It's suppposed to mean that the server doesn't support any of the formats the client specified in the Accept* headers. At least for the main Accept header, browsers typically include */* and even if they don't the server is better off just pushing whatever so yeah, would be interesting to know why they chose to return that particular error here.
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.
Not just employee gifts, but nearly all gifts are valued less by the receiver than the giver.
A gift represents a decision made on behalf of the receiver by the giver. In very few situations would the receiver make the same decision as the giver with the same resources. It's assumed that the receiver will use the same resources in an optimal manner, so gift-giving is a net negative.
In some circumstances, gifts are valued higher by the receiver than the giver. Gifts of time, of expertise, of opportunity, or things that the giver can get at a much lower cost than the receiver - these can be more appreciated.
Anyway, that's my grand theory of gifting, and why I generally avoid it, unless I can make it worthwhile to the gift receiver.
This is a very simplistic and very narrow perspective about gifting when looked from this side.
I don't consider gifts as the items solely. The person who brought the gift spent some time pondering what would I like, gave his/her best shot. Spent time and funds to acquire this and gave it to me.
Yes, it might not be the exact item I'd get; yes, it might not be crazy expensive (or just flat out cheap and simple). But it's a small anchor which makes me remember the person who gave me the gift and the occasion. The thoughtfulness and kindness what makes a gift, a gift.
That gift is priceless for me from now on. It can be a mug, it can be a pin, it can be a watch, or anything.
Putting everything on a material perspective is just not very kind, and is a great disservice to the person who bought the gift.
And yet, for years I’ve decided to make personal gifts or draw cards. Instead of earning money like everybody else I practiced arts and crafts and now I can draw, paint, sculpt, and do some other stuff that makes people smile.
Buying something is transactional, but making something takes effort. My $1.30 cents of clay to make each knock-off baby Yoda figure one year was a huge hit compared to the $300-400 for some other themed item on Etsy.
Gifts from an employer are kind of blah to me as well. You’re spending money you could have given me but think you know better, because it’s tax deductible.
>Gifts from an employer are kind of blah to me as well. You’re spending money you could have given me but think you know better, because it’s tax deductible.
FYI, while I do not think this (or any) deduction should exist, this is only $25 per year for non cash or non cash equivalent gifts:
There's "I remember you and I want to show that I care about you" gifts.
These days, I'm ambivalent about such gifts, whether it's giving them or accepting them. It's not the love I'm ambivalent about, it's just that it's also usually a ... thing. Which takes up space.
But there are also "Man, you've got to see this!" gifts. Not just something that the receiver will like, but which the giver loves also. Things that grow what you have in common.
These gifts need familiarity and trust. If the giver isn't on the same wavelength as the receiver, it becomes a "this is your sort of thing, isn't it?" gift instead, and they are not the same, even when they hit the mark.
And of course, a "you've got to see this" gift from a stanger is just a promotional sample. There has to be familiarity already, otherwise it's an imposition. "Why did you think I wanted to be more like you?"
My brother is the one who most usually gives the good "you've got to see this" gifts to me, and I dare hope I've managed to give some back.
>The thoughtfulness and kindness what makes a gift, a gift.
That gift is priceless for me from now on. It can be a mug, it can be a pin, it can be a watch, or anything.
Have a 75-year old friend that thought exactly like this and because of it, her house ended up being cluttered with tons of cat trinkets that she didn't want because her coworkers happen to find out "she likes cats". So she had cat figurines, cat pot holders, cat pins, cat stuffed toys, cat Christmas ornaments, etc. Decades of accumulated stuff like that. The items were things she didn't enjoy and would never buy herself but she hung on to them because of the cultural meme of "it's the thought that counts!" being beat into her head. She's not an assertive person so it wasn't in her personality to tell people to "stop getting me cat things" -- so she just smiled and thanked them. And because she felt "obligated" to the thoughtfulness and memory of the giver, she felt compelled to keep everything and constantly relocate them to the next house when she had to move. She didn't know what to do with all of it and it didn't feel right to her to throw it all away.
I finally convinced her to just put all the accumulated gifts on Craigslist as a "free giveaway". This was the psychological breakthrough she needed because she knew whoever would come get them would actually want the items. She finally was able to de-clutter her house.
I was only able to give her that advice because 99% of the gifts I received just created clutter in my house and my brain.
>, and is a great disservice to the person who bought the gift.
As counterpoint, buying a gift can be a disservice to the recipient as you've now added a destructive mental loop in their brain that has to figure out how to reconcile the giver's generosity with an unwanted item.
The above situation makes me wonder if society needs a total re-think of gifting etiquette where only very close family relations exchange gifts such as husbands/wives and parents/children.
For lesser relations like coworkers, the counterintuitive thinking that can make life better: not buying a gift is "the gift of not forcing the recipients to expend mental energy about that unwanted item later in life".
My friend did enjoy giftcards from Starbucks. She likes coffee and it didn't clutter up the house. The problem with gift cards is that many think it's too vulgar (or "low effort") because it's a thin veneer over cash. Understandable. But that's also why she keeps getting "real gifts" she doesn't want.
I understand where you are coming from, but in my case saying "My house a little bit too cluttered with these, can you bring me less/none of these from now on" is a very possible thing to do. It can be also said politely, and a real friend wouldn't take it personally, too.
I also tend to give out worn out or very old gifts to people who appreciate them. It's not easy as writing for me, too, but I know the real dangers of having an unintended hoarder's den.
On the other side of the equation, if my friend tells me that buying them these gifts creates mental load and clutter in their life, I'd listen. I'd instead gift experiences and/or expendables (e.g. gift cards), if he/she accepts.
I think these matters can be discussed, and it will certainly improve the friendship and the relationship between two parties.
If I can get enough information about people, I'd buy them what they like. This can be socks, gift cards, or just a box of chocolate.
I don't wish my gifts become burdens or pain points in one's life. I'd also not get offended if someone gives away something I gifted.
Being human and good relations is rooted in communication. No need to put this into hard molds and make people miserable by projecting our values over others under nice names. I buy gifts to make people smile. If I can learn what makes you smile most, I'll get that one. If not getting one will make you smile, I'll get you none.
Few times I've "gifted" a dinner, or some activity within a trip we take together they'd already be paying for, or consumables like good wine, or niche food from my home country. I can keep going but you get the point. When I couldn't afford much stuff, hanging out for an afternoon together and me paying for ice cream could be the gift. Maybe make your wishes known to your friends and adapt your own giving style.
