done by Friday but I goofed off, I'll work.

    If I'm working nights and weekends for business reasons, then my manager is in the building the entire time. A lot of them tone down their rhetoric when you make them put skin in the game. All of a sudden some of the scope gets negotiated down.

    • tonyarkles 5 years ago

      It’s funny to tell this story in a thread about bad incentives, but the “managers not there” part reminded me of it.

      I worked at a startup that did citizen identity management for government (think SSO for an entire province). Because of gov’t IT policies, we often had to deploy after hours, in a kind of weird “managed IT” process. We still automated the process, but couldn’t press the button without being on a conference call etc.

      Anyway, we had a deployment go south on Friday night, rolled it back, and decided to come back and try again Sunday. The CEO himself showed up about 10 minutes after we did with a big box of Dilly Bars. Normally that would put this in the category of this thread: “thanks, I’m working overtime for ice cream...” but what he said made it all better: “I know this sucks to be here today. Help yourselves to ice cream. And I’ll be in my office all day, stop by if you need anything. And please let me know when you’re done so I know I can go home.”

      Awesome awesome dude.

      • dbcurtis 5 years ago

        Yes, having a manager just be there showing appreciation is huge. My story is trying to crack a hot, high-impact bug that got reported days before product launch. Daily 8:00AM and 5:00PM status meetings on Saturday and Sunday reporting to multiple VP's kind of hot. So the debug lab manager had little clue how to hang a logic analyzer probe any more, and no clue how to read the traces. But he brought in take-out 3 meals a day and did whatever else to keep us well-fed and caffeinated during the ordeal. And if we wanted to consult with somebody, he tracked them down and got them on the phone. Basically just hung out and said "Thanks" often.

        • tonyarkles 5 years ago

          That is 100% awesome. I've had a few managers over my career that got that.

          The counterpoint (funny enough, at the same company as the ice cream) was a different exec who came close but just missed the mark. Weekday evening deployment (started at 5:30pm) and he orders pizza. A lot of pizza. Things go smoothly and since we're just sitting and watching monitoring for a bit to make sure all is good, he decides to head out. Ten minutes after he leaves, we get a call about a third-party site that broke after the deployment... guess we're not leaving.

          So the debugging drags on, and around 11pm we start getting hungry. AHA! Leftover pizza in the fridge! We go to the kitchen to discover... he took all of the leftovers home. Like 4 pizzas worth. So what's our conclusion? "Fuck it, we'll fix it in the morning. Let's go home."

          All it would have taken waa leftover pizza...

    • BonesJustice 5 years ago

      I have the same rule. If I’m expected to come in on the weekend, my manager had better be there. If it’s important enough to ask me to sacrifice my personal time, then it had better be important enough for him to be there too.

      Unless it’s because I screwed up and need to fix something post haste. In which case, he won’t have to ask me at all.

      • lamby 5 years ago

        You could even passive-aggressively frame it as "oh, but you being around would be highly motivating..."

  • brokenmachine 5 years ago

    Call me ungrateful but I can't think of anything I'd less like doing than being forced into a dinner with coworkers that I already spend more time with than my family or friends.

    Get the money, then go home.

    • c0vfefe 5 years ago

      People with a greater emphasis on work-life balance probably wouldn't stay at a job requiring occasional massive overtime, like the comment you replied to. At that point, the dinner after work is no longer the issue.

    • rv-de 5 years ago

      You better not let this attitude shine through in a job interview, though :D

      • brokenmachine 5 years ago

        "Doing your job then going home is frowned upon in this workplace".

fatnoah 5 years ago

Oh, man, don't get me started. Two short ones: I did a stint in professional services and billed for 2600 hours @ $250/hr for a total of $650k. Essentially worked 12+ hour days for a year, and got a bonus of $1000 before taxes. I quit within a month.

Next up was an appreciation gesture where we were thanked for all of our extra hard work with a pack of "Extra" gum and a delivery of baked potatoes (with all the fixings, at least). Unfortunately, the potatoes didn't arrive until about 2pm and no announcement was made. There was just a couple tins in the corner of the kitchen.

  • rsweeney21 5 years ago

    Most of the developers at my company (www.facetdev.com) are contract, but for the few full-timers we still have, we used to ask the team to work long hours out of the goodness of their hearts if a project needed it.

    That seemed wrong, so I implemented a bonus plan where you get paid 60% of everything you bill over your weekly goals and made working extra hours optional. I love writing those bonus checks!

    • stavros 5 years ago

      Wait, so you pay overtime, except you pay 40% less? I must be misunderstanding.

      Also please tell me you aren't proud of paying for overtime and I'm misunderstanding that too. That should be the minimum expectation.

      • dhruvmittal 5 years ago

        Not the original poster, but any kind of overtime is rare for salaried work? At least in the US.

        I'd take 60% per hour for overtime in a heartbeat as long as it was optional, since I've always ended up doing that kind of work for client/manager goodwill (or the pleasure of not being fired).

        • chatmasta 5 years ago

          Some states (Washington, IIRC?) require overtime hours be tracked even for salaried positions, and those hours should be 1.5x regular rate.

          (This is off the top of my head based on an internship 6 years ago)

          • foota 5 years ago

            I think this may be true beneath a certain salary amount, but it's relatively low for software.

            • inuhj 5 years ago

              For California it depends on both type of work and compensation. You can still be required to pay overtime to a salaried employee if they don't meet certain criterion such as being in a managerial position.

            • dragonwriter 5 years ago

              In California, the level for computer professionals is nearly double the main (professional/management/admin) amount ($88K+ vs $45-50K depending on employer size.)

      • socalnate1 5 years ago

        60% of what was billed to the client; so probably the equivalent of 3x or 4x their normal salary rate.

      • tecleandor 5 years ago

        I understand that you get 60% of what's billed to your client, which probably is several times your salary rate per hour, and not 60% of your regular rate per hour. Maybe?

    • euler_angles 5 years ago

      So you ask people to work overtime at a discount to their normal rate?

      • rsweeney21 5 years ago

        No, when full-time employees are billed out to clients it is usually at 2-3x their effective hourly pay rate. 60% of their bill rate is more than 1.5x their typical pay rate.

      • ineptech 5 years ago

        "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." - The oft-ignored HN comment guidelines

        • euler_angles 5 years ago

          I couldn't understand what he meant at all, that's why I asked.

russh 5 years ago

My wife is a registered nurse and the facility she works for had a Christmas party "to recognize all the hard work" everyone did. At some point they did a raffle and handed out a total of 8 gift cards among the 200 employees at the party. Whatever. Her next pay stub had a deduction for $35 to cover the cost of that party and the "gifts" that were given.

  • mikeash 5 years ago

    I think this one has transcended the realm of bad gestures and ended up deep in the territory of illegal wage theft.

  • hi41 5 years ago

    Oh God. That was very cheap. Don’t visit the home of the managers. They might charge you for the snack you were offered.

vinceguidry 5 years ago

One of my hobbies is to dream up fun ways to shame the higher ups. The basic gist of it is that you have to thread a needle between the fiction that you as an employee care about the business and the business cares about the employees and the reality that the business primarily cares about increasing profits and the employees just don't want to be bothered by silly management tactics.

So in order to be successful at this and deliver maximum shame you have to pay the same amount of lip service to the fiction as management does while savagely illustrating the reality. And do it as publicly as possible, but not in a town hall or all-hands meeting. All-hands meetings are ridiculously expensive from the corporate perspective so derailing them to make a point makes you out to be a villain. At least wait until they ask for questions.

But if the boss gets up and grabs everyone's attention for a minute, that's the perfect time to go on the warpath. "So what are we going to get for all this effort? Gift certificate to Applebees?" especially if that's something that's been done before. The idea here is that the boss is making an appeal to sacrifice personal comfort for the good of the company. That's never okay and is poor management. So raise the question of what we're getting in return.

The payoff is twofold. First everyone paying attention gets the pleasure of watching the boss squirm. Second is the eventual pavlovian conditioning that gets the boss to respect the workers by not making unreasonable demands just because nobody will stand up to them. They need to justify it with more than hoorahs.

The best part of it I think is if you do this once and get away with it, you won't see it again for awhile, then when they do and you have to remind them again, you can watch that flash of 'oh right, I can't do that with Vince around' on their face.

Won't work in the public sector where the expectation to sacrifice yourself for the public good is intrinsic to the culture. But I consider carrying the torch for workplace respect part of what I consider "managing up" and one of the things I try to bring to every role.

  • fj39dkf 5 years ago

    I'm surprised this seems to work so well for you. I've had colleagues do similar things and it pretty much always resulted in them being "managed out", outright fired, or mysteriously lumped into a round of layoffs that otherwise didn't affect their department.

    • vinceguidry 5 years ago

      It really is about threading a needle and making sure you pay the appropriate amount of lip service. It really helps to make yourself really hard to fire and likeable otherwise in the organization. Respect starts with you respecting others and the company. If they respect what you do for them, then you get the latitude to push back on stuff.

GlenTheMachine 5 years ago

My employer, a US DoD component, had a program called “On The Spot” awards. The idea was that if you had done something outstanding, your first line supervisor could authorize an immediate bonus of up to $1000.

Being the DoD, it couldn’t be that simple. They decided that actually the bonuses had to be approved by your second, third, and fourth line supervisors. And also by the program manager at the sponsoring agency. Forms had to be filled out, lost, found, signed, routed, xeroxed, left on desks while people were on vacation. Passed through legal and security.

Also, the bonus was distributed among all the team members being rewarded. The $1000 figure was the maximum allowed for the total bonus, not the individual bonuses.

My team did something outstanding. It took 18 months of hard labor. Overtime. High stakes demonstrations. We ended up bringing in tens of millions of dollars in funding. A full year later an extra $150 showed up in my paycheck.

PS I forgot another incident. I was nominated for a prestigious award, given by an official very high up at the Pentagon. I was asked to write my own nomination letter. I was given the award; to receive it I had to dress up in a suit, show up early to work, shake the official’s hand, and then spend an hour giving him a tour. The actual award was a letter of commendation and a challenge coin. There was no bonus.

Theoretically, the challenge coin would be worth a lifetime of free drinks in bars frequented by military members. Or so I’m told. I don’t drink.

  • throwaway66666 5 years ago

    Damn! My current CEO wants to do the same. But he wants people to vote across teams. EG, backend engineer nominates machine learning researcher. Machine learning nominates HR. For a $1000 bonus, or a new ipad previous generation. Reasoning is that the manager cannot approve because that would reward favoritism, so random people nominating random people it is. Bad ideas coming from a good place I guess, but people are going to feel demoralized for sure in the end.

