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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

So they basically told you "you're fired, go to a bar"? Jesus, people...

"Go enjoy a round of drinks with all the people you don't work with anymore."

When something similar happened to me in the first dotcom crash, my boss at least had the decency to say "screw it, I'm putting it on my company AmEx", and even when he went home, he told the bartender "Keep it open all night, and add a 25% tip" and told us to stay as long as we wanted.

We did.

Kudos to him.

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 disappeared to the offline somehow.

Ended up giving my director a slightly embarrassing hug when we got back in, but we'd been through enough over the past that she forgave me and we're still friends.

How can a hug be so embarrassing that it needs to be forgiven? It's a euphemism I'm missing, isn't it.

She and I were somewhat standoffish people back then, not really huggy types. Meanwhile, I come into the office, 3 sheets to the wind, see her, and said something like "S., I am going to miss working with you so much!" at a fairly loud volume, and I'm a good half foot taller than her.

It's something I still have to buy her a beer for every couple of years or so.

Hmm, I still can't relate. It sounds like a very sweet gesture. If you told me you'd miss me and hugged me, I'd buy you a beer.

I grok. Our business relationship was very good (thus my outburst) but our somewhat distancing (and very "proper" and "professional" Midwestern based) personalities in the 90s led to it being slightly embarrassing for us, then.

We obviously got past it, but it makes for an amusing story as she's never seen me that inebriated since, and actually didn't know I could get that buzzed as well as be demonstrative.

Ah, I see, thanks. I'm glad everything is good now!

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

Did nobody on the entire engineering team have a company credit card?

At a former place I worked (a university), there was no annual cost-of-living increase to your salary. Instead, any increases were performance based.

If you scored the _highest_ level on your performance review, the level that required approval from several levels of HR to ensure that not too many people got it... you might get a 1.25% salary increase. If you scored "satisfactory" you might get a 0.75% increase.

Eventually some consultant told them that doing performance-based raises for such meager amounts and meager differences between high and low end, were actually found by research to have a negative impact on morale. (I left soon after that, so not sure what they changed to).

One more case of many of paying an expensive consultant to tell you something that was obvious to most of your staff already but you didn't listen to them.

I have a friend who worked as a consultant for a few years. I asked him what he did exactly, he said "well a company asked me to help them solve X, so I would go to the company's developers, ask them how they'd solve X, then I would tell the management that and get paid handsomely for it, and everyone's happy. Management got a solution, the devs got listened to, I got paid well, win-win."

I remember a study that noted that random awards not given to everyone were seen to have more morale boosts than rewards that people thought were small that were given to be everyone.

But yeah it amazes me people can't figure out the tiny reward is wonky.

I find "merit"/"performance" based raises for like 2 or 3% to be insulting.

You think I wasn't already doing my best, but what's going to motivate me to really give you my best is the promise of a 2% raise, if I successfully navigate the insane beurocracy to fill out my paperwork the right way to game the system and have my manager cooperate?

You don't just think I take no pride in my work and don't care about the project/mission itself, you also think I'm cheap/desperate.

Ah, the US. 3+ hour delay in the EU and you’re automatically entitled to a minimum of €250 compensation. Airlines try _very_ hard for that not to happen.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-right...

There is a name for that. It is "damning with faint praise."

> 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.

This is basically how I felt about the Amazon employee discount program, which if I remember right was 10% off all purchases, capped at $100 / year.

Sounds like the one penny tip people like to leave to make a point.

Well, there's your name then - a "fuckdelta".

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