In my experience "I don't give gifts because gift giving isn't efficient and here's a study proving my point" isn't conducive to fostering friendships.
If the people you hang out with think cat trinkets or socks are good gifts, I get why you became so jaded to it. Becoming the person that can give such gifts that are in the categories you appreciate, and cultivating friendships with others that do the same is way better approach in my view than just walking away from gift giving as a whole.
> When I couldn't afford much stuff, hanging out for an afternoon together and me paying for ice cream could be the gift. Maybe make your wishes known to your friends and adapt your own giving style.
That is essentially gifting them your time and honestly I appreciate the company more than trinkets
This is why I like consumable gifts the best. A dinner, a soap, some chocolate or wine.
But even that can trip up people who like to keep stuff in pristine condition. I think there would be a market for products that come in a "open" state - the cover torn off, a fake outer seal broken, 3 chocolate slots empty ("eaten") etc. so they can be more suitable for hoarders.
For the best part of 20 years I felt chocolate as a gift was a poor choice. But a month or so ago someone gave me some figs with the inside replaced with chocolate and it was such a novel gift (for me) that I'd say it is the best gift I got in years. Novelty is king for me.
Similar story with wine. Someone went to the effort of buying me a bottle that you can't get in USA from my home country and it was really special.
Yes, this is a very utilitarian and pessimistic view of gift giving, and probably not great for me to have. I've been shaped by years of required and thoughtless gift giving.
Items of low value, carefully selected, actually work really well for gifts! I think the process of curation can dramatically increase their perceived value, compared to a "serious" gift. But at some point, you just have too much stuff of all kinds, and you have to start getting rid of it.
> The person who brought the gift spent some time pondering what would I like, gave his/her best shot.
That's a hell of an assumption to make. There's a very real chance they spent 2 seconds buying something last minute because they were obligated to buy you something! I see my girlfriend do it every Christmas.
> There's a very real chance they spent 2 seconds buying something last minute because they were obligated to buy you something!
That's a hell of an assumption to make. In my family we negotiate what we going to buy for every member for at least two weeks, taking account what they are going to like and what they actually need, amongst other criteria.
Any friend of mine and my wife also gets the same treatment, as far as I experienced.
BTW, nobody is obliged to buy me anything for any day. I'm perfectly OK with that.
> This is a very simplistic and very narrow perspective about gifting when looked from this side.
I agree with you re: thoughtful gifts given to (or received from} people you have a relationship with. But I dont cosider employer gifts in this category. I view employee-employee gifts EXACTLY how the parent does. They tend to be impersonal (especially when given to the whole office) junk that gets forgotten, passed on or resold.
The basic idea is let's measure what the gift cost and what the receiver valued it at. But not everything that matters can be measured and not everything that is measured, matters. The study should have accounted for the strength of relationship between the gifter and gifted and how it was affected by the gift. It should have measured social status of the gifter before and after. These deepened bonds and increased social status could pay off later in the year. The 2001 paper Poverty and public celebrations in rural India (https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/2528.html) examines that idea and finds it to be true.
When you're looking at an institution that has developed independently thousands of times across human history in wildly disparate cultures, you need to ask yourself what benefit it brings before dismissing it.
This comment reminds me of the teenage atheists who think religion is worthless because it's a bunch of made up stuff they don't believe is true. Regardless of what they believe, religion has independently developed and flourished in a number of cultures. Religions that involve regular congregations bring benefits to their members, such as living longer, happier lives.
> Women who went to any kind of religious service more than once a week had a 33% lower chance than their secular peers of dying during the 16-year study-follow-up period.
You cut out the important bit in his statement: "that involve regular congregations". And you didn't even put in a "[...]" to indicate your editing.
I would hazard a guess the removed bit is actually very important, because having a social network has been shown to improve lives: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=social+network+and+old+age&ia=web (hopefully that's enough citation), and regularly showing up to congregation is probably a huge step in having a social network.
You should consider the communicative value of gifts, a communicative gift is one where someone likes something and believes that the receiver will also like it, this is not just I like TinTin comics so I will give the big book of TinTin to receiver because how could someone not love TinTin? I love TinTin so he's great!
A communicative gift is I know they won't like TinTin the way I do but given that they are a lesbian that wants to read lesbian focused literature maybe give them the Locas: Maggie and Hopey stories and they will get that you considered them in choosing what to get, but also to introduce something to them that you like that you value and that you hope they will value as well.
That's similar to how I see it. My niece recently turned 16 and in a recent conversation I discovered she's into fantasy but hasn't heard of the Discworld novels. I looked up which book is commonly considered the best intro to the series (Small Gods) and bought her that. It might spark a real interest, or it might turn out that Discworld is too dated and unappealing to teenagers these days, but that bit of thought makes the odds better than random.
It's why I prefer to give hard cold cash. Not even gift cards...cash. And definitely not those stupid Visa gift cards where you pay a activation fee and occasionally get scammed.
I'm also from an Asian background where cash is more acceptable. I feel any other form of gifting is a ruse to increase consumerism, i.e. the popularity of gift registries, the perception that one isnt thoughtful if you dont yet a good gift etc.
For all the people I might consider giving a gift to the amount of cash I would have to give for it to be meaningful would be huge. And that size would make it embarrassing. Much better to make the act part of the gift. As someone said elsewhere on this topic low value curated gifts are often very highly appreciated.
For me, some of the best gifts are those things that I like, but I wouldn't buy myself because I find them too capricious, too shallow, too unnecessary, etc. to justify the cost. In your words, suboptimal.
Gifts are an emotional thing so it's no wonder that they don't make much sense from a purely rational perspective, as (at least most of the time) that's not the point of gifting.
So do I (well, from my father's bees, that is...). But it illustrates exactly what the OP is talking about - this honey comes at low cost or free to us, but for the receiver it represents a much higher value. (prices around here for local, pure honey are 7 or 8 euros per 450 grams / about a pound). My kids sell my parents' honey for 5 euros and people are grateful for those low prices even, and treat it like we're doing them a favor.
I gift people some sourdough bread I make. The price of a loaf of bread is ridiculously cheap, much cheaper than my time would cost if I factored it in and my breads aren't perfectly baked every single time like a bakery with professionals can do.