    • asark 5 years ago

      It's surprisingly easy to accidentally be designing a game and not realize it. And designing games is hard. And one can closely approximate the percentage of the population that's put so much as one thought toward how to do so—the limits of the practice, the balance, the ways your rules can be abused or encourage behavior you hadn't anticipated—ever, as zero. That when someone starts to recognize what they're accidentally doing they tend to give up, or abandon any effort to do it well, or ditch it and go with some familiar, proven pattern instead even if it sucks and doesn't fit the situation, makes sense. It's hard, and very few people are good at it.

      It's easier to recognize that you're playing one than that you're making one, it seems.

    • Spooky23 5 years ago

      These schemes always suck. After a major datacenter migration and other big transformation projects, that place I worked at setup an awards committee and had unbiased judges rate nominations. I was the only technical reviewer... the rest were customer success manager types, hr, even accounting.

      End of the day, the most passionately written nominations were for people in IT support, mostly for doing shit they weren’t supposed to do. The “customer champion” replaced toner quickly at our expense, (it was supposed to be paid for by the customer for reasons). The other big one, that came with cash, was given to someone who was a notorious master of getting other people to do their work.

      I felt bad for the organizers, as they really intended to do a good thing.

    • jnwatson 5 years ago

      Early on in a recently IPO'd security company, HR thought it would be great to allow anyone in the company to give an award to anyone else. It was points worth about $50. Eventually, word got out that nobody was paying attention to the awards going out, and it was an automated system, so the points would be applied automatically.

      You can imagine what happened. My favorite was two folks that were related to each other awarded the "Nepotism Award" to each other.

  • gameswithgo 5 years ago

    A challenge coin! Are people who tend to run companies total children, or do they think that those of us working for them are children?

    • Nexxxeh 5 years ago

      I think it's more a cultural thing. Not everyone is financially motivated, they want the recognition. A challenge coin is a tool for doing that. It's in a similar vein to a medal.

      It might have been misjudged in this instance however, but they're a thing in military circles so I can imagine how it seemed like a good idea.

      Tbh I'd have been really pleased, but I can appreciate that's not universal.

      • GlenTheMachine 5 years ago

        If you are in the military, you can use challenge coins to get yourself free drinks. The idea is that when everyone is at a bar, the guy or gal with the challenge coin from the highest ranking officer never has to pay for rounds of drinks.

        I've never seen a civilian use one. We don't spend much time in bars, and the feeling I get is that if I did try to whip one out in the presence of uniformed personnel -- a challenge that I would almost certainly win, given who this coin was from -- that would be a tremendous faux pas.

        So at best, this is the sort of object that carries some real meaning in a very particular social context among a very particular set of people, but that meaning doesn't carry over to anywhere else. Like baseball or Pokemon cards, I suppose. How would you feel about your boss switching out Christmas bonuses for packs of World of Warcraft cards?

        • defen 5 years ago

          How long are challenge coins "valid"? If someone had a challenge coin from Eisenhower (not sure those exist, let's pretend they do) would that person essentially always win, forever?

          • WorldMaker 5 years ago

            From my weird lay understanding, it's somewhat similar to childhood games where people would try to determine who had the "coolest" Pogs [1]. There are multiple "axes" that determines which challenge coin "wins": highest rank associated, most interesting challenge involved (some coins represent specific deployments or activities or actions), perceived rarity (there only three of the coins ever made), etc. To some extent the challenge coins serve what medals/badges always have: an excuse to tell a cool story, maybe brag about something. Similarly the "free alcohol" rules follow the same general principles of "that's a really cool story, I owe you a beer for it", just reduced to simple evocative coin form.

            Which "axes" are in play, and who "wins" (or ties, a lot of the rule variations I've heard are set up to optimize towards ties; the most common challenge is just whether or not the other person has a challenge coin of any sort, not necessarily trying to figure out which wins if both people have coins on them) varies a lot between groups.

            Also, challenge coins have seeped into some parts of lay culture, especially bar culture (given that alcohol has always been the big bet, it shouldn't be a surprise). For instance, the liqueur Fernet has its own challenge coins that bartenders tend to challenge each other for free shots of Fernet. (Bars try to keep one in reach of the bar at all times in case the bar is challenged, and the number of people that have them that have them that aren't themselves bartenders is supposedly kept quite rare.) https://talesofthecocktail.com/history/part-family-behind-sc...

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_coin

            [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_caps_(game)

            • defen 5 years ago

              Interesting, I love Fernet. Now I just have to figure out how to get a coin...

          • GlenTheMachine 5 years ago

            I honestly don’t know. The guy whose coin I have is now retired.

      • bumby 5 years ago

        Public can be difficult to award people without running afoul of ethics rules. You're suprisingly constrained on what, and to what extent, you can award with congressionally appropriated funds. Sometimes people just eschew the whole idea because it's so difficult.

      • Spooky23 5 years ago

        It’s a big thing among some Infosec people who get a rise out of the cyber warrior nonsense.

        One guy I know has enough of these things you’d think he was a navy seal, mostly from training sessions. His actual job is monk-like copying/summarizing of NIST documents and CVEs.

    • tlavoie 5 years ago

      Well, it worked for toilet-training our daughter. "Pogs" (colorful cardboard disks) were in at the time, used here as rewards.

  • agumonkey 5 years ago

    It's always like that. Such a common trick. Something in humans is eager to prove themselves to the hierarchy.

  • awestley 5 years ago

    Ouch. A slap in the face to you and they might as well have burnt that $150 (Likely $300 dollars before taxes) since it had the total opposite effect.

    • quintushoratius 5 years ago

      > Likely $300 dollars before taxes

      The net bonus was probably $150 before tax; it's a rare employer that pays the tax for you.

      • awestley 5 years ago

        Net by definition means after certain adjustments have been taken out (like taxes). Regardless $75/$150/$300 in any case, it's a slap in the face. A slap that you need to pay taxes on.

  • brokenmachine 5 years ago

    > Theoretically, the challenge coin would be worth a lifetime of free drinks in bars frequented by military members. Or so I’m told. I don’t drink.

    This may be frowned upon in the military, but you could rent the coin out to people?

    • StavrosK 5 years ago

      The free drinks are because the coin impresses people enough that they volunteer to buy you drinks, it's not an official voucher.

  • tssva 5 years ago

    Besides the overtime everything else would be part of the job you were being paid to do. As a federal employee depending on your job classification you were paid either 1.5x your salary or 1.5x the salary of a GS-10 Step 1 adjusted for your locality for the overtime. Most likely in private industry you would be a salaried employee and not have received overtime pay or a bonus which exceeds what you received in overtime pay.

    Also challenge coins, especially given to a civilian employee, are considered an honor in the DoD. Your post gives the impression of a great sense of entitlement on your part.

    • GlenTheMachine 5 years ago

      Maybe they are to uniformed members of the military. I've never once seen a civilian use, display, carry, or talk about a challenge coin. They typically get thrown in the back of a desk drawer and forgotten about. We literally have no use for them whatsoever. They don't even make good paperweights.

      I have a stack of fourteen of them. Most of them I was given for spending thirty minutes giving some random officer a tour of the lab. They're not exactly hard to get.

      • LyndsySimon 5 years ago

        I’d say most “gun nuts” at least know what they are. They’re not that obscure.

  • acollins1331 5 years ago

    I still don't have an email address.

gameswithgo 5 years ago

I worked for a while for Thomson Reuters, where some years ago somebody in charge read that companies with value statements performed better than those that did not. So they hired a 3rd party consultant to write down their values and they had these posted all over the walls.

They also had posters of stuff like "the mood elevator" pasted up in the kitchen: https://themoodelevator.com/

Everyone I felt like I could talk to about this thought this was childish, idiotic nonsense. Do companies have thousands of childish people who take this stuff seriously and think it is great? Or does everyone have to just pretend because they don't want to get fired?

I have a hard time understanding it. Anyway I left that place.

  • BryantD 5 years ago

    Values work really well if the company is actually serious about them. Having a third party consultant write down your values is usually an indication that you're not too serious about it.

    Amazon's values work because management is deadly serious about implementing them. You may not enjoy working at a company organized around those values, but they keep the majority of people focused where Bezos wants them focused. Apple has a very different set of values; still works. Ditto Google.

    At companies under a certain size, you don't need to write down your values to make sure everyone knows what they are. One of the common causes of growth failure is forgetting to keep an eye on your values as you grow, and then all of a sudden half the new engineers don't seem to understand why you need to keep latency as low as possible.

    Here's an interviewing tip. If the company you're interviewing at has core values, ask how they apply to the team you're looking at. Bonus points if it's a core value that doesn't seem to apply -- maybe something about product if you're interviewing for a datacenter job, say. If the answer is weak, the company might have lost track of how it wants to do business.

  • orclev 5 years ago

    It's a problem of delegation. Some executive "reads" some whitepaper (I.E. gets told about offhandedly by their buddy at the golf course), and thinks that it sounds like a great way to prove their "doing something" about moral or diversity or whatever. They then turn around and tell someone under them to "make it so", who does a tiny bit of research and then passes that off to someone under them. Eventually this arrives at someone with a clue who actually does some research and figures out this is an idiotic idea, but at that point you'd basically be telling your bosses bosses boss that he's a moron, so instead you just play along, get it done, and hope everyone forgets about it in a couple months.

  • maxxxxx 5 years ago

    For me any kind of motivational posters on the wall are an immediate red flag. Usually it means that things aren't going well and management can't come up with anything better than hanging up posters. Well-run companies show their values by the way they work. They don't need posters.

    • brokenmachine 5 years ago

      My company sends emails about online surveys.

      The surveys are thankfully anonymous.

      I know these useless surveys will never have any effect, and you never hear about any results or changes that have happened because of the surveys.

      There are only checkboxes for "mildly agree", "agree", etc.

      But there is usually a tiny "other comments" box. So I usually write long diatribes about all the company's failings in that tiny "other comments" box.

      At least I'm getting paid while filling them out, but they must be wondering who the disgruntled truth-sayer is, since I'm sure not many in the company actually bother to do the surveys.

      The only reason I know not many actually bother to do the surveys is because they do release stats on that, and encourage people to do them - I imagine it's some kind of Executive KPI for worker engagement or some such bullshit.

  • radcon 5 years ago

    > So they hired a 3rd party consultant to write down their values and they had these posted all over the walls.

    My previous employer did something similar with a word they invented -- except it was really just a synonym for efficiency.

    The CFO got so excited that he had a bunch of posters printed out and handed out smaller versions to the supervisors. The supervisors all thought it was embarrassing but none of them had the guts to say that to the CFO.

    To this day they still list that fake word in all their job postings with a little blurb about what it means, completely unaware that most applicants will probably spit their coffee out laughing at the absurdity of it. I think it might even have its own page on their website too...

