101–110 of 348 posts
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 su…
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.
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…
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…
It's easier to recognize that you're playing one than that you're making one, it seems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of Indians fine with steak dinners. India is a pretty diverse country.
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.
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 c…
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…
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.
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.
By chance does the company name begin with "C"? I think I work there...
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 c…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.