Still, people appreciate it a lot, much more than if I purchased a better-looking loaf of bread from a professional baker for 2-3€.
I don't think it's necessarily tied to the value it represents to the receiver, it's the act of kindness with the unexpectedness of a gift that gives it value.
I used to do this but reciprocality meant that everyone started giving me back baked goods in return, usually really sweet stuff that I don't want in my diet.
I enjoy baking sourdough loaves to return favors though e.g. if s neighbour takes care of my lawn while I'm away. That's fun and keeps the books balanced.
I agree with the parent comment and I also agree with you. The reason is that I believe that the states rule mostly applies to permanent things (i.e curtains or mugs) while you are commenting about a consumable. Everyone likes when you bring olive oil from vacation and, if it meets a certain minimum, everyone likes when you bring cake. In your case, you further have the DIY aspect. DIY things are generally interesting (though it depends on the quality of the item and the relationship between giver and receiver). But store bought stuff that the receiver may as well have bought themselves? If I am invited to a (non-BYO) BBQ, I would never bring a potato salat from the local supermarket. But I would (at times) definitely bring a home made one.
At my first job, the boss/owner of the company knew a lot about wine. As a result, the Christmas gift basket contained a lot of excellent wines that I wouldn't have been able to pick out myself. But I guess that's an example of expertise.
And of course it's not much use to someone who doesn't like wine (they may have had a non-alcoholic alternative).
"excellent wines" or a great example of a wasteful gift because excellent wines aren't substantially better than OK wines, unless you are a wine enthusiast (not just a wine drinker).
It's like giving out RTX 3080s en masse. Most people won't get the value of what you spent.
And excellent wine can be a lot better than an OK wine for a similar cost. I think it's a perfect example where some expertise can dramatically increase the value. For wine drinkers, at least.
The great thing about wine as a gift is that it doesn't go bad quickly. Even if you don't drink it, you can re-gift it to someone who will appreciate it.
While your first and second paragraph may generally be true the opposite can also be true.
I do prefer receiving gifts when those gifts are informed. Which is why asking about desired gifts is perfectly fine.
There are certain classes of things that I do not consider necessary yet I would desire and for which the variety available results in paralysis of choice. For these, having the giver choose, and having the thing have additional sentimental value (it is from the giver) makes it more valuable than the thing itself.
I like your theory and it puts into words this nagging feeling about gift-giving (material or immaterial) which I had for years.
I love making gifts to people, without expecting anything in return, but still wondered why it sometimes seemed to drive people away. That's why the "Law of Reciprocity"[0][1] never sat right with me while I experienced more personal anecdotal evidence for the reverse phenomenon [2].
If I always gifted my son what he asks, he would have nothing but cars and other vehicles. He wouldn't have discovered many other kinds of toys that he loves (as well as some that he doesn't, of course... one can't have a 100% success rate). Gifting can be a good way to expose people to new things that they might like, and this is even more so in the case of kids, as they ask from a much more restricted set of known things than adults.
Kinda why I hate getting gifts, I'd genuinely prefer for giver to just take me for a beer or something, I prefer company to them basically wasting time working to earn money to give me something I might or might not like.
On other side picking what to give is endless source of anxiety to me.
The gift is the very fact that it’s non optimal. I wouldn’t spend $500 on a coffee grinder. That’s the gift. Otherwise I’d already have that coffee grinder.
It’s only a “net negative” if the receiver of the gift can’t afford their necessities.
The same is true when there is information asymmetry. I wouldn’t spend $10 on this specific candy from Japan, because I didn’t know it existed. It’s “non optimal” and again that’s the gift. I get to try a new candy I’ve never heard of.
I agree with this.
I have started the following a number of times. I would really appreciate if I get gifted something most of people find mundane e.g. socks. Unless I need special socks for something specific I really care very little. So if someone uses his time to save me from doing quality sock shopping I value this a lot and would be happy about the gift. I don't like cheap and wear once socks though.
I always see gifts as recommendations. You don't need to have expertise to know about something that is more valuable than expected and that the person would not have bought for themselves. And the best gifts that I (or others around me) have received are things that turned out better than expected.
Yep in most cases and to different degrees in different cultures and contexts, gifting seems to be a procedure that primarily is about the giver and their needs, rather than about the receiver - while claiming the opposite.
One place I worked had layoffs and project cancellations, so morale was way down. As a tone deaf move one day, we got an email saying as a treat because we appreciate you all being here despite how shitty everything is, you can purchase yourself a coffee and expense it (max of $10). That turned into more jokes than anything. Morale was horrible and they thought making people feel good was letting them buy coffee, which they'd then have to fill out expense forms to get "for free".
Yes, we're privileged to get a free coffee, but relative to our paycheck, it's a pointless gift and just smacks of being out of touch with employee sentiment at the time.
You'd think that Amazon would do that (and apparently they do not) just so their employees would be more familiar with the products and able to offer better suggestions on improvements.
Guess I now know why the Prime Video interface is so terrible!
As a customer I don't want Amazon employees to have free Prime membership so that hopefully at least some of them get annoying by the constant Prime-pushing that they make normal users go trough.
Yeah, giving people an extra form to fill in is not the greatest gift. A better idea would be to go around and ask people what kind of coffee they want and then getting it for them.
It's still not going to significantly raise morale on its own, but at least it's not going to sink it further, and it focuses on the nice gesture instead of the bureaucracy.
I agree that somebody walking around asking for your order and bringing it to you while you bang away at code would be a super nice gesture. The problem in the case I described though was everyone was working from home, so picking up your own coffee was the only way to do it. (Again, making it even more pointless as a gesture.)
Yeah, that's pointless. I would expect most coffee drinkers to already have the best coffee at home. I guess it was a really poor attempt to translate the nice gesture to an environment where it doesn't really work.
Reminds me of how some nurses in Finland were gifted with an ice cream voucher for their hard work during corona times. [1] The picture translates roughly as:
[The upper text]
"As a small thank you for your effort during the corona year, we'd like to offer you an ice cream during the hot weather in summer."
[The lower text on yellow background]
"The voucher is valid for the selected ice creams in this [kiosk]. You're welcome!"
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 site for 24h until the next pricing run.
He pulled some heroics and managed to fix the import in time and black friday was a success.
So he saved the company 5M GBP in profits, singlehandedly.
As a thanks he got a 25 GBP gift card to the same site.