    • pwodhouse 5 years ago

      That doesn't sound very Googley.

      • raphlinus 5 years ago

        I chuckled, but I have to say that the word "Googley" used to mean something when I was there. It was exemplified by, among others, Claire Stapleton, who would post incredible little stories to go along with TGIF announcements. Retaliating against her for organizing a walkout is one of the most un-Googley things you can imagine. Now that she's left, if someone uses the word "Googley" unironically, you can laugh in their face and tell them I gave you permission.

        ETA: I found that Claire has posted a sampling of these on her site: http://cargocollective.com/clairest/Miscellaneous

  • c3534l 5 years ago

    > So they hired a 3rd party consultant to write down their values and they had these posted all over the walls.

    That sounds like a pretty big statement of the company's values, regardless of what they actually said.

  • pixl97 5 years ago

    >I worked for a while for Thomson Reuters

    I'm sorry, have you recovered?

    Dealing with their accounting/auditing software is not good for ones health.

    • gameswithgo 5 years ago

      it was brief. we got bought, laid off, good severance!

cptskippy 5 years ago

I worked on a team of three people in the early 2000s to develop one of the first web based automotive insurance underwriting applications for an insurance broker. It was a low volume program and as such they hired a single marketing representative to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania. He worked on commission and was expected to make in the high five figures.

It ended up being wildly more successful than anticipated and pulled in double digit millions the first year. The marketing representative's commission ended up being middle six figures as a result.

He sent us a case of Tastykake snack cakes as thanks. That was all we got in the way of thanks from the company.

  • woah 5 years ago

    Was it really his responsibility to give your team a lavish thanks? Sounds like he had a windfall, but working on commission can very easily go the opposite direction.

    Was the wild success of the initiative due to your team’s outstanding technical genius?

    • cptskippy 5 years ago

      It wasn't his responsibility to reward us, and he gave us the gift pretty soon after the program's launch as thanks for the support we gave him and his top producer. I wasn't admonishing him, he was a genuinely nice guy. I only mentioned his fortune to give perspective on how profitable the program was.

      A producer at this broker made just over $50k on commission if they busted ass. This program was so successful that he made close to half a million.

      I mentioned his gift not because it was shitty but because it was the only form of thanks or acknowledgement we received.

      It was actually a great gift at the time because we're located in Little Debbie country and didn't even know what Tastykake was. It contextualize so much pop culture (e.g. Clerks).

    • perl4ever 5 years ago

      "Sounds like he had a windfall, but working on commission can very easily go the opposite direction"

      Well, I'm a bit skeptical. Someone who makes $500K unexpectedly isn't going to lose $500K unexpectedly.

      • StavrosK 5 years ago

        One year you sell $500k worth of software to customers, the next customers sell $500k worth of software to you. Easy come, easy go, it's a zero-sum game.

    • falsedan 5 years ago

      I believe that, without anyone to implement the system, it would have made zero dollars.

    • magashna 5 years ago

      Probably not, but this is more patronizing than thankful. I'd rather get nothing than $3 of snack cakes

lostphilosopher 5 years ago

Not a counter point to this article, but a counter point to the efficacy of monetary rewards.

> "Study showed that monetary incentives are great for routine, mechanical work. But how does it play when talking about cognitive, advanced tasks? Not well at all."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgKKPQiRRag

Counter-counter point: If anyone ever points you to this for evidence _you_ shouldn't get a bonus/monetary reward system, ask if _they_ get a bonus/monetary reward system...

  • thomascgalvin 5 years ago

    I'm completely uninterested in bonuses, because they're a one-time thing.

    A merit increase at the end of the year stays with you for the rest of your career. A $1,000 bonus is gone as soon as it's spent.

    I've seen some organizations that use bonuses to cover over the fact that people aren't getting raises, and I would expect people who do cognitive tasks to be better able to run the math on why that's bad.

  • Someone1234 5 years ago

    This is a different topic than the article and the discussion so far.

    A yearly bonus or a "thank you"/party/etc aren't rewards tied to specific tasks. They're meant to be gestures of appropriation. You're discussing a bonus structure that ties financial incentives to very specific work items, and rewards them accordingly.

    I'm not disagreeing with your point, just pointing out they're two different topics.

    • rdiddly 5 years ago

      Appropriation or appreciation? If it's appropriation I'm intrigued!

      Like what if someone shows up to an event you planned, and starts thanking people for coming. They're basically implying/claiming ownership of the event. Appropriation through appreciation.

      In other words what if you thought a project was yours, and then someone appropriates it by thanking your team, implying it was for that person all along?

  • lostphilosopher 5 years ago

    > "Every day was a hot new idea and yesterday’s priority was forgotten. Why bother making progress towards a goal that will change tomorrow?" ("Rob's" comment on the OP's article)

    This to me is the single biggest killer of motivation / productivity. If you've got this problem, I agree with the video that even large monetary rewards won't salvage productivity.

    • brokenmachine 5 years ago

      I agree that is bad, but what about a bureaucracy where everything is so convoluted that you can never get any idea off the ground?

  • radcon 5 years ago

    I don't think one reward method is objectively better than any other because individuals are all motivated by different things.

    Some people want to feel appreciated, some want to feel like their work makes a difference in the world, and some really are motivated by huge wads of cash.

  • pwodhouse 5 years ago

    That study is probably true but does it apply to engineers, people who are paid to be logical and rational as much as possible? Your efficient-because-people-are-irrational reward system is demotivating your best people.

    I feel happier when I get a bonus that brings retirement closer, or lets me give more to charotsbt causes I believe in, or gives me a day off, instead of a throwaway toy or schwag or a gift card or a meal at an expensive restaurant that doesn't serve food I can eat.

  • hnick 5 years ago

    I can't watch the video, so maybe it was covered, but it can also have the opposite effect. Applying a reward or a fine pegs a "price" to the action and can produce something opposite to the desired outcome.

    The common example is if a daycare has parents frequently turning up late for pick up, so they have to stay open late. So they decided to apply a surcharge for latecomers in a study. The problem got worse, since the the value of the fine was less impactful than the guilt felt by most parents. It was now seen as more acceptable to be late.

    Example write-up: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what...

  • balfirevic 5 years ago

    Maybe they will respond that management is basically routine, mechanical work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

  • c0vfefe 5 years ago

    It keeps people happy who might otherwise leave.

Areading314 5 years ago

On a team with many colleagues from India, was repeatedly promised steak dinners if we were able to meet deadlines.

  • duxup 5 years ago

    I once traveled with a college who was socially a bit hard to handle. So we go out to the valley from the Midwest and he keeps suggesting we go to burger joints with the local team that is about %70 Indian.

    Everyone kept looking at me like "What the hell?".

    • hinkley 5 years ago

      One of the places I mentioned in another post did pizza on fridays as a teambuilding lunch thing. It would have been nice except it took us about two months to convince them to order a vegetarian pizza for our Indian coworkers. Didn't feel like teambuilding.

      But as I meet more and more people with food sensitivities I think that providing food for an event is just fraught anyway, and maybe you should try something else.

      • duxup 5 years ago

        That's really weird, when done right, it isn't that hard to find a vegetarian or similar alternative. Most places that cater or just about any place have good options these days.

        At one place I worked we just used the same folks to bring in food. Rather than debate what they just had packages and we would check boxes (vegetarian, etc) and numbers and blamo reasonable food showed up.

        I think the real issue is when you have folks who don't know what they're doing trying to manage it.

        • vibrato 5 years ago

          What about a carnivore alternative? Not so cheap...

    • duxup 5 years ago

      Er... colleague.

  • billfruit 5 years ago

    There are plenty of Indians fine with steak dinners. India is a pretty diverse country.

    • kyllo 5 years ago

      Only about one-quarter of Indians eat beef, so it's not at all safe to assume that any random group of Indians you encounter will be majority beef-eaters.

      • thtthings 5 years ago

        one quarter? Who told you that?

        Less than 1/10th percent Indians eat beef.

      • oh_sigh 5 years ago

        Well then they can get the pork chop

        • kyllo 5 years ago

          Pork is probably even less popular than beef among Indians. At least a lot of the Muslims eat beef, but they don't eat pork. A majority of the Hindus, Buddhists, and Sikhs eat neither.

          For real, any corporation employing a significant proportion of Indian people (hell, even non-Indian people too) should be culturally sensitive enough to know that any offer of a morale dinner must feature vegetarian options. This is basic cultural sensitivity and anyone who doesn't understand this has no business managing people.

        • addicted 5 years ago

          Pork isn’t popular amongst meat eating Indians either. Just look at your local Indian restaurant menu. You will see very few, if any, pork dishes.

          • perl4ever 5 years ago

            I don't think I've ever been in an Indian restaurant that has pork or beef on the menu, but that's in my corner of the US. Pretty much universally, they have chicken, lamb, goat, seafood, and vegetarian versions.

        • AstralStorm 5 years ago

          That reduces it to just over half Indians, the other is vegetarian.

        • bastawhiz 5 years ago

          Then maybe they should have used the extra five brain cycles to decide to offer a pork chop dinner instead.

          • oh_sigh 5 years ago

            Person A: Do you want to get tacos for lunch?

            Person B: Sure

            - goes to taco stand -

            Person A: 3 tacos please

            Person B: I'll take the enchiladas

            Person A: Oh my god, we were supposed to be getting tacos for lunch. How could you do this to me?

            • bastawhiz 5 years ago

              The metaphor doesn't work. You wouldn't dangle a steak dinner as a reward to a group of people who you could reasonably assume were mostly vegan. The intended reward _is_ the steak, because steak is expensive and delicious when prepared well. Yes, you could order a nice salad, but don't you think it sort of misses the point? It's not on the employee to enjoy the reward they're being offered, it's on the management to pick a reward that's valued by the employee. And sometimes, that means having even a tiny bit of cultural sensitivity.

              • oh_sigh 5 years ago

                'Steak dinner' is an American English idiom for 'a nice meal'. And it isn't culturally sensitive to assume that a group of Indians are vegans.

                • kyllo 5 years ago

                  That's debatable, I'm American and would take an offer of a "steak dinner" to literally mean steak. Even presupposing you're correct that it's generally understood by Americans as an idiom, assuming that non-Americans understand American idioms is a form of ignorance, if not deliberate arrogance.

                  No one's saying "assume they are vegans," we're saying "don't assume they eat meat." Big difference.

                • egypturnash 5 years ago

                  I'm American and if someone offered me "a steak dinner" I would expect to be taken to a steakhouse, where steak was pretty much the only item on the menu.

