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The worst morale-boosting gesture I've experienced

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

#291

Post by egypturnash »

oh_sigh wrote: post #253
bastawhiz wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

'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.

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.

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

#292

Post by egypturnash »

gameswithgo wrote: post #153
empath75 wrote: post #88

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.

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

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.

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

#293

Post by kevinlou »

gameswithgo wrote: post #153
empath75 wrote: post #88

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.

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

This is infinitely worse than a challenge coin.

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

#295

Post by parrellel »

corodra wrote: post #97
eli wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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

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

#296

Post by rsweeney21 »

socalnate1 wrote: post #237
stavros wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct

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

#297

Post by rsweeney21 »

euler_angles wrote: post #281
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!

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

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.

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

#298

Post by euler_angles »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #297
euler_angles wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Ah, gotcha. That's pretty cool.

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

#299

Post by iN7h33nD »

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.

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

#300

Post by tonyarkles »

hinkley wrote: post #186
7402 wrote: post #71

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.

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 t…

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.

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