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 on how much he was paid, the company paid that. Doesn't matter if he saved 5M in profits or not. What if he had failed? Or what if he was the reason the pricing import failed? Would it be okay for the company to penalize him by clawing back some of the money he had been paid in the past?
Yeah my take on this is that the only appropriate response is a thank you from top level leadership and serious consideration of your heroics when it comes time for salary adjustment.
A thank you without a gift is way less insulting than a thank you with a paltry or trivial gift.
the COMPANY was run really shittily already, there was absolutely no effing reason to plant anything. all the people tried to make the company better, for shitty effing pay.
have you ever seen a world where people take some kind of pride in their work? want to have a positive impact?
I think giving 25 pounds was strictly worse than not giving anything at all. This was an insult.
I don't necessarily think he should have been compensated based on the (theoretical) loss of money. He was employed after all. And properly someone else would haved saved the day early enough anyway.
But 25$ is quite an embarrassment. Nothing would have been better in that case.
> And properly someone else would haved saved the day early enough anyway.
According to the story, no. The regular employees in the regular system failed, and OP person decided to act like an owner and save the company, outside of job responsibilities, covering up for management's failure to build and test a reliable system. Did the OP person get paid like an owneror promoted to a leadership position for being a leader? No.
OP's friend didn't get paid like an owner because he wasn't an owner. If you want to be an owner you have to take on the risk as well. If they had missed it, and lost the 5M, you wouldn't support them taking back half of this guy's pay for the next 6 months to help make up for it.
I mean, if you want to do it on the cheap, it only takes a few minutes for the dev's boss' boss' boss' boss' assistant to handwrite a note saying "Nice work saving the company, you are officially my hero" or words to that effect.
It's tricky to reward outstanding work for salaried folks, since it can mess with intrinsic motivation or misalign incentives. Here it's probably appropriate to have a five figure spot bonus for the line employee who made the fix, and a promotion, if they still had the junior title.
And also a very long uncomfortable conversation with whichever architects or seniors decided it was okay for Black Friday pricing to only be uploaded five minutes before midnight - what the hell is that about?
Salary is literally extrinsic motivation. The problem isn't bonuses, the problem is when bonuses become so regular and frequent that they turn into an informal part of the salary and not paying them becomes equivalent to withholding part of the salary.
If you pay a one-off bonus for outstanding work, make sure you tie it to something specific the employee can understand. If it's a reward for a massive deal decide in advance if you want to pay out similar bonuses for similar deals in the future and what the rules are.
An employer-employee relationship is not a friendship no matter how much you like each other. It's a dependent relationship and it needs rules to protect both sides. A five figure bonus is a big deal for many employees so treat them with the dignity they deserve by making sure they can understand the conditions. If you think there aren't any that just means you haven't spelled them out or don't want to be held accountable.
> 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.
Sometimes the lack of reward indicates a cover up. I've seen my manager turn white while in a room with his boss and he made a joke about the cost of pizza he was providing and I replied with "take it out of the million or so I saved you last week". He didn't tell his boss that I worked 48 hours straight to resolve a problem my manager created.
That wasn't necessarily the company being cheap. If it was heroics, it could be someone else took credit, or that someone else wanted to keep the mistake quiet, and so the thanks came out of some accounting bucket for tiny rewards.
Personally, that might've been a time I'd look and whether it was time for a promotion, even though I think rewarding heroics is tricky for engineering culture (better to celebrate work that means heroics never required).
The company was cheap beyond belief. This gift card was just stupid.
The real problem obviously was that the company was so shittily run that heroics were needed to save the day. Also my buddy was junior enough to care and do it.
It's pretty sickening to see that people in this thread seem to focus on the moral hazard of thanking via a monetary means, where will this stop? One should not get paid? Not the management that led to this and also to the top level post of totally inept token gifts.
I’ve had innumerate similar experiences, where my actions saved or made clients millions.
I did not get a thanks - gratitude is meaningless, as whoever expresses it for whatever reason will be perfectly happy to turn around and rip your face off five minutes later having entirely forgotten that you just saved their bacon - however I also did not get a kick in the nuts, so that’s good enough for me.
So it was a bug that he could fix in only 5 minutes that solved everything? It sounds like he fixed a wrongly defined variable. Probably should have gotten something better but also someone should have excoriated the QA team/system and whoever wrote the code.
Whoever made that mistake should have just taken your buddy out for a nice dinner.
Also completely agree with everyone on the misaligned incentives.
The production/assembly building would get very hot in the summer. One day, a decision was made to pass out bottles of Gatorade to the workers in the building. The marketing/sales department decided to turn this into a social media 'opportunity', they left their air-conditioned offices to have pictures taken of them handing cold bottles of Gatorade to the production floor employees.
They made it look like an act of charity on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
What I've seen other employers do is provide large coolers of drinks and cups for employees to have throughout the day when it's very hot out.
Even dumber than that, this happened just weeks after the company removed the soft drink vending machines from the building because of 'health' reasons.
I understand the server is having difficulties, but this is the first time I see "406 - not acceptable" in the wild. I expected it to throw a 500 error or just timeout.
That makes two of us. We have a Cloudflare worker serve the content from Webflow (which is actually set up with a custom domain at https://webflow2.tremendous.com/. Yes, it's a little convoluted.
We still don't know what broke here - the Cloudflare worker or Webflow, or the combination of the two.
Maybe it didn't go down because it maintains a hard limit on how many requests it considers acceptable? Any request beyond that number is not a bad request per se, but still unacceptable to the server.
That's the best logic I can discern here. I honestly have no idea.
That would not be a proper use of the 406 code, which is specifically about the Accept* headers that the client sent.
My guess would be that whatever abstraction they used ended up with no content produced (because of timeout or whatever) so the framework could not satisfy any of the content types that the client accepts. Still another error would be better but I can see how it could happen.
I’m allergic to casein and whey (proteins found in milk). And any amount of cross-contamination will make me physically sick. Caffeine and alcohol aggravate my mental health issues.
This was a disaster at my last job.
Every event involving food, one of the following happens:
- Pizza party, donuts, cake, etc as rewards. A number of people choose not to eat these because of calories, so people allergic to the food can choose not to eat it.
- Spend over a hour making a list of safe restaurants that are too expensive for me to ever have been to and still getting sick because food safety is for plebs.
- Help plan the catering for an event I’d rather not attend.
