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Comment by colde | Hacker News Reader

It's undignified because it's prizes to the highest performer, instead of bonuses to everyone meeting a certain goal.

They are essentially pitting employees against each other, because if i sabotage someone else, i have a better shot at winning.

If they did it by saying "everyone that meets this specific standard gets a bonus of X" then i don't think anyone would really complain. But because they are overworking themselves to have a chance to maybe get a prize, it seems unnecessarily exploitative.

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I’m confused as to how a prize to the highest performer is undignified. This is precisely the model they want to encourage. It’s not literally a single prize, but there are multiple prizes.

Imagine the olympics where there is no gold, silver, bronze. Is it undignified to award the highest performers?

A method that awarded everyone would not lead to productivity gains desired since it skips the competition and motivation. This only applies to manual labor and not to many other careers.

Competition is not undignified or wrong if it is fair and structured properly.

Overworking is optional. It’s something I used to be into when I was young, but not now.

It’s tyrannical if all weee forced to work harder, even if age prevented it.

> Imagine the olympics where there is no gold, silver, bronze. Is it undignified to award the highest performers?

The Olympics is a competition, not a group of people working towards the same goal. It would be MORE like giving one member or a relay team a gold medal instead of giving it to an entire team when they win.

> It's undignified because it's prizes to the highest performer, instead of bonuses to everyone meeting a certain goal.

That's not how a raffle works. You earn tickets which increase your chances of winning. The highest performer isn't necessarily the winner. That also limits how much effort people are going to put into it.

I agree that getting rewarded for actual work performed is strictly better, but in the end the workers get to decide if they want to play that game or not.

> They are essentially pitting employees against each other, because if i sabotage someone else, i have a better shot at winning.

I guess the possibility that warehouse workers are going to sabotage each other and risk getting fired over raffle tickets wasn't considered in the planning. I'm not saying it won't happen, but it sounds far-fetched.

> but in the end the workers get to decide if they want to play that game or not

This is a rather short sighted view. In many cases, they either play or they lose out big (either financially or even up to losing their job). For many of those outside tech (and some in tech), losing your job isn’t a risk they are able to take.

That presumes this raffle is really a secret ploy to get rid of unproductive workers. I'm not presuming that.

If you think it’s a “secret” ploy, then you’ve not worked in these types of positions before. It might not say it on the promotional posters hung around the work place, but it’s definitely well understood that performing in the bottom 10% is not a career continuing path.

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