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Publicly credit your employees

superted.io

1–10 of 21 posts

Re: Publicly credit your employees

#3

Possible Problem: My dad was a structural engineer and made some very nice brochures with photos of all his awesome employees on it. His competitors used the information to poach them.

So he wasn't paying them enough?

(But yeah, this is something that is good for employees and bad for employers.)

Re: Publicly credit your employees

#4
Microsoft and a lot of other developers used to add "credits" or easter eggs to their programs. At least for Microsoft it was the customers that complained about them. In retrospect they likely went too far incorporating full fledged games complete with DOOM style 3D engines [1], but it was a good morale booster for the developers and a chance to add some culture to their work.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwg9eLHZZRo

Re: Publicly credit your employees

#6
The reason is often they don't want to get their employees poached.

Sometimes there just isn't enough money yet (or reasons to believe that the money is best used else where) and they haven't had the time/luxury/discipline/etc. to make sure someone leaving doesn't cause major issues.

Re: Publicly credit your employees

#7
How does that pay the bills? Maybe back in the day, when you could expect to stay at your employer for the whole of your career such tokens of appreciations were meaningful. But nowadays there's no common purpose in the employer-employee relationship, and these things are about as worthless as the medals they used to hand out in the East Bloc.

Re: Publicly credit your employees

#8
A few years ago, I spent on some time on spinning this issue around and giving employees a way to request public validation of their contributions from their employers. Sort of asking your manager to give you a public endorsement of your contributions every six months or so. I talked to a few managers and every one said companies wouldn't accept such a thing.

Any novel thoughts on how to get around that obstacle ?

Re: Publicly credit your employees

#9
post #3

Possible Problem: My dad was a structural engineer and made some very nice brochures with photos of all his awesome employees on it. His competitors used the information to poach them.

So he wasn't paying them enough? (But yeah, this is something that is good for employees and bad for employers.)

> (But yeah, this is something that is good for employees and bad for employers.)

From an employer's perspective it's great so long as everyone else is doing it and not them :-)

Re: Publicly credit your employees

#10

How does that pay the bills? Maybe back in the day, when you could expect to stay at your employer for the whole of your career such tokens of appreciations were meaningful. But nowadays there's no common purpose in the employer-employee relationship, and these things are about as worthless as the medals they used to hand out in the East Bloc.

> How does that pay the bills? Maybe back in the day, when you could expect to stay at your employer for the whole of your career such tokens of appreciations were meaningful. But nowadays there's no common purpose in the employer-employee relationship, and these things are about as worthless as the medals they used to hand out in the East Bloc.

You're absolutely right that we do not expect to stay with one employer for life. Maybe I misunderstood it but it seems like the point is that because we don't stay with the same employers for our whole lives, the original article equates it to working on a movie or a television show where we credit people. Maybe we can even create some sort of an IMdb as a who's who of software development. It would be so cool, don't you think?

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