- Standing around awkwardly while everyone apologizes multiple times for forgetting my food allergies. I don’t want to be there and now I am responsible for making everyone else feel better about the situation.
- Told to get lunch on my own and expense it. Forget the receipt and have accounting get my manager involved.
And for fun, the worst situation: a VIP coming to the office to work with me for two days on an important project.
Well, if course everyone involved had to go to dinner with him. I had to pick the restaurant. Said restaurant did in fact not understand food safety, despite their claims to the contrary. Realized this about half an hour into the meal. I was severely sick for the next two days and felt terrible for the next week.
The damage was severe enough I couldn’t keep food down initially. Probably should have gone the hospital, but I didn’t want to pay hundreds of dollars on top of my misery.
I suspect this was career limiting. Got a new job eventually. So fuck that guy.
Butter is everywhere in restaurants, that could be a big issue, especially in higher-end restaurants. And "fast casual" places tend to have some kind of cheese at the counter.
I have celiac disease, so I also have a lot of issues with cross contamination at restaurants, and I have problems similar to GP.
I can usually eat at restaurants, but I need to ask a lot of questions and/or make sure I go when they aren't busy, so I can be reasonably sure that the kitchen staff have the time to ensure that my food isn't contaminated. I also need to avoid fast casual restaurants unless it looks like the food bins at the counter have been recently replenished (less risk of utensil contamination).
I simply don't eat at company events, and for that reason I too don't put any value on food as a company gift. I try to eat pretty healthy anyway, so I don't mind being barred from pizza, Italian combo sandwiches, and tacos. When the team goes out to lunch, I usually walk with them to the door of the restaurant, and then go my own way.
That said, GP seems to be carrying a lot of guilt and bearing a lot of emotional burden related to this. Seems like the company work environment might have been disrespectful and/or toxic for other reasons, of which the food issues were a symptom.
No. There are plenty of places
I can go where this doesn’t happen. And I cook my own food. I know what I’m allergic to. A lot of expensive places I had to pick from used gallons of butter every night.
I’m also in the Midwest. Food safety is a bit of a foreign concept out here.
A company I know gave all their employees company branded beach towels, sunscreen, water bottles, and bucket hats for Christmas when it was making record profits. Being in the southern hemisphere, beach paraphernalia is seasonally appropriate, but I suspect they would've preferred just being given their share of the money that was spent on company branded products. Or, you know, a bonus because, well, record profits.
In maybe an unrelated note, a few of those employees later stole from the company.
Often, this is a side-effect of tax code weirdness.
In my legislative framework, branded stuff is considered "advertisement", which can be given out with any amount of value to employees. Non-branded stuff - or money - would be taxable income. With a tax rate of up to 48%, that's a difference, and paperwork for the employee.
So I have a very nice thermos with my employer's logo on it, and I am quite happy about it.
Unfortunately a lot of custom branded swag is sold B2B by companies who have not much idea about quality and are just branding so-so unbranded junk. Conversely I was happy to receive an iFixit pro toolkit with our company logo embroidered on the outer instead of the iFixit logo.
If the items are good, high quality I don't mind branding. If you want you can also make it more subtle.
But don't give me the cheap use once beach towels and expect me to be forever grateful.
All in all best gifts are time or money. E.g 2 paid days off.
My favorite: being asked to pick a company-branded jacket out a few available options and then never receiving it because I work remotely.
I managed to fly in the same week the swag arrived. There were 5+ open boxes of swag visible, but person responsible for handing them out wasn’t
available every time I checked. I didn’t matter that my name, size, and selection was on the list. After I went home there was a company-wide email there were “extras” available for pickup in the office. They hadn’t ordered extras, they were the remote employees’ orders.
I couldn't actually. There was a counter and three people between me and the boxes. They actually wanted to help me but weren't allowed to. I'm not going to ask a retail employee to risk getting fired over a jacket.
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.
Weird. Did noone else notice the obvious? A prepaid/gift-card company rooting via a (sketchy) survey based article for prepaid/gift-cards as the number one gifts.
How convenient.
I would love see the numbers behind the survey and the questionaire and the selection method of the sample.
I gotta say I personally felt insulted when I was doing contracting and my hiring company bought me a 5 dollar starbucks gift card. They were making $25/hr off of me for the privilege of having introduced me to employer. Found it pretty galling.
By that logic money is the best gift. We still have tons of unused gift cards that we forget about or are only applicable to things we're not that interested in.
Still, I prefer something more personal than money.
I think the worst one I've ever seen was a nurse I know was given a pen (of bic quality), a $10 giftcard to fast food, and a lanyard as a gift from the hospital during COVID. She was pulling double shifts and exposed to all sorts of hazards (the union didn't come to save them on PPE for a long time). This hospital, by the way, is insanely profitable.
I'm not sure how you could insult people more. Even no gift would be less insulting.
The worst gift I've received from work was a $100 digital multi-store gift card. It probably seemed like such a reasonable thing to give (and I even liked it at first, too). Unfortunately, it turned out to be really difficult to redeem it in full for the combinations of things I would like at the places where it's redeemable.
I'm fairly sure I've already spent more than $100 in my time on trying to use it. So in a sense, I was gifted negative money. When I realised this I ended up throwing it in the rubbish bin.
It would have been so much more efficient for everyone involved to just send me an extra $100 in cash. Put it in an envelope with a fancy card if you want to make it special. But eh, gotta feed the gift card business.
> 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.
A raise. A raise is the best gift a company can give its employees. And a raise big enough to take an employee's financial worries off the table has a good chance of making them feel more motivated and more valued.
I really can’t imagine a gift that would motivate me as an employee. There are things i might appreciate, but the only “gift” I would find motivational would be a raise.
I worked at a place that when the company did really well you get a bonus of two weeks paycheck. It some times could happen twice a year and nobody had to ask for it you will receive the news through a “thank you” email.
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".
Previous company had some decent one-off gifts for life events. A couple nice coffee mugs with company colors and hearts for a wedding and bamboo cutting boards with company logo for a housewarming gift were quite nice and actually were appreciated. felt like these were good things to offer. The employee appreciation day "water bottle" was an awful piece of garbage though that honestly felt insulting, a $5 cafeteria voucher would have been better.
I would say the quality of a gift matters. A big part is managing expectations though, if employees aren't expecting a gift, you have a lot more freedom than if something is expected. A free Paczki on Fat Tuesday is more appreciated than a Christmas cookie (especially if referred to as a bonus).
