Comment by AtlasBarfed
2 days ago
Really, it just references the ridiculous lengths companies do to not actually pay employees to do good work. Utterly broken reward systems, foosball tables, etc.
I have several times saved my companies multiples of my salary in saved cloud costs or other instances, and always of my own initiative out of "professionalism". There are lots of stories I recall on HN comments of similar things, and sure maybe they got a promotion or a title... I have heard of AWS tech people getting pretty big bonuses for big service wins. But that was a huge anomaly.
Capitalism is supposed to (in theory) reward efficiency and productivity. The CEOs certainly know how to advocate for financial performance rewards, as do many other managerial tiers.
Candy bars? Christ, it's kindergarten. I just never fail to be amazed that "capitalism" is a bunch of rigid hierarchical despotic firms fighting in a "free market"... well back when there were approximation of free markets. When you're in these tightly structured orgs, it's like authoritarian planned economies (that is communism in the totalitarian soviet sense, not any putative ideal of communism).
I'll spare you all the further rants about Middle Manaagement Machiavellianism.
Congrats on your candy bar and employee of the week picture.
And yes, anyone could also propose that anyone be given an actual monetary raise, and as far as I know, typically those also happened.
Also, there was no middle management.
(And yes, I know, there are real problems with that sort of popularity-based thing that can absolutely cause bias against the quiet, well-performing type too modest to ask for a raise either.)
Look, I’m just as cynical about capitalism and perverse reward systems and all that as anyone, but nobody was talking about “saving the company blah blah zillion million dollars”, more like simply offering a helping hand to someone who feels gratitude about it. It worked 100% on an employee-to-employee basis, there was zero management structure or process involved. And it was something that anyone in the company could’ve established, just by ordering a fifty eurobuck’s worth of candy on the company credit and proposing the idea to the rest of the company which was 1) small back then 2) incredibly committed to employee wellbeing in all the right ways.