                • bastawhiz 5 years ago

                  I'm American, and if someone told me they're taking me out for a steak dinner, I'd immediately assume we were going to a steakhouse. It couldn't be any less of an idiom. If they took me out for pork chops, I would be completely and utterly confused.

    • perl4ever 5 years ago

      Sure, but that's not the point. The point is whether you're likely to find a group where everybody is fine with beef (or pork, or any meat at all).

      Also, not all Indians are fine with the Indians who are fine with steak. Significant conflict over that sort of thing sometimes makes the news outside the country.

    • Areading314 5 years ago

      I know -- my colleagues were not though!

    • KSS42 5 years ago

      Some get around this by ordering bison - totally different species ...

  • kgwxd 5 years ago

    The steak is a lie!

  • Theodores 5 years ago

    Oh dear! I can relate to this as I am invariably the lone vegetarian. I don't have meat or fish smells in my life and so the idea of dining out with people eating steaks is just abhorrent. I prefer not to go if I know I am going to struggle with the menu but it is never easy to refuse the kind gesture. It comes across as anti-social.

    People also order from the more expensive end of the menu if the company is paying. Normally they might eat a chicken sandwich for lunch but if the company pays they are eating dead octopus or some other endangered species more intelligent than them.

    The other one that I have seen is outright vegetarian baiting, so that means ordering things like crispy chicken's feet or sheep testicles just to push things to the culinary extreme.

    Working with Indian co-workers on training in the UK the Friday treat was KFC. Eaten at desks. So the whole place reeked of the stuff and every surface had the finger licking slime. Bins had bones in them. If you are the lone vegetarian you have to just keep quiet. But with 6-7 people over from India in the office? The company can't just change its KFC ritual.

    Few people were what you might call athletic in that office.

StavrosK 5 years ago

We need to find a name for a gesture so small in its generosity that it ends up being offensive. No bonus would have left me disappointed, but a $50 bonus would have made me angry.

Like when Delta gave a food voucher to make up for a 5-hour delay on a 30-minute file. The voucher was for $3. Fuck Delta.

  • pavel_lishin 5 years ago

    When my entire engineering team was laid off, work organized farewell drinks for us.

    Except they didn't actually budget for this. Their idea was that the whole office would go out and... celebrate? Us being laid off? And pay for it ourselves?

    • JakeStone 5 years ago

      Man, when my company got shut down in the dot com days, after the 10am all hands, I said screw it and took my entire team out for drinks until about 4, out of my own pocket.

      As far as I'm concerned, that's the way you do it if you're going down with the ship. Drink with the crew, pay for them, and tell stories and try to make plans as you slip into the waters. 19 years later, I'm still friends with all but one who disappeared to the offline somehow.

      Ended up giving my director a slightly embarrassing hug when we got back in, but we'd been through enough over the past that she forgave me and we're still friends.

      • StavrosK 5 years ago

        How can a hug be so embarrassing that it needs to be forgiven? It's a euphemism I'm missing, isn't it.

        • JakeStone 5 years ago

          She and I were somewhat standoffish people back then, not really huggy types. Meanwhile, I come into the office, 3 sheets to the wind, see her, and said something like "S., I am going to miss working with you so much!" at a fairly loud volume, and I'm a good half foot taller than her.

          It's something I still have to buy her a beer for every couple of years or so.

          • StavrosK 5 years ago

            Hmm, I still can't relate. It sounds like a very sweet gesture. If you told me you'd miss me and hugged me, I'd buy you a beer.

            • JakeStone 5 years ago

              I grok. Our business relationship was very good (thus my outburst) but our somewhat distancing (and very "proper" and "professional" Midwestern based) personalities in the 90s led to it being slightly embarrassing for us, then.

              We obviously got past it, but it makes for an amusing story as she's never seen me that inebriated since, and actually didn't know I could get that buzzed as well as be demonstrative.

              • StavrosK 5 years ago

                Ah, I see, thanks. I'm glad everything is good now!

    • FireBeyond 5 years ago

      When something similar happened to me in the first dotcom crash, my boss at least had the decency to say "screw it, I'm putting it on my company AmEx", and even when he went home, he told the bartender "Keep it open all night, and add a 25% tip" and told us to stay as long as we wanted.

      We did.

    • StavrosK 5 years ago

      So they basically told you "you're fired, go to a bar"? Jesus, people...

      • pavel_lishin 5 years ago

        "Go enjoy a round of drinks with all the people you don't work with anymore."

    • rdiddly 5 years ago

      It's like, no, I'm headed home to get started on never seeing you guys again!

    • kragen 5 years ago

      Did nobody on the entire engineering team have a company credit card?

  • jrochkind1 5 years ago

    At a former place I worked (a university), there was no annual cost-of-living increase to your salary. Instead, any increases were performance based.

    If you scored the _highest_ level on your performance review, the level that required approval from several levels of HR to ensure that not too many people got it... you might get a 1.25% salary increase. If you scored "satisfactory" you might get a 0.75% increase.

    Eventually some consultant told them that doing performance-based raises for such meager amounts and meager differences between high and low end, were actually found by research to have a negative impact on morale. (I left soon after that, so not sure what they changed to).

    One more case of many of paying an expensive consultant to tell you something that was obvious to most of your staff already but you didn't listen to them.

    • stavros 5 years ago

      I have a friend who worked as a consultant for a few years. I asked him what he did exactly, he said "well a company asked me to help them solve X, so I would go to the company's developers, ask them how they'd solve X, then I would tell the management that and get paid handsomely for it, and everyone's happy. Management got a solution, the devs got listened to, I got paid well, win-win."

    • duxup 5 years ago

      I remember a study that noted that random awards not given to everyone were seen to have more morale boosts than rewards that people thought were small that were given to be everyone.

      But yeah it amazes me people can't figure out the tiny reward is wonky.

      • jrochkind1 5 years ago

        I find "merit"/"performance" based raises for like 2 or 3% to be insulting.

        You think I wasn't already doing my best, but what's going to motivate me to really give you my best is the promise of a 2% raise, if I successfully navigate the insane beurocracy to fill out my paperwork the right way to game the system and have my manager cooperate?

        You don't just think I take no pride in my work and don't care about the project/mission itself, you also think I'm cheap/desperate.

  • Retra 5 years ago

    There is a name for that. It is "damning with faint praise."

  • thaumasiotes 5 years ago

    > a gesture so small in its generosity that it ends up being offensive. No bonus would have left me disappointed, but a $50 bonus would have made me angry.

    This is basically how I felt about the Amazon employee discount program, which if I remember right was 10% off all purchases, capped at $100 / year.

  • hnick 5 years ago

    Sounds like the one penny tip people like to leave to make a point.

  • RantyDave 5 years ago

    Well, there's your name then - a "fuckdelta".

niccl 5 years ago

A different view: I'm a contract dev at a very small company (20 all up, 2.5 devs, all contractors). The bosses are owners, and work _crazy_ hours. Occasionally they'll give out $100 supermarket vouchers, with a hand-written Thank You message, when we've hit some milestone. It's worth barely more than an hour's work, but I still appreciate it. I'm pretty well paid there, and to give a cash bonus that would be significant on top would be a big dent for them, so I mentally fall back on the 'It's the thought that counts', and the hand-written cards give a genuine feeling of being appreciated

  • crooked-v 5 years ago

    I'm sure it helps that it's actually something useful, unlike some of the other examples given in the comments - everyone needs groceries, after all.

throwaway2413 5 years ago

My own personal favorite, from my GM, explaining why the sales team was getting six-figure bonuses for an extremely successful year entirely driven by engineering, which was getting barely four figures:

“Sales people are motivated by money; engineers are motivated by fun work. So just do your job and have fun!”

I’m not even interested in money, just a little respect would’ve been great! Needless to say, I quit shortly thereafter.

AdmiralAsshat 5 years ago

I read this and was immediately reminded of David Sedaris' short story about working as a Macy's Elf:

>I spend all day lying to people, saying, "You look so pretty," and "Santa can't wait to visit with you. You're all he talks about. It's just not Christmas without you. You're Santa's favorite person in the entire tri-state area."

>

>Sometimes I lay it on really thick. "Aren't you the princess of Rongovia? Santa said that a beautiful princess was coming to visit him. He said she would be wearing a red dress and that she was very pretty, but not stuck up or two-faced. That's you isn't it?" I lay it on and the parents mouth the words, "Thank you," and "Good job."

Source: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/47/transcript

  • itronitron 5 years ago

    I particularly liked Sedaris' rendition of 'Away in a Manger' sung straight from the heart.

ConfusedDog 5 years ago

Kudos session during the Agile's Sprint Retrospective. Everyone suppose to show their appreciation to teammates of their choices for a mandatory pat on the back. I always feel being forced to do that is really awkward.

For one, if someone didn't get at least one pat on the back, it is very demoralizing for them. Also, there are a lot of teammates did not get a pat by the persons they think should be gratuitous would be a little resentful. I think it's one of the dumbest morale boosting activities.

jchw 5 years ago

A certain startup I worked at, the CEO would give out... gift cards. Occasionally, usually after someone was severely overworked. And I’m pretty certain he got them for free/cheap in the first place.

Of course, the real red flag was starting at $10/hr 1099’d (almost definitely illegally) and being told it’s more than most people start at. For software engineering. After a good interview. I was astounded and perplexed, but it was my first software job, I was a college dropout, and I was still living with my parents, so I took it anyways. But if I knew what I know now, just a few years later, I would’ve laughed in their faces. Oh well.

  • cosmie 5 years ago

    > the CEO would give out... gift cards. Occasionally, usually after someone was severely overworked. And I’m pretty certain he got them for free/cheap in the first place.

    I've been there, and it wasn't even a startup. The company credit cards had 1% back, redeemable as gift cards. The owner/CEO insisted on paying as many vendors and contracts as possible via credit card to rack up the points. The stack of gift cards (for places he didn't like enough to keep the cards) became the de-facto office "perk me up", particularly after bouts of excessive overwork.

    • bluedino 5 years ago

      I don't mind gift cards. It's a bit tacky when you can tell they are Christmas leftover by the eGiftCard that is included with it expering back in Feburary, and it's June.

  • ravroid 5 years ago

    When I first started out as a software dev for an agency, I was offered $9/hr. I took it because it was more than the minimum wage I was making at my restaurant job.

    After a few months they rewarded me for my hard work by giving me a raise of $1. At the time I was grateful but now I realize what an insult that was.

    • Thiez 5 years ago

      A wage increase of over 10% every few months doesn't sound so bad. I don't suppose it was a regular thing?

      • ravroid 5 years ago

        That was the only raise I received unfortunately. But once I realized that the work I was doing produced the same value as salaried employees, I learned to use leverage to negotiate better compensation. I haven't waited around for a raise ever since.