There are a number of websites on HN where I've faced this while on a datacenter network; though I hadn't investigated the previous instances simply because I was using a VPN on my phone.
In a rather interesting twist, this page serves up Datadome's bot management scripts; but I wonder why they don't proceed with the fingerprinting as opposed to directly blocking the user.
> “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 points, compared to gift cards, but the gift card selection isn't great. At least for a couple items I was looking I could get the offered item via one of the offered gift cards and save literally hundreds of dollars.
Another suggestion for the list: don't do that, and make things a good deal, or at least value them fairly.
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.
My work was thinking of adopting one of those points based systems for peer recognition. I happened to have been on a team that had already built a small recognition system internally already, so I got to sit in on the pitch meeting.
There was a lot to like about the pitch, but my reaction to the “rewards store” was “ugh, this feels like the incredibly manipulative and icky ‘reward catalogs’ we got whenever their was a youth fundraiser. It would lower my trust in the company. Can we just do cash?”
Apparently they could do that, but the sales team couldn’t conceive of the “rewards center” as being a turnoff. They either truly thought it added value or it was so central to their business model they couldn’t believe people might not want it.
> Apparently they could do that, but the sales team couldn’t conceive of the “rewards center” as being a turnoff. They either truly thought it added value or it was so central to their business model they couldn’t believe people might not want it.
The most contact I've had with sales is walking through their area, but it just comes of as a totally alien culture to me. Their walls were covered with posters about this or that quarter's big prize. They even had an area commemorating the big prizes from years past.
> after all, it's pure sugar on top of your agreed upon salary no matter how you slice it
I strongly disagree, at least in my area and culture. It's widely assumed that employers will provide some kind of year-end holiday-time bonus. It's just as much a part of exprcted total compensation as tips in industries afflicted by that cancer.
An employer stiffing employees deserves to be called out for violating norms.
At my company when we celebrate something like Christmas or a big project milestone, we have a short celebratory huddle in the office / Zoom where our CEO will relay some anecdotes and thank us for our efforts, and then just tells us: "take your family out to dinner at your favourite restaurant and the company will cover it."
I think it's a great way to show your employees they are valued. I don't need a pizza party with co-workers or some junk I'll toss in a corner and never use.
It costs more than $5 in administrative time/squandered mental energy to own, store, carry, and use (or remember to use), a $5 gift card. Net value is negative.
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:
Ironic, I just got a email about company holiday gifts.
I've gotten some great swag, clothing mostly - a very very nice couple of jackets, headphones (which were made by a sibling in our conglomerate) and a pack of misc snacks - plus the ubiquitous coffee cups.
This year on offer is an 8 lb ham, an 11-13lb turkey, a mix of foods, or a premium chocolate sampler, or I can donate the equivalent to the local food bank.
> “It was company swag (a stone drink coaster with the company logo on it) that I had to sign a form for and that form allowed the company to then tax me on that ‘gift’ as income,”
Yeah, i dont think the problem there is just that it is swag.
Lots of swag is kind of crap, but on occasion i've gotten some higher end swag, and i dont really mind it.
Yes, I quite like high quality company swag like sweatshirts and hoodies with logos on them. It's particularly fun in retrospect after the company has gone under and you wear them to your current job or out on the town. People will say things like "Hey, I remember them! So you used to work for them?" It's a conversation starter.
I agree, quality branded swag is awesome. Then again, so is the company I work for. I got a three way jacket once, and a nice book bag with a laptop pocket another time. I use both regularly.
I hired an operations person to plan silly stuff like this because people that worked for me wanted a culture
When I was an employee I hated non-work related stuff as part of work
turns out, even the patronizing stuff is team building amongst the workers. they build rapport with each other by talking about how patronizing it is. shrug. moving on.
It's funny how different industry can be, in tech most people love receiving swag it even becomes their entire wardrobe ahah
I mostly don't care about gifts but there is one that had me burst laughing; Company wanted to celebrate "employee appreciation day" or something like that.
We received a big announcement from the CEO with... a 10$ gift card. It's coming from a good sentiment but is my work only appreciated to only 10$ ?? ahah
I can keep my head around it, how can anybody thought it was a good idea, feels so cheap and even unnecessary as we were paid decently. It was definitely net negative for the company but still makes me laugh.
I really don't get why people in tech love swag so much. Is it because people's esteems are generally so low that they will become walking advertisments because it gives them a sense of pride to show that they work at whatever company?
When I worked for an aerospace company that is now, thankfully, defunct, our HR department gave us all a miniature Twix candy bar and a company ink pen.
The candy bar I received was melted and the ink pen did not work.
This was a couple of days after I learned that I would not receive a bonus that almost every other employee received.
Some of these are objectively bad ($5 grocery card) while others (team dinner) are basically complaints about a job/coworkers you hate (now these fools are taking your free time, too).
You certainly don't need to hate people to not want to go out to dinner with them. Not after 8+ hours of work. And often when there are team/company dinners, they are often an attempt to make up for lots of overtime and/or having to travel.
If after all of that, you would rather actually see your family for a change, or catch up with friends, or get some of your chores done that've been piling up due to work, or relax with some hobbies - then somehow you're painted as the bad guy who hates their coworkers and isn't a team player just because you don't want to spend 24/7 with them?
If it's cash-equivalent (i.e. I can actually use it in a store I commonly go to) then I don't mind even $5. I mean, it's not something that would make me particularly happy, but $5 is more than $0. I have also used some company swag for years (cups, water bottles, hoodies, scarves, backpacks, etc.) with no complaints, if it's not cheap-ass stuff but a proper product with a logo slapped on it, why not. I mean, if it's a gift and it costs me nothing, why feel bad about it?
Things I do feel bad is either crappy quality things, or things I couldn't use - like gift card for a place I don't go to, or crappy tshirt I would never wear, etc. - that's just waste and I am becoming part of it, that makes me feel bad.
Once when I was a kid, too young to have any sense, I wanted to make some money shovelling snow. I didn't realize yet that you need to make an sgreement with your customer before doing the work. This was a small town in upstate new york so even the strangers were not really strangers. As a kid you don't really see any adult as being all that different from your parents or teachers.
So dippy me just starts shovelling the sidewalk in front of one of the shops on main street, a good chunk of storefront between the shop and the street that hadn't been done when the others had been.
