Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

shkspr.mobi

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 348 posts

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#231

Post by falsedan »

woah wrote: post #220
cptskippy wrote: post #115

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 anticip…

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?

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

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#232

Post by davidwitt415 »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #89
davidwitt415 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Ignorance of the (social) Law is no excuse.' Regardless of motive, they deserve to be mocked for such a stupid act.

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

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

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#233

Post by foota »

chatmasta wrote: post #228
dhruvmittal wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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)

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

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#234

Post by bastawhiz »

oh_sigh wrote: post #184
bastawhiz wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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?

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.

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#235

Post by president »

bitL wrote: post #229

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 improv…

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.

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#236

Post by kej »

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.

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#237

Post by socalnate1 »

stavros wrote: post #210
rsweeney21 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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.

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

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#238

Post by mikeash »

russh wrote: post #212

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.

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

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#239

Post by vibrato »

duxup wrote: post #192
hinkley wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 el…

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…

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

Re: The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

#240

Post by cleetus »

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.

Post reply on HN