        • x2f10 5 years ago

          What's a good way to go about this?

          • nothrabannosir 5 years ago

            Get a competing job offer. Whatever they offer you, ask for a comparable raise of your current workplace. Be very explicit about it being non-negotiable. Whether to mention the competing job offer is a matter of taste; it helps prove you mean business, but it can damage trust. Either way: if they say no you leave.

            This only works if, and because, you are ready to walk away. It's the easiest form of negotiating. But it does require you to actually be able to walk away!

            • owenmarshall 5 years ago

              This strategy works extremely well if you are actually underpaid, and if you are you might not need that offer at all: I once bluffed my way into a 16% raise that was issued on the spot.

              This is not a success story - it only worked because I was an incredibly poor negotiator and signed on for at least 20% under my market value.

            • petra 5 years ago

              Why does mentioning a competing job offer damages trust ?

              Aren't we all adults and know this is how this game is played ?

              • i_are_smart 5 years ago

                Unfortunately many managers are not adults, emotionally.

Someone1234 5 years ago

Considering how expensive staff are, I've never understood the culture surrounding penny pinching the stuff that would keep them happy/improve moral/improve retention.

Forget the moral arguments for a second, even in purely financial terms it would likely pay for itself in recruitment savings alone, let alone brain drain/efficiency, training costs, and so on.

Even a "cheap" employee in a white collar job, is likely costing $60K or more (inc. the employer's share of taxes, benefits, etc). 1% of that is only $600. But people won't pay even that towards bonuses/comfortable chairs/second monitors/"thank you" lunches/staff parties.

At some point it seems a lot less to do with what is rational/logical, and more to do with the power dynamics and people higher up the chain's apathy. Companies are actually hurting themselves for seemingly no good reason. It isn't even fiscally responsible.

  • smacktoward 5 years ago

    I wrote a whole thing about this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/05/introducing-lefkowitzs-la...

    What it boils down to is that the penny-pinching stuff is the stuff that's least painful for managers to cut. Firing people sucks, selling big things like buildings is hard and takes a long time. Whereas cutting off the free soda is something the manager can do right now, without having to pick a fight with other managers or launch into a whole gigantic process.

    The irony is that cutting the penny-pinching stuff is usually the wrong thing to do, because by the time the managers accept that they're underwater cutting small expenses is no longer enough to right the ship. What they should do is bite the bullet and make one big cut that's big enough to solve the problem; that at least would minimize the effect on morale, since they could tell everyone who's still there that they survived the cut and are now safe.

    But again, that requires some courage and willingness to accept some pain, whereas cutting off the sodas is easy and painless. So they do the easy thing, and start down the road of endless little cuts that sap morale and drive people away without actually solving the problem.

    • pureliquidhw 5 years ago

      This reminded me of when my old company cut the cheese from the salad bar. Mind you, this company was famous for their free lunch perks, but when a salad bar in WI cuts the cheese... well.. it stinks.

      This was in 2009/2010. They did a intranet article about how smart they were for cutting the cheese and how it saved $10k a year... in a lunch program that staffed ~100 and fed ~10000.

      It was quite clear that it cost MORE to cut the cheese in lost wages from people bickering, complaining, and spinning the decision. however, I'm sure it looked like a quick win for the non-salad-eating manager in charge.

  • bobochan 5 years ago

    I work in the US and since the Great Recession the swag that we used to get around the office (e.g. t-shirts, ice cream days) have really dried up. Spending on buildings, on the other hand, has increased rapidly.

    Last year I went to a meeting in France that was held in a rather old building in Grenoble. It was a day long meeting so they brought in a boxed lunch for everyone. Shocking. There was some sushi, chicken in pasta, hot rolls, chocolate cake, and two small bottles of wine and water. It was fantastic.

    I was slow on the uptake, but then it hit me, given a choice between spending money on people or things, they chose to spend it on people. Honestly, a total shock for me.

    • BurningFrog 5 years ago

      In high tax countries, you spend a lot on untaxed benefits for the employees.

      In Silicon Valley I make 3 times as much (after tax) as I made in my high tax European country, but my work place life is crap in comparison.

      • sharadov 5 years ago

        Don't they have free food and a foosball/ping-pong table? Isn't that pretty much a staple? Or, is it the co-workers that suck?

        • BurningFrog 5 years ago

          In one of my European jobs we'd have quarterly "seminars", where we ostensibly studied something. But they were really quite costly parties at exotic locations.

    • Sahhaese 5 years ago

      Or they put on a show because they had visitors in...

    • esoterica 5 years ago

      Catered lunches are a very common perk in the US too.

  • HelloNurse 5 years ago

    Prioritizing penny-pinching in general over being nice to people in general is an easy temptation for entrepreneurs, and it goes well with generic egoism.

    For example, I'm used to more or less annual all-hands dinners at inadequate restaurants, with better wine for the partners (all sitting together, of course) and combined with partners-only yacht weekends and the like.

  • duxup 5 years ago

    I'm with you, with all the costs a bonus seems like a pretty arbitrary place to make the call to be cheap.

    In the situation I was in there were some penny punchers who felt quite proud of saving a couple hundred bucks here or there and couldn't see the forest through the trees of the misc expenses they were "saving".

    It was really just poor management.

  • mevile 5 years ago

    It must be hard to quantify the benefits of preventive measures to reduce employee turnover.

    It would probably take a company that had all of its shit in order to have a nice report about how HR initiatives over some amount of years was directly correlated to lower employee turnover. If you can't put it in a report to accurately understand the impact of the expenditure it probably becomes hard to justify. I think this must explain all the ineffective half measures and low budgets.

  • lazyasciiart 5 years ago

    See also: open offices.

    • Someone1234 5 years ago

      We've gone from Office Space being everyone's nightmare, to the Cube Farm being an upgrade from the hell of Open Plan. Talk about backsliding.

      • duxup 5 years ago

        I always liked the cube farm.

        I had my space and some level of control of the environment, but everyone was within earshot if needed.

        It's always a balance.

  • freewilly1040 5 years ago

    I think often there just truly isn't the money because the company is dying. It can take a long time for a company to die, and people will put up with a lot in the process.

  • Spooky23 5 years ago

    Depends on the company. In less exciting industries, well stocked lunchrooms and office supply closets are a bad sign.

4ntonius8lock 5 years ago

I once worked for a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy.

The owner (main shareholder) of the company decided that what the company needed was a new CEO to turn the ship around.

At the time, the company was so broke that we were getting less than the needed amount of office supplies. At the end of each month, basics were missing. So us, the employees, were bringing in our own toilet paper, coffee, cleaning materials, etc.

The new CEO came in at the end of the month when everything was missing. He felt were were 'gloomy'. So he went out and bought us all balloons and something else I forgot by now.

But the feeling of going to my desk to pick up toilet paper that I had to bring in while carrying a 'free balloon' with some 'motivating' words is something that I will carry forever. It was part of my motivation to spent 8 years self employed.

  • brianpgordon 5 years ago

    Isn't providing insufficient restroom facilities an OSHA violation?

    • 4ntonius8lock 5 years ago

      It wasn't in the US. I'm sure it was a violation of some code in that country, but if the company is close to bankruptcy... you can't bleed a rock. The only way for the remaining employees to see what was owed to them was for the company to keep sputtering on.

butterfi 5 years ago

I once worked for a very high profile entertainment company. Every year, the CEO would give a "company gift" that was usually somewhat underwhelming. A blanket with the company logo. A workout bag with the company logo. An umbrella, with the company logo. Clearly someone was shopping out of the "stuff we can get our logo on" catalog. The year after I left a new CEO was hired (who, arguably had more experience in this particular industry) and they promptly said "oh hell no" to that practice, and gave everybody new iPhones and iPads. Dang.... figures it happen just after I left...

  • the_common_man 5 years ago

    The CEO? butterfi

    Sorry, couldn't resist :-)

bitL 5 years ago

I remember one young aspiring manager (now director at Google) destroying a new talented employee by completely disregarding their work (which was the main component of their brand new successful system and helped said manager to a promotion), then later requesting that very same employee to smile more and be as energetic/optimistic as when they first walked into the office. Beatings will continue until morale improves...

  • president 5 years ago

    This is the what happens when you hire engineers with zero emotional intelligence and/or communication skills just because they can pass a Leetcode interview and then promote them to a leadership position later down the line. I've seen this happen way too many times.

    • gameswithgo 5 years ago

      he was talking about an aspiring manager and here you assume he passed a leetcode interview. ive never known an autism spectrum leetcoder type to tell someone to smile more.

      • bitL 5 years ago

        He was a tech lead and got promoted to manager after the release of that new system, the core of which was written by the mistreated developer. I think it had to do with dark personality traits instead of autism/Asperger.

  • epage 5 years ago

    This reminds me of an internship. During my midterm review, my manager confessed to the org always giving interns terrible projects, the ones no one wanted to do, and later in the meeting procedes to dock me for not being enthusiastic enough about my project.

    For my final review, I got high marks without changing a thing.

Qub3d 5 years ago

Could have been worse. There was a time when corporations would literally pay to produce entire broadway productions about their companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_musical

  • crooked-v 5 years ago

    The documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway suggests that those productions got positive reponses from employees, but that probably had to do with good production values (some of the shows cost more than actual Broadway runs) and it being an expenses-paid day trip for everybody.

    • Qub3d 5 years ago

      That's actually where I learned about industrial musicals myself. I wanted to link a more direct explanation, however.

  • pwodhouse 5 years ago

    Remember "The Internship"?

  • IggleSniggle 5 years ago

    These still exist in the form of corporate newsletters filled with high-production videos of very serious people saying very serious things. It's still considered a musical, it's just you hafta have the right Dadaist frame of mind to get it.

empath75 5 years ago

I spent 2 weeks basically carrying our team building a proof of concept for a $10 million contract, working 60+ hours a week, and got a $25 gift card for applebees.

  • gameswithgo 5 years ago

    Not sure if that is worse than a challenge coin. Maybe.

    • egypturnash 5 years ago

      A lifetime chance at free drinks from military people (and hangers-on of military culture) vs a meal at Applebees.

      On the one hand you have to spend time in the company of military folks. On the other hand you have to go to Applebees. Damn that's a hard one to call. I think I'd prefer the coin, at least it's shiny.

    • kevinlou 5 years ago

      This is infinitely worse than a challenge coin.

  • C14L 5 years ago

    Plus, of course, the payment for the overtime hours, I guess?

lazyasciiart 5 years ago

My younger sister received an award for being a promising new grad or something in her first year at one of the Big 4 accounting companies. Her prize? A public ceremony where a senior manager handed her a copy of 50 Shades of Grey.......