It took a good hour or more, and I cleaned it all up good, no haphazard slack job. Then the owner comes out when it's all done and gives me 2 quarters. This is about '77 to '79, that's 1978 to be clear not 1878...
I go home and my dad asks how I did and I tell him, and he said first, you should have asked if he wanted his sidewalk shovelled first, and agreed on a price before doing it, so in that sense you can't complain because you did that to yourself. However seperately, you should have given him the 50 cents back and said no thank you sir. if this is all you can spare, then you obviously must need it more than me. And refuse to take the 50 cents and even refuse to take anything even if he then offers more. You were wrong to just start doing something without being told to, but he should be ashamed to do that.
That is what's wrong with a $5 gift. Or an uttery thoughtless gift. Keep it. You obviously need it more than me.
It's more about dignity and respect and thoughtfullness than plain money, but a tiny token money value with no other aspect to make it more about being funny or something, is itself a message.
I don't think it's the same situation. Not accepting 50 cents for shoveling establishes the price for this work - i.e. creates situation where there's "paid work" - which costs more than $0.50 and "free/charity work" which costs nothing. With gifts, it's neither - you don't work for gifts, you work for the salary. The gifts are extra - unless there's something in the contract, or they are culturally expected - e.g. in Israel, it is customary for every company of decent size to give out gifts on certain holidays, and if it's not done, it's considered a cultural faux pas. Shitty gift could in this situation be considered as trying to change the cultural norm and thus one could push back by refusing them, for example - thus signaling that the cultural duty of gift-giving remains un-fullfilled. But in the US, I don't think there's any cultural custom like that?
> It's more about dignity and respect and thoughtfullness
I guess I just don't think people giving me money for free is an affront to my dignity. In fact, I am willing to accept monetary donations of any size (well, maybe above $1, otherwise it's too much trouble to bother) - as long as they are not accompanied with any reciprocal expectation from me. As I said, if there are expectation or cultural norm, that's different business.
Did you miss the part where we're talking about a 7 or 8 year old dipshit kid and an adult?
That store owner absolutely deserved to be humiliated. It doesn't matter the tiniest little bit about the kid didn't make an agreement first. I suppose you will now call the unsolicited shovelling vandalism and the store owner actually should have called the cops?
Do you not have any sense of perspective or context?
Maybe I'm overly sensitive but I get mad whenever I see or hear the water bottle thing. I hate these water bottles and I sure as hell won't carry one with me. And in the office it's the worst. If everyone had the same one how would I not accidentally mix them up? Also who needs more than a low amount of water bottles.
You could imagine I'd be against drinking tap water, no - I've been doing that for years. But I am against lugging bespoke branded water bottles around and I can not get over the fact how people would assume they're even a decent gift.
Some of these end up in the Goodwill stores of Silicon Valley. Someone should visit them all, and make a blog: "Coffee cups and water bottles from failed startups."
When I first moved to the US I wasn't particularly flush with cash and had maybe a 1000 bucks in my pocket by the end of the first year. At some point I worked a Saturday and my manager gave me a $50 gift card to Ruth's Chris as a thank you. So I went with a friend only to come to the conclusion the cheapest steak on the menu was $60 to begin with, oh the shock I felt.
The gifts that really get me going are the 500 mAh power banks that probably cost all of $2, tiny terrible speakers were a thing for a while too. They'll end up in a drawer or the landfill.
It's as the article says, a pittance. If you go above and beyond by some amount, you want to see that rewarded proportionally. Yeah, it's > $0 … but was it commensurate with the effort?
I remember a manager once giving me $100 to "have a nice dinner with my spouse" after working over the weekend. It was a nice gesture. Showed awareness of the sacrifice, even if it was expected.
Not full retribution, but we were all chasing the startup dream, or perhaps a bigger bonus later. There's some value in small short-term rewards, to show appreciation.
That's a 20× difference though. $5 barely buys the coffee that one probably had to drink to work the late hours/weekend or whatever, let alone would it make up for the time. (And, again, $100 might be enough, or it might not. Depends on the effort the person put up. If I had to spend all weekend on something … probably not, since my own employer pays me at a higher rate than that; i.e., I sacrificed a weekend for lower wage?)
Employees are here for the money. Having an interesting job, a good work environment, perks, flexibility, etc... is a nice plus but no matter what you are doing, none of your employees will work for free.
Employees are not stupid, when they receive gifts, they know where the money is coming from, and it is money they could have received as extra pay, and they most likely would have made better use of that money than whatever gift they received. Give them money, that's why they are here.
There may be some good reasons for other gifts: taxes. If you give money to your employees, it may be considered salary and taxed as such. An gift card may not, and it can be almost as good as cash depending on where you can use it.
The obvious issue is that giving employees $25-$50 in cash (which is what most of those things cost per person) is too little and can be considered insulting.
I'm going to guess everyone was a lot older than you and already knew their finances quite well - so one free meal a week added up to something for them.
Actually they were all young like me but it is fair to say that I was unable to recognize the benefit of a free meal because I was an entitled prick as well as a former New Yorker who knew from bagels.
Every year my employer sends a fancy gift box to celebrate the new sales cycle, and it's full of shiny streamers, and tat. It's painful to see all that money ending up in a landfill. Just give the money to charity or something.
i am pretty sure money would suck just as much when considering the amounts. if a company is giving you a pizza party, gift card, water bottle etc. worth like $5-$10, the cash equivalent is $10 extra on a paycheck.. that sounds equally juvenile as any of those other gifts because the actual insult is the _amount_ .
rewarding say a much harder *year* of work over COVID with a few giftcards or $50 sucks balls because everyone knows we deserve much more than that. the only meaningful rewards are large bonuses or promotions and that will just never happen.
Some of these criticisms come across as pretty entitled and spoiled. Lots of places never give out any gifts, or give you a shitty cheap watch or a plastic company pen in recognition for 30 years of dedicated service.
The socks complaint really bugs me. If I received a pair of socks from my boss, as long as they weren't tube socks, I'd actually like and use them! As long as you don't love in the tropics, it's hard to have too many socks.
Company swag can be great when it's medium or high quality, or at least a bit exclusive.
