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

331–340 of 348 posts

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

#331

Post by rdiddly »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #51
StavrosK wrote: post #34

We need to find a name for a gesture so small in its generosity that it ends up being offensive. No bonus would have left me disappointed, but a $50 bonus would have made me angry. Like when Delta gave a food voucher to make up for a 5-hour delay on a 30-minute file. The voucher was for $3. Fuck Delta.

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?

It's like, no, I'm headed home to get started on never seeing you guys again!

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

#332

Post by aiyodev »

Got an email saying we were getting rewarded with pizza for lunch. My desk was near the door. I saw the pizza delivery guy bring in the stacks of pizzas and put them in the conference room. A group of supervisors came to supervise the pizza delivery. Supervisors wore casual attire. Then a man came who must have been their boss because he wore a button up short. Then a man with a shirt and tie. Then a man in a suit. Finally, a man in an expensive suit I recognized as the VP. Everyone assembled waited for him as he looked at the stacks of pizzas, said something, and nodded. The supervisors then put the boxes on carts and started to distribute them. I finally got my two slices of cold pizza over an hour after they were delivered. Felt so appreciated.

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

#334

Post by pureliquidhw »

smacktoward wrote: post #107
Someone1234 wrote: post #47

Considering how expensive staff are, I've never understood the culture surrounding penny pinching the stuff that would keep them happy/improve moral/improve retention. Forget the moral arguments for a second, even in purely financial terms it would likely pay for itself in recruitment savings alone, let alone brain drain/efficiency, training costs, and so on. Even a "cheap" employee in a white collar job, is likely c…

I wrote a whole thing about this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/05/introducing-lefkowitzs-la... What it boils down to is that the penny-pinching stuff is the stuff that's least painful for managers to cut. Firing people sucks, selling big things like buildings is hard and takes a long time. Whereas cutting off the free soda is something the manager can do right now , without having to pick a fight with other manage…

This reminded me of when my old company cut the cheese from the salad bar. Mind you, this company was famous for their free lunch perks, but when a salad bar in WI cuts the cheese... well.. it stinks.

This was in 2009/2010. They did a intranet article about how smart they were for cutting the cheese and how it saved $10k a year... in a lunch program that staffed ~100 and fed ~10000.

It was quite clear that it cost MORE to cut the cheese in lost wages from people bickering, complaining, and spinning the decision. however, I'm sure it looked like a quick win for the non-salad-eating manager in charge.

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

#335

Post by defen »

WorldMaker wrote: post #271
defen wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How long are challenge coins "valid"? If someone had a challenge coin from Eisenhower (not sure those exist, let's pretend they do) would that person essentially always win, forever?

From my weird lay understanding, it's somewhat similar to childhood games where people would try to determine who had the "coolest" Pogs [1]. There are multiple "axes" that determines which challenge coin "wins": highest rank associated, most interesting challenge involved (some coins represent specific deployments or activities or actions), perceived rarity (there only three of the coins ever made), etc. To some ext…

Interesting, I love Fernet. Now I just have to figure out how to get a coin...

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

#336

Post by tonyarkles »

dbcurtis wrote: post #319
tonyarkles wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 confe…

Yes, having a manager just be there showing appreciation is huge. My story is trying to crack a hot, high-impact bug that got reported days before product launch. Daily 8:00AM and 5:00PM status meetings on Saturday and Sunday reporting to multiple VP's kind of hot. So the debug lab manager had little clue how to hang a logic analyzer probe any more, and no clue how to read the traces. But he brought in take-out 3 mea…

That is 100% awesome. I've had a few managers over my career that got that.

The counterpoint (funny enough, at the same company as the ice cream) was a different exec who came close but just missed the mark. Weekday evening deployment (started at 5:30pm) and he orders pizza. A lot of pizza. Things go smoothly and since we're just sitting and watching monitoring for a bit to make sure all is good, he decides to head out. Ten minutes after he leaves, we get a call about a third-party site that broke after the deployment... guess we're not leaving.

So the debugging drags on, and around 11pm we start getting hungry. AHA! Leftover pizza in the fridge! We go to the kitchen to discover... he took all of the leftovers home. Like 4 pizzas worth. So what's our conclusion? "Fuck it, we'll fix it in the morning. Let's go home."

All it would have taken waa leftover pizza...

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

#337

Post by lamby »

BonesJustice wrote: post #283
hinkley wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have the same rule. If I’m expected to come in on the weekend, my manager had better be there. If it’s important enough to ask me to sacrifice my personal time, then it had better be important enough for him to be there too. Unless it’s because I screwed up and need to fix something post haste. In which case, he won’t have to ask me at all.

You could even passive-aggressively frame it as "oh, but you being around would be highly motivating..."

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

#338

Post by rv-de »

brokenmachine wrote: post #311
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.

Call me ungrateful but I can't think of anything I'd less like doing than being forced into a dinner with coworkers that I already spend more time with than my family or friends. Get the money, then go home.

You better not let this attitude shine through in a job interview, though :D

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

#339

Post by dragonwriter »

foota wrote: post #233
chatmasta wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In California, the level for computer professionals is nearly double the main (professional/management/admin) amount ($88K+ vs $45-50K depending on employer size.)

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

#340

Post by tlavoie »

gameswithgo wrote: post #152
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #79

My employer, a US DoD component, had a program called “On The Spot” awards. The idea was that if you had done something outstanding, your first line supervisor could authorize an immediate bonus of up to $1000. Being the DoD, it couldn’t be that simple. They decided that actually the bonuses had to be approved by your second, third, and fourth line supervisors. And also by the program manager at the sponsoring agency…

A challenge coin! Are people who tend to run companies total children, or do they think that those of us working for them are children?

Well, it worked for toilet-training our daughter. "Pogs" (colorful cardboard disks) were in at the time, used here as rewards.
Post reply on HN