211–220 of 348 posts
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.......
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…
> 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 h…
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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.
Lots of popular things would be inappropriate gifts in a work setting. This is the "barely plausible" innocent explanation I was talking about.
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A “straight forward romance book” would still be inappropriate
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…
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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?
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 di…
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
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.
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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.
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?
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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.
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).
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 the wild success of the initiative due to your team’s outstanding technical genius?