  • athenot 5 years ago

    This sounds like something straight out of the TV show The Office. Goes to show that reality is often more extreme than fiction.

    • Swinx43 5 years ago

      Or House of Lies. That show was way closer to the truth about consulting than most would care to admit.

  • mabbo 5 years ago

    ... had they read the book? Or just heard it was popular?

    I'm trying to mentally justify how this isn't the craziest, stupidest idea ever.

    • 1121redblackgo 5 years ago

      If I really stretched my imagination, maybe 'She's worked so hard and did so well for our company, maybe she deserves to take a nice vacation, here's the most popular book for women to symbolize that'.

      • protomyth 5 years ago

        You are putting a bit too much thought into the decision making. I figure someone walked into the book store and picked the book from the first bestseller display.

        Never attribute to malice or ignorance what can adequately explained by lazy.

        • eli 5 years ago

          It is very common for abusive people to exploit this attitude and commit acts that are clearly over the line but have some barely plausible innocent explanation. Gaslighting the victim is, perhaps, another intentional part of the abuse.

          You'd have to work pretty hard to convince me that gifting a young woman a sexually explicit novel is not malicious.

          • corodra 5 years ago

            I didn't know 50 Shades of Grey was erotica until the movie trailers started hitting TV.

            Most guys had no clue about the book other than thinking it was a straight forward romance book. I could make the same claims against other people about how they can't tell the difference between spam and real emails or ad results and real results. I know because I'm consistently around it and I HAVE to know. It takes a level of maturity to understand that everyone else doesn't know what you may know.

            • eli 5 years ago

              A “straight forward romance book” would still be inappropriate

              • corodra 5 years ago

                Really? I gifted romance books before to women. Not publicly, since I've never been in a situation to do so. They've all been happy about it since I always get them something random that they would never pick. Or is it that people really don't gift books? I remember the original book cover to 50 Shades was like a tie or something. It actually looked like a "tasteful" book if you didn't know better. Literally, I would have picked that up for my mom in a similar situation, if she didn't own it already...

                I'm really thinking you're pushing a bias on the situation. Someone did something potentially nice, but in a lazy ass way. Like getting flowers for someone who is allergic to flowers. The laziness really bit them in the ass. It'd be the same if I told someone I liked horror and they got me Twilight because they heard it was about vampires and werewolves.

                That's a situation where you laugh your ass off about it and crack a joke.

                • TheOtherHobbes 5 years ago

                  Firstly you shouldn't reward significant work achievements with a cheap book. That's tone deaf no matter what the book is.

                  Secondly if you do pick a book, you can at least try to make it relevant to someone's actual professional competence - something useful, but not insultingly peppy.

                  Thirdly if you're going to do that, you can ask them what they want, in a way that indicates you value their competence and opinion.

                  Gifts and rewards are all about social signalling, hierarchies and statements of relative value. The messages are understood whether or not you're aware you're speaking that language.

                  If you get it wrong, it's not just demotivating for the person, it's demotivating for everyone else too.

                  And no, you don't have to be super-serious about it. Jokey gifts are fine, although riskier than something straight. If the culture can take it, they're a good choice. But you have to be very sure that is the culture.

                  • corodra 5 years ago

                    Whoa! You ask people what to get them as a gift? Do you also just tell them "Hey, I'm too important to remember your likes/dislikes and to make an effort to get you something that's at least somewhat meaningful." You realize a lot of people take that as a really bad insult right? Being asked what to get as a gift is just a "fuck you, I'm forced I get you something against my will". Why do you think when some people are asked that, they just say not to worry about it. That signals utter uselessness. Jesus, even my neighbors, who I barely know, got me Neil deGrasse Tyson's latest book for Christmas because they knew I like science. Seriously, like how heartless are you to just give advice to "Just ask what they want. Don't bother thinking about it. It's not important to think about that person on a human level and surprise them." Like, WOW. I just reread Man's Search for Meaning again last week, but your comment really just bothers the hell out of me. And you want to talk about cultural appropriate actions?

                    Now, check the op, it's "Most promising grad that's been there for a year." It's a borderline participation trophy. "Congrats, we didn't fire you." More than likely, senior management, who gave it to her, probably felt the same thing and thought making a big deal out of it was pointless. "At least get her something other than some stupid piece of paper". So the guy, who 99% likely didn't know her either, but did ask around what she likes and probably someone said "she likes to read". Maybe he even saw her read a book. Then he just either quickly ordered it off amazon if there was time for it to come in, or just walked into barnes and noble and saw the "New York Times Bestselling Book" table right at the door and picked it out. It is after all, someone he doesn't know. But at the same time thinks a stupid piece of paper and making a big deal about nothing is insulting to her as well. At least get her something of some minor tangible value.

                    The main point, most guys had no idea what the fuck the book was about the first year or two it came out. They just knew women liked the book and asked no more questions. It has a not racey cover on it. It's easy to think it's not too crazy judging by the cover.

                    Yea, profession book. Think about that one. "Congrats, we didn't fire you for a year, here's a book that'll teach you to do your job better." Talk about lacking empathy. At least getting a fiction book means, "Congrats, we didn't fire you, have fun with a book."

                    A gift that's demotivating is one of being generic. A gift that can apply to anyone. At least a book narrows you down to around a rough 30% demographic of a given population with written language. "Oh hey, I notice/heard you like to read. Since you've proved not to be useless to the company, here's a book people seem to like and I hope you enjoy it yourself."

                    I also highly doubt it was a joking gift. ESPECIALLY AT AN ACCOUNTING FIRM. You realize the HR nightmare and a half. Like, seriously. Because no one has ever fucked up by trying to do a simple nice gesture, ever, in human history. Everything is full of malice, hate and evil. Every single person. Must be if you think asking someone what they want as a gift is even remotely appropriate.

                • futureastronaut 5 years ago

                  Gving the gift of a romance novel to a non-significant other is strange. Please consider that if the gift is from a man, most women would see it as odd at best, a misguided come-on at worst.

            • thaumasiotes 5 years ago

              > I didn't know 50 Shades of Grey was erotica until the movie trailers started hitting TV.

              > Most guys had no clue about the book other than thinking it was a straight forward romance book.

              These are not compatible sentences. Romance novels are erotica.

            • parrellel 5 years ago

              ...Something like 2/3rds of the romance genre is erotica.

            • scotty79 5 years ago

              Romance books are just porn for women. Works for men too but for men it's easier to just look at some pictures.

          • Veen 5 years ago

            It was also a book that was enormously popular among women. At that time, if you were to randomly choose a book from the best-seller list, there’s a good chance you’d land on Shades of Grey.

            • eli 5 years ago

              Lots of popular things would be inappropriate gifts in a work setting. This is the "barely plausible" innocent explanation I was talking about.

              • Veen 5 years ago

                We’ll have to agree to disagree about the plausibility. I consider it perfectly plausible that an assistant was dispatched to buy a book for a prize and, having no knowledge of the dire state of women’s popular literature, grabbed whatever topped the best sellers list.

          • pwodhouse 5 years ago

            Depends on when. When the book first came out and Amazon did TV ads about moms in the bathtub reading it, I just thought it was a random popular chick lit book.

          • shinsheel 5 years ago

            50 shades of Gray is perfect book for office manager to be "awww, you see, we are not so boring office hamsters, hehehe. We may be informal and naughty"

            I promise you, when people give a f*ck about you they don't gift you the most plastic overhyped book they can find you don't even need to open.

          • protomyth 5 years ago

            Thinking about it, I would bet money that the book buying was staffed out. As many have pointed out, prior to the movie, it would take someone who cares to figure it out beyond its on the best seller list.

          • dgellow 5 years ago

            I don't know if you read it but the book is really soft on the erotic part.

        • corodra 5 years ago

          Yea, people do this all the time with kids too. They pick up the first thing that's either popular or they see as "child appropriate". It's just laziness. It's not hard to think adults do it to other adults. Especially if they think the whole thing is pointless to begin with.

        • mcguire 5 years ago

          Someone who didn't care about causing a sexual harassment complaint and couldn't be arsed to flip through the book?

      • mc32 5 years ago

        So ten years ago it would have been “the sisterhood of the traveling pants.”

    • maxxxxx 5 years ago

      They probably didn’t read it. “Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance “.

      • davidwitt415 5 years ago

        'Ignorance of the (social) Law is no excuse.'

        Regardless of motive, they deserve to be mocked for such a stupid act.

        • WillPostForFood 5 years ago

          Reframe that as: The ignorant should be mocked, and you can see why that attitude makes the world a more unpleasant place.

          • davidwitt415 5 years ago

            As opposed to your PoV, which lets people off the hook for their offenses in order to maintain the pretense of pleasantry? Right.

          • aidenn0 5 years ago

            The ignorant in power should be mocked?

        • eli 5 years ago

          Would merit a much stronger response than mockery IMHO.

  • itronitron 5 years ago

    Somewhere down that path one of the executive admins should have put the brakes on that particular book purchase. The fact that they didn't says something about the company.

    If she was the only person that received 50 Shades and other people received different books then that is an obvious case of harassment.

    • pwodhouse 5 years ago

      Sometimes the admins will let a horrible decision be realized because they want the decision makers to face the consequences.

      Or maybe there's another 50 SoG book that about suits for accountants.

      Or they confused 50SoG with Lean In, another book about women getting ahead in the corporate world

      • TheOtherHobbes 5 years ago

        "Fifty Shades of Emacs"

        I'm not going there.

        • duskwuff 5 years ago

          For the sysadmins, there's always "Savaged by Systemd"...

    • pdpi 5 years ago

      Or somebody thought "50 Shades of Grey is a popular book with young women, and it'll show we're cool and modern", and didn't think farther than that.

      You can definitely make a case for this being harassment of some sort if you _really_ want to see it under that light, but without more context it could easily be an honest mistake.

    • Havoc 5 years ago

      Admins at big 4 do as they’re told unless its against an actual policy for the most part

  • todd8 5 years ago

    WTF. I’m sorry I’m flabbergasted.

    • oarsinsync 5 years ago

      At least the book has an air of deniability ("we purchased the current top fiction book for women")

      I'm unable to think of an explanation for this that isn't terrible: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48348431

      • bena 5 years ago

        Obviously they just walked in to the closest sex shop and purchased the first vibrator in the "best selling" section.

  • mcguire 5 years ago

    EJECT! EJECT! EJECT!

dash2 5 years ago

This reminds me of the story in Rivethead about Howie Makem, the Quality Cat at General Motors, a 5' 9" cat who would wander the shop floor encouraging quality.

