Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad • Hacker News Board

Re: Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad

#211

Post by kennend3 » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 1:11 PM UTC

tboughen wrote: post #18

MichaelCollins wrote: post #11

> It’s also best to avoid socks. Everyone already has socks, and realistically, they will likely also get socks from someone else during the holiday season. What is this crap? Socks are the best gift. Didn't the author stop to wonder why everybody gives people socks during the holiday season? Because virtually everybody uses socks, because socks wear out fast, because new socks are the most comfortable and it's alway…

I’m glad that works for you, but it doesn’t for me. The one ‘life hack’ that’s ever worked for me is to own a single type of sock (white, cotton, Nike). The entire batch of 30 pairs was bought at the same time so they wear evenly, meaning all socks match with all other socks. When I get down to a few functioning pairs, into the bin they go and a new batch is ordered. My family knows not to buy me socks…

THIS!!!

I do the exact same thing because when i do my laundry i don't want to spend my time trying to find socks that match, and have the same wear level.

I don't like socks as a gift for a secondary reason. I have tiny feet for a man and I have been gifted socks (twice??). Both times they were size 10 and what should have been the ankle was half way up my calf? What am i to do with them?

Re: Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad

#212

Post by p0pcult » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 1:11 PM UTC

Woof. I once got a gift card to a meal kit subscription service, that forced me to sign up for a (cancelable) subscription to use the gift card, which wasn't even high enough value to get a single delivery. I think this hits 3 of the 5 criteria for bad employee gifts:

-specific retailer -food -household(ish) item

Re: Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad

#213

Post by robertlagrant » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 1:14 PM UTC

jnsaff2 wrote: post #158

So I had a buddy, he was a junior-ish very talented dev in this big retailer where I was working as well. This retailer obv had massive campaigns for black friday, but also obv very shitty and inflexible systems. This buddy of mine found that the black friday promotions pricings import failed 5 min before midnight. Meaning that not only would there be no black friday pricing, there would be no pricing at all on the s…

> So he saved the company 5M GBP in profits, singlehandedly.

This is true, but he didn't make that 5M. If you count every contributing factor to that 5M, you end up with a vast amount of money. The power not going down saved the company 5M. The people who made the goods made the company 5M. The people who set the prices made the company 5M. Or, they were all doing their jobs, and 5M was made.

Re: Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad

#214

Post by actionablefiber » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 1:15 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #196

jnsaff2 wrote: post #158

So I had a buddy, he was a junior-ish very talented dev in this big retailer where I was working as well. This retailer obv had massive campaigns for black friday, but also obv very shitty and inflexible systems. This buddy of mine found that the black friday promotions pricings import failed 5 min before midnight. Meaning that not only would there be no black friday pricing, there would be no pricing at all on the s…

Let's say he was giving 500,000GBP. 10% Great right? You have just given folks incentive to plant problems and reap the reward. You might say, they can audit and if you caused the problem, you don't get the reward. Great! Now, let's collude with another team mate, I cause they problem, they fix it, we split the rewards. Once you give monetary incentive, folks start figuring out ways to game it. There was an agreement…

> Great right? You have just given folks incentive to plant problems and reap the reward.

"Just given"? Doesn't this incentive already exist in the world with or without direct cash bounties for fixing problems?

Re: Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad

#215

Post by danwee » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

Sometimes I get bags, swags, coffe mugs with the company logo, gift cards in a store other than Amazon... 100% of the time I end up either throwing them to the trash or giving them away for free.

Companies: just give money as gift. Period.

Re: Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad

#216

Post by agentwiggles » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #209

> “I got a $5 grocery card,” wrote a one employee. “Excuse me?? What the hell am I supposed to buy with $5?” Also a grocery card is kind of insulting. Sure everyone buys groceries, but giving one can be interpreted as implying you think they need help paying for food. ---- My company contracted out its "performance rewards" gifts to a 3rd party company. As far as I can tell ALL of the items are 2x overpriced in point…

Ugh, when I was at accenture (briefly, after an acquisition), they had a similar "points" system where you could cash the points in for rewards. Most of it was absolute junk. I did manage to extract a bit of value when I found they could be cashed in for Nintendo eShop money - there's worse things than a free game - but still. Just ... give me money.

In a previous gig we were on the receiving end of a fairly pathetic "Christmas bonus". It was $100, which is a decent amount, but after tax we only saw about $60 of it. The "insult" was very much compounded by the fact that the previous year's bonus had been $300, and worse, that the company sent out an email the previous week which said "expect a little something extra in your paycheck next week, Merry Christmas!".

Then your check hits your account and you're like "... wait, is this even different than my normal pay" and then you're logging into ADP to check your statement only to realize "oh, it's just $60".

I don't ever like to complain about free money - after all, it's pure sugar on top of your agreed upon salary no matter how you slice it - but at some juncture you hit the point where it's just not even worth the trouble.

Re: Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad

#217

Post by cainxinth » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

What I like even less than unwanted, cheapo gifts are endless ‘not technically mandatory but it looks bad if you don’t go’ work gatherings like team building sessions, birthday parties, fall picnics, etc.

There are people who don’t have a life outside of work and they live for those things. For me, it’s just another obligation. I’d rather a cheap beer in a dive with my actual friends over a posh corporate wine mixer any day.

Re: Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad

#218

Post by jon-wood » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

Falkon1313 wrote: post #97

unsupp0rted wrote: post #53

> A good gift gives employees a renewed fervor to work harder, helps them feel more motivated, and makes them feel more valued by their employers. Does it? I’ve never experienced this. A company is not a person. A good gift or a bad gift makes me feel the company made a business decision that affected me, just like any other business decision that affected me.

I've had a few that made me feel valued. Thoughtful gifts when a baby was born, when a family member died, and when I got Covid-19. But the generic "give one of these to everyone in the company" gifts? Nah.

When my son was born I was working for a company that did grocery deliveries from really good food shops, despite living way out of the area we'd usually deliver to they put together an order made up of things people knew my wife and I enjoyed, then sent a driver out to bring it to us - I was totally blown away, not least because I knew the value of the order itself was in the hundreds of pounds, plus the additional cost of pulling a driver from deliveries for two hours to drive out to my place and back instead.

That sort of thing sadly only seems to happen at small companies where people really know each other. If the CEO says "we're pulling someone off deliveries to send Jon a gift" then it happens, but beyond a certain scale you end up having to go through an approval chain to do so, and someone higher up that chain takes one look at it and says "no, its more profitable for us not to do that, send him an Amazon voucher instead".

Re: Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad

#219

Post by germinalphrase » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 1:26 PM UTC

cainxinth wrote: post #217

What I like even less than unwanted, cheapo gifts are endless ‘not technically mandatory but it looks bad if you don’t go’ work gatherings like team building sessions, birthday parties, fall picnics, etc. There are people who don’t have a life outside of work and they live for those things. For me, it’s just another obligation. I’d rather a cheap beer in a dive with my actual friends over a posh corporate wine mixer…

I’m fine with those events if they happen within my contractual work hours. If not? I’m going to choose time with my child 10/10 times.

Re: Employee gift ideas that make people feel bad

#220

Post by kapilkale » Thu, Nov 03, 2022, 1:33 PM UTC

tdeck wrote: post #50

Looks like it's down, here is a cache link: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...

Sorry about that ya'll. We're back up now.

The eng team was extremely confused about what had broken our webflow setup (we do some magic with Cloudflare workers to point our marketing pages at at Webflow with a custom domain)... and then I saw that we were frontpage.