One day the order came down that Howie Makem was not to appear in public without his head on. The working stiffs figured out the reason: otherwise, they might realise he wasn't actually a cat.

duxup 5 years ago

At a company I worked at it was bonus time. Bonuses had been a point of contention forever as the company always bugled the metrics and despite a lot of talk bonuses were hard to account for.

So anyway they announce a "Christmas Bonus":

$50....

I mean I'll take $50 but it felt like such an empty gesture. Just a few years earlier I had gotten $150 bonus while working at a pizza joint. The HR person who sent out the survey that year did not like that factoid about the pizza joint that I provided on their benefits feedback survey.

  • tempguy9999 5 years ago

    $50? Bloody luxury!

    Why, when I was young, well, about 20 years ago at least, the small team that included me was offered a bonus to get something done on time. We worked hard and hit the deadline. The very afternoon we delivered it, I was made redundant.

    They gave me a week's severance pay. Unfortunately I had a contract both sides had signed that they'd forgotten about, which entitled me to a month's pay. I waved that in their face (very carefully, I literally did not put it past them to grab it off me and rip it up, they would do that). They paid up.

    My share of the bonus? They told me I had no proof so I wasn't getting anything. I took them to the small claims court and got it all plus interest.

    It took 18 months but I knew how much they hated losing money, and how they loved screwing people over just because they could.

    The biter bit. I enjoyed myself.

  • xeromal 5 years ago

    Yeah, I got something similar to that. Make 6 figures and got a 200$ yearly bonus. I'd rather have no bonus. haha

    • maxxxxx 5 years ago

      Or when a team works 6 weekends in a row, give them 3 days extra off and make it sound generous.

      • futureastronaut 5 years ago

        I worked in a startup eng. org that worked everybody to the bone for several months with a dubious SOA overhaul. The prize was a cheap open bar. At least it looked like an open bar, privately reserved and such. We each got two raffle-style tickets to exchange for drinks, lest us peons get carried away. Three days off? That would've been amazing.

        • Nelson69 5 years ago

          hahaha. "drink tickets" I don't honestly know if it's a cost thing so much as some trick HR has convinced people will limit their liability if something bad were to happen. Every time I see that done, it seems like there is a little black market for them the develops, some folks don't drink or leave the party early and people tend to accumulate more than their 2 or 3 tickets.

          This company no longer exists but they routinely demanded 6 days a week effort as a matter of principle (if you put the hard work in up front, it pays dividends as the project goes on... and then they just add stuff near the end of the project) Some people left, morale was terrible, what did they do? The C-level staff that a) had limited culinary ability, and b) nobody really wanted to spend time with made a special dinner for everybody, it was quasi mandatory on a Friday night. The CEO even gave a speech about how they could have just taken us to a nice restaurant but it felt more personal and special for them to make and serve us dinner.

          To make it even better, there were some vegans in the mix and they didn't have anything that they could eat.

          • duxup 5 years ago

            >To make it even better, there were some vegans in the mix and they didn't have anything that they could eat.

            I was on the reverse end of that. A small group of folks eventually became in charge of company morale type events... they only liked "different" things.

            So there would be a presentation or event like thing and lunch. Except lunch would be these weird vegan-ish "pizzas" and other dishes catered out, but absolutely NO standard type lunch stuff. I don't mind odd stuff here and there but it was all very unusual and honestly sometimes gross (even the vegans on our team wouldn't eat it). Like at least have a few standard sandwiches.... At one point it became such an issue people stopped going to the events.

            The saga went on and on with this group of folks "guarding" the door so people didn't leave early, events eventually became mandatory (people still did not go), etc.

    • robohoe 5 years ago

      Plus you'll be taxed on that $200!

  • punk-coder 5 years ago

    My ex worked at Home Depot corporate office, and their Christmas bonus was Home Depot gift cards.

    • duxup 5 years ago

      If it is sizable.... might be nice.

  • pwodhouse 5 years ago

    At my company, we trumpet our best metrics, not bugle them.

  • cheeze 5 years ago

    Apparently they had never seen Christmas Vacation?

sigstoat 5 years ago

* got a $6 christmas bonus one year. (they did a percentage across that board, and i was working very little.)

* coupon for $10 off a turkey on more than one occasion

* enormous bowl of candy left out for everyone to get fat on. when employees complained that we didn't appreciate a constant supply of candy, CEO whined about how he was giving us "free food" and we were complaining.

* two different employers have decided that they needed to paint a bunch of fancy accent walls. they then get budget painters to put a single sloppy coat of cheap paint over the professionally painted office-wall-grey. ends up looking pitiful.

_jal 5 years ago

Incidentally, this is also why philanthropy is not a substitute for a safety net.

devchix 5 years ago

I read this thread with such a jaundiced eye; from blunt cluelessness to outright cruelty - who is on the other side of these transactions? Surely these are humans who think about the things they (do to|inflict on) their underlings? Surely they are surrounded by other humans of moderate good sense who could see the harmful, if unintended consequence and talk them out of it? And yet, here we are.

My contribution: office Christmas party. One drink ticket. Spouse or significant other specifically, emphatically, disinvited.

pwodhouse 5 years ago

John Oliver did a segment explaining how Murray Coal gave people bonus checks as low as $3 for dodging safety policies to mine more coal, and said "they can void their checks if they don't want the bonuses". Some miners mailed the checks back voided with "Eat Shit Bob Murray" on them.

  • nefitty 5 years ago

    Murray is possibly one of the most infuriating contemporary figures I've ever learned about: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Murray

    After one of his mines collapsed:

    > The MSHA report heavily criticized Bob Murray's volatile behavior during the crisis, especially at daily briefings for family members, where he "frequently became very irate and would start yelling," even making young children cry, it said. He told family members that "the media is telling you lies" and "the union is your enemy."

    http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26050043/ns/us_news-life/t/year-af...

howard941 5 years ago

Well at least they tried. I'm in a Fortune 500 with no IC/TC promotion path that spams the entire company with promotion announcements that land like insults every week.

  • maxxxxx 5 years ago

    I see those all the time too well knowing that for me that for me any further promotion is close to impossible.

    One thing that happened a few years ago was that I was on an improvement project that supposedly saved the company millions of dollars. At the end we won an award and i received an email talking about a big party at headquarters with great entertainment and good food where people could mingle with top management and the board of directors. It described what fantastic opportunity this would be. This went on for paragraphs.

    Then the last paragraph said something like “by the way to save money we will send only the project lead and your management (who had nothing to do with the project) to the event but you will also get a nice plaque instead of the $500 or so gift card that used to be normal for this type of award. “. I still don’t know how anyone could write this and not see how crazy it was.

    Anyways this was a good reminder to look after myself and not be a “team player”.

    • duxup 5 years ago

      >Anyways this was a good reminder to look after myself and not be a “team player”.

      Well you can do both, just don't expect anyone to do the first part for you. Especially if that means moving on.

    • GoodJokes 5 years ago

      Radicalize, just do it.

  • wyldfire 5 years ago

    It's way better than the secret promotions that happened where I used to work (a fortune 500 company). The levels were spaced much farther apart than FAANG and when someone did get promoted you'd only find out if they decided to make a change to their email signature.

    • mieseratte 5 years ago

      Reminds of a job where they would wait until the last day to announce someone was quitting. Management required the resigning employee to keep quiet. So hand-over then became a mad-dash for all involved.

    • howard941 5 years ago

      I'd prefer that. We're big enough that there are nice promotions every week upgrading marketing/sales and M&A people into upper management. The last (last as in terminal, final) time I privately asked about promotion pathways all it got me was the manager's ridicule in a later engrg department meeting.

  • GordonS 5 years ago

    By chance does the company name begin with "C"? I think I work there...

    • howard941 5 years ago

      It doesn't but they're interchangeable like that, all cut from the cloth (mine starts with an S). It's nice to see you on HN!

mcguire 5 years ago

So, several years ago, I was working for SAIC on a government contract. This was shortly before the SAIC/Leidos split. Our head-honcho was an otherwise decent man, but SAIC HQ decided...something. I've no idea what they thought they were doing. What happened was that the daughter or niece of one of SAIC's original founders came in as the co-head-honcho. No one liked her, although no one particularly disliked her. No one knew what she did. She would show up at meetings, be irrelevant, and disappear again. The customers were very confused.

Shortly before Christmas, she and one of the administrative assistant types went around the office with a cart, giving out name plates. She had to ask who everyone was. Then she expressed how valuable you were and how you were doing a wonderful job. She eventually disappeared again, back to wherever she came from, very shortly before the SAIC/Leidos split.

I still have no idea what the hell was going on. And I worked at IBM for several years.

AnimalMuppet 5 years ago

When I bring home a new T shirt from work, my wife says, "Morale's bad again, huh"?

hinkley 5 years ago

One place handed out awards to half a dozen of us but the ceremony and the gift were not given at the same time.

We had to harangue them for 6 weeks before they gave us the damned thing and by that point the fact that we had to work for it a second time completely undermined the thoughtfulness of the original idea.

And earlier boss would come to us at 10 am on Friday and said we could leave early if we finished up early. The third time he did this we all shot daggers at him and there was no fourth time. Because every time he did this we ended up staying late on Friday instead of leaving early. This is the same guy who argued my estimates for a project down by 50% and then the project took 3x as long as he told the customer (if you don't have time to do it right you have time to do it over). But that's a different story.

It's important not to offer an award that you are not 100% sure you can follow through on. It's way worse than nothing. It's Lucy and the fucking football.

kej 5 years ago

My dad worked Saturdays at a store related to his hobby, mostly for the employee discount. They did a holiday bonus as a percentage of yearly pay, and with his limited hours it came to something like $15.

It became a running joke until a year or two later when I had my first software development job. The holidays came around, and we all got a letter saying how vital we were to the organization's financial success this year, and to express their appreciation they included a copy of the year's final pay stub.

I had another job where I worked remotely, and they sent out employee recognition packages that were just office supplies with the company logo. The icing on top was that they had insufficient postage and I had to pay for a lousy pen.

fooblitzky 5 years ago

The worst morale boosting gesture I've ever experienced was the CEO telling an all-staff meeting that anyone that wasn't happy to work there could get $2000 for quitting on the spot.

  • mcguire 5 years ago

    Once as a co-op for IBM, our manager at the weekly described a severance package.

    I immediately tried to take it.

    At a later meeting, when the package was modified, he started out with, "mcguire, you are not eligible."

  • ok_coo 5 years ago

    How many people took it?

    I'd probably take it on the spot. I mean, if morale is that bad already it's like you're getting a bonus for leaving. Might as well!

    • fooblitzky 5 years ago

      I don't think anyone did - it was ambiguous whether it would invalidate the notice period (4 weeks), which would have been a bit more than $2000. No-one was prepared to risk it.

nostalgk 5 years ago

Currently working at a place, taking a significantly lower pay, just for the morale around here. Last place I worked didn't even have free coffee, and it was a Fortune 100 company. I'll take the coffee and ability to put my feet up, thanks.

mejarc 5 years ago

The setting: a mandatory, in-person all-hands meeting at a medium-sized enterprise software company in SV.

The time: a few weeks before the winter holidays, mid-2000s.

What we expected: to hear about our company's IPO or beneficial acquisition.

What we got: orders to design and construct crazy! wacky!! zany!!! miniature golf obstacles in the office for the CxOs to play through.

I doubt the (unquantified) morale at this company improved.

HelloNurse 5 years ago

Custom made motivational posters, with elegantly typeset quotations and slogans. Part of the same great rebranding/reorganization initiative in which employees got company-branded mugs and pens.

bori5 5 years ago

"Many years ago, when I was very young and you were even younger...Grinding through emails"

Dude you're still young!

  • xtracto 5 years ago

    My same thought... I understand email is "old" in terms of technology speed but man SMTP was just defined in 1982.

euler_angles 5 years ago

One of my past employers gave us a "big Christmas bonus". It was a Twix Bar with a pen tied to the bar with a piece of holiday ribbon.

The pen didn't work.

magashna 5 years ago

I got an XXL Berkshire Hathaway shirt. I'm a medium. Thanks

  • failrate 5 years ago

    Did you even work for Berkshire Hathaway? Lie to me, and tell me you worked for Citibank: it makes the story even better.

    • Scoundreller 5 years ago

      They may have gotten a BH T-Shirt even though they worked for somebody else.

  • mcguire 5 years ago

    IBM: I was to be sent at short notice to the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam. They wanted every one to wear a "uniform": black pants and an IBM shirt. My manager said they'd get me button-down shirts, but at the meeting where they distributed the shirts, no button-downs were to be found. They'd mysteriously disappeared. They had to scrounge me up some XXL polo shirts.

  • grimjack00 5 years ago

    At least you could wear it; I am a XXL (tall), and I've only received a proper sized shirt twice in the last twenty years.

falsedan 5 years ago

One job presented me with a Kindle after passing probation, it was still in the box so straight into eBay to get money for something I actually wanted. Same place rewarded a risky project we completed blazingly fast (the new VP, when reviewing it, said it looked good for three quarters of work and we had to correct him to say we’d started 3 months ago) with an Italian meal and a promotion for the lead dev. The rest of us were on pitiful salaries and all but one quit in the next three months.

Makes me appreciate the current role more, which has 4 office events a year, a kids Christmas party where the parent-provided presents are reimbursed, and a standard formula for a leaving drinks budget (roughly enough for one drink per employee per year of employment). People still talk about when a 5- and 7-year veteran both finished up in the same week.

dba7dba 5 years ago

I used to work at a kinda old, small startup shop. The office had 'filtered' water dispenser. BUT the filters had not been replaced for awhile and one day I noticed the water tasted filthy.

The CEO's office was right next to the water dispenser spot. As I was walking through the hallway, I noticed cases of FIJI water bottles in his office. And no, it wasn't for us. It was ALL for him.

For those who don't know, FIJI water bottle costs about 5 - 6 times more than regular water bottles.

bazooka_penguin 5 years ago

Dont tech companies in china hire full time cheerleaders for their male programmers?

  • anc84 5 years ago

    I heard they did that in Texas.

ravenstine 5 years ago

I worked at a company that handed out monthly "awards" to one member of every team, but it was clear that winners of these awards were picked out of a hat and everyone knew it. One guy on my team got an "outstanding excellence" award the week after getting chewed out by the CEO for not pulling his own weight(which was totally untrue).

me_again 5 years ago

My manager gathered our team in a conference room to listen to the audio book of "Who moved my cheese". Which, if you're unfamiliar, is a lame allegory about how you shouldn't complain if you are fired or otherwise screwed over.

The oddest part is that the layoffs everyone expected never materialized.

aiyodev 5 years ago

Got an email saying we were getting rewarded with pizza for lunch. My desk was near the door. I saw the pizza delivery guy bring in the stacks of pizzas and put them in the conference room. A group of supervisors came to supervise the pizza delivery. Supervisors wore casual attire. Then a man came who must have been their boss because he wore a button up short. Then a man with a shirt and tie. Then a man in a suit. Finally, a man in an expensive suit I recognized as the VP. Everyone assembled waited for him as he looked at the stacks of pizzas, said something, and nodded. The supervisors then put the boxes on carts and started to distribute them. I finally got my two slices of cold pizza over an hour after they were delivered. Felt so appreciated.

simonebrunozzi 5 years ago

I once worked at a large IT company. Several years ago, a high-ranking manager was off to Europe for some sport thing. The company had the biggest outage in its history, spanning several hours/days, and most of his team was working non-stop to handle customers and trying to fix issues. He decided to stay on vacation - his sport thing was too important to be canceled. Wait, the best part is yet to come.

Months later we were having one of these kick-offs. He stood up on stage, started his slideshow, and offered a few pictures of sunny places where he was having fun playing that sport. Most people in the room knew what they were doing while he was having fun. One of the worst examples of leadership I've witnessed.

That person was let go several months later.

szbalint 5 years ago

Ten euros worth of Amazon gift cards as birthday gift from the company.

That amount has a great way of signaling that the company is too cheap to do anything real, but too unsophisticated to realize they then should have just given a slice of cake or a birthday card.

iN7h33nD 5 years ago

My first job, 8 months on relatively fresh to software dev. They announced we were going to have a pizza party the next day for all of our hard work this year. The next day come around and about an hour or two beforehand I see managers running, yes literally running, around the office and taking people aside. Turns out half the company was fired and there wasn't even pizza. They pretty much just said, we fired some people no big deal, back to work everyone.

hackerbabz 5 years ago

My company spent months building an internal, online reward site.

You got points for going to unpaid classes in addition to your normal work hours.

It had no backend validation and within 30 minutes I’d awarded myself some company sweatpants.

I got an email a day later asking what size I wanted, and out of fear, I replied that I didn’t want them anymore and I never took another reward.

Havoc 5 years ago

The comments here. Ouch. So far so good my side. For above avg a months pay and a extra day off

simonebrunozzi 5 years ago

Loved this comment on the article:

> My then manager once closed a team meeting with the words, (literally): "Thank you, and whatever other motivational stuff l'm supposed to say".

parrellel 5 years ago

5 dollar Target gift card bonuses, and then after launching a major app on time a real bonus with a 3 page legal memorandum attached telling me it was not.

thisisawkwrd 5 years ago

My last company cut everyone's quarterly bonuses and then handed out company branded fidget spinners.

Damogran6 5 years ago

I worked for State Government. They made a big deal of going to a 'pay for performance' program...You'd be paid for excellent work...Nobody would lose any pay...this program had no funding.

Somebody was bad at math...or they thought we were bad at math. It did not improve morale.

steve_taylor 5 years ago

This level of bullshit has PWC written all over it.

radcon 5 years ago

I worked for a company that was always handing out cheap tokens of their "appreciation" (we all knew they didn't appreciate the employees but I guess they figured pretending might reduce turnover). Sometimes it was a free pretzel or water ice, other times it was a Thank You email that sounded like it was written by some cheap marketing AI. You could also get a "Shout Out" in the monthly newsletter that nobody read, but only if you twisted your coworkers' arms enough to submit one. In the end, all their efforts only served as constant reminders of how little the executives actually appreciated everyone, which decreased morale and increased turnover.

There's something extra depressing about working for a company where the millionaire executives think workers can be placated with 25-cent junk food. I think that company is still limping along somehow, which is great because the new Glassdoor reviews are usually pretty amusing.

Also, if you want to see an example of morale boosting gone wrong the Healthineers song is pretty great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5LiUrezV6k

  • bluedino 5 years ago

    Here's my story:

    A place I worked at one time had the vending machines removed. The owner's neice was overweight and died of cancer and had other health issues, so he didn't want any of the rest of us making poor deciisions and ending up like her

    So they took the vending machines out. Great, now we need to go to the gas station a block down the road to get a candy bar, chips, or afternoon soda.

    One particularly hot day, the sales team went out to the production floor/warehouse to hand out Powerade (generic gatorade) to the workers.

    They brought the social media and marketing people with them to take photos and post the 'good deed ' online. We can only have a soft drink when they deem it necessary!

    • arkades 5 years ago

      Was at a place that did something similar, but at least they replaced it with free (if crappy) coffee and giant bowls of fruit. I actually appreciated it, even if it was a touch “we want to pay lower Health insurance premiums” paternalistic.

    • maxxxxx 5 years ago

      There was a story about Steve Jobs seeing an overweight engineer in the hallway eating a donut. He glared at him and next day there were no donuts in the Apple cafeteria. I don't remember where I read this.

  • salixrosa 5 years ago

    You and I must have worked for the same company.

    Did the owner's wife also get "employee of the year" at the annual Christmas party?

    • radcon 5 years ago

      Haha no, but I'm sure if we combined work stories we could easily get enough material for a few more 'Horrible Bosses' movies.

tzakrajs 5 years ago

Christmas 2010, HostGator gave everyone an e-cigarette or some other option but since we were mostly 20-somethings working there the vast majority chose the e-cigarette.

  • bluedino 5 years ago

    I bet the next week was glorious if everyone smoked them at their desks

    • tzakrajs 5 years ago

      It was, there are probably some videos of us double, or triple barreling them and blowing clouds everywhere. My throat still hurts thinking about that day.

  • Scoundreller 5 years ago

    For 2010, that’s pretty ahead of the curve.

    Did they give you a couple Bitcoin in 2011?

GoodJokes 5 years ago

These are times when I remember that in a hierarchy people at the top are so removed and deluded that they think their employees aren’t full grown adults that see this bullshit for what it is. It is insulting actually.

beezlebubba 5 years ago

I worked for a "huge well-known bank" as a data center engineer. Unfortunately, they had converted all the FTE positions to contractor. As a contractor, you had as much job security as a slab of meat. All new contractor hires were given a copy of "Who Moved My Cheese" to read. In 32 years of working, I've never seen a place with a higher turnover rate. It was sad because the job itself was pretty nice, just nothing else about it was.

draw_down 5 years ago

Certainly bizarre, but pretty harmless I think. I could certainly think of worse.

edoo 5 years ago

This is almost as bad as the US government using taxpayer dollars to run covert social media campaigns to make everyone feel better about the government.

  • jessaustin 5 years ago

    We're not meant to opine about black budget spending!

mooseburger 5 years ago

This sounds kinda nice. Certainly better than a sandwich, or a lunch. You have to give it points for originality at least.