A few examples:
* Medium- or high-end backpack, jacket, or other clothing embroidered with then coolest version of the company logo
* Soft and comfy team- or project-specific designed t-shirt or hoodie
* Branded shades or tennis shoes
* Cash is always nice, too
As long as the gift isn't offensively cheap or completely thoughtless, I wouldn't respond harshly or harbor any bad feelings. Any token of appreciation is likely better than none at all.
Perhaps best to be considerate and ask around beforehand and allow people to opt out from the gift? This could help minimize the likelihood of negative responses and feels.
p.s. Who remembers Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation? That was a quintessential example of an offensive company holiday gift; IIRC, without any warning, the cheap-ass boss swapped a long-standing cash bonus for a fruit club membership.
Asking people if they want to opt out of all gifts could also backfire as a perceived loss. I.e. gift quality is higher than they expected, or perceived costs of this perk for others seem to be getting out of hand to them, while they feel committed to their initial choice of being someone who declined and is sort of against the whole thing.
At larger companies, I noticed that you can do a give away with tables along the path to the cafeteria, etc, and really get away with giving out shwag of pretty much no value in a way that pleases quite a few either because they get excited by anything free or they get caught up in the moment, branding as a sort of collectible, etc.
I remember on reddit someone was complaining about getting a Victorinox pocketknife for a five year anniversary gift, and it was a nice 30+ dollar knife, and people were complaining loudly about the insensitivity of it.
I wondered aloud to my partner, would they be happier if they just got a certificate?
Yeah, lots of the stuff on the list isn't going to piss me off, it's just "meh" at worst. If they handed out $5 gift cards and people didn't want them you know I'd be going around and slurping them up.
Don't think it has much to do with the tech industry.
If it's a 5€ thing for a shop you have to get to first that might actually eat up the benefits already. (I'm in Europe, if I have to go to the city center I'd actually pay 6 € for both ways with public transport and probably 2-4 € in parking (+ gas)).
So yeah, unless I'm taking the bike it would probably not make sense to go out of my way to even cash in a 10 € voucher if it's not online or something I frequent anyway. There are no malls here in a sense that I'd be stopping by on even a monthly basis.
I saw this movie recently. There’s a scene where he just openly ogles at a woman’s breasts for a very long time in store as a gag.
It’s pretty wild that when you look at one of his later character’s, Pierce Hawthorne in Community; an old inappropriate white guy, you still don’t see such behaviors played for gags to mock the inappropriateness of it in modern times to such an extent.
The mockeries of that era are tamer than the reality even in light hearted comedy.
Shares, shares are never a bad gift. Until they are, but then they are a good gift.
Also gifting is social MADness, as gifts imply fortifying alliances, i gifted you, the others did not gift, we are allies in social warfare, now, like it or not. Its trying to enhance a social bond, meanwhile the best gift is a respect for the life time of a human being. Not many companies who respect that, unless its expensive as hell.
Last year we all got a £100 gift card that could be used at a number of retailers, plus a choice of two hampers - one containing alcohol, the other not (contained chocolate, popcorn etc. and yes some company branded items too).
Can't really complain, can see how gift cards go unappreciated though. Usually just top up my Amazon account balance and use it on everyday things or gifts for other people.
For me the best company gifts are small mundane things printed with company-specific inside jokes. Coffee mugs with quotes from the team, references to past projects or humorous incidents, that kind of thing. I'm not going to bring that stuff outside the office, but it does a lot to make me feel like a m member of the team in an "I was there" way.
It is common in India to gift gold and silver. They can be sold(most jewelers will take it for cash value) and it is something that would go up in value.
This year, cryptocurrency and NFTs are also making news as Diwali gifts.
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs shall be taxable in the hands of the recipient under Section 56 (2) of the Income-tax Act, 1961 if total value exceeds Rs.50,000 for the year.
When considering the cost of recruitment, training, and negative productivity associated with low morale it is mind-boggling that companies paying $60-100K+ for employees cannot or will not find 1% of that employee's total to keep them happy once a year.
To be honest a lot of the things company do don't even seem like profit maximization (since a Christmas gift could easily be argued that way), they just feel like constant short term thinking, medium to long term be damned. They know this is worse for them eventually, but yet they do it anyway since that 1% saved today across the whole company might be a big number.
A lot of it all comes back to poor management training and how they spend too much time maximizing the balance sheet rather than maximizing the workplace itself. Same reason why IT pros spent years trying to get two monitors regardless of the well known productivity gains.
We got "free pizzas" for something I don't even recall anymore this year at my company, sent to our home. Problem: It was a gift generalized to two whole regions, and of course I was in the "wrong one" for this. My pizza was sent at 4pm with no input from me, same with some colleagues, while we were working our asses off at the office studio recording on-demand content (we stayed up to 9:30pm). Needless to say I arrived to some cold soggy pizza at home.
A gift (pizza) of choice voucher would have been much better and less embarassing for leadership.
The worst "gift" I have received is crypto in some shitcoin the CEO was trying to hype. I just left it where it was. It was worthless at the time and it's worthless now.
People feel bad if the subtext is "We're cheap and we don't really value you." Or "We own you so here's something branded with our logo for you to display."
But non-cheap high-status gifts can make a positive difference. I know one company ordered an upscale Christmas hamper for everyone, with home delivery. It had a very good effect on morale and was much appreciated.
I don't want a holiday party, extraneous dinners, random gifts, or any kind of thing where the employer thinks "yeah, that will make them happy or improve morale". I just want the money. Take all that money and redistribute it back into my paycheck when you can. Nothing beats seeing extra money show up in your paycheck.
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.
One place advertised on StackOverflow jobs a while back. I followed to their job details. Under perks of the job they said free fruit, and that they used version control. That as a fat No then.
Is there a good gift recommendation website or service? Gifting is essential and so hard. I’m sure billions of dollars are left unspent yearly because people didn’t find a gift in time.
I love the tradition of gifting fancy fruit in Japan. Individual pieces of fruit which are objectively perfect and treated with an absurd amount of care and therefore priced at a silly level, but apparently also quite delicious.
> 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 always nice to get a new pair even if you already have lots of socks. If anybody asks me what I want as a gift, I tell them socks.
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.
Exactly. Maybe I'm somewhat color blind, but many times people have told me I'm wearing one dark blue and one black sock. So I've solved that by buying all identical socks. Then there's no issue.
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?
I get what you're saying but this is totally impracticable for some people. I mean, just thinking about myself, I work in a smart/casual environment and I wear a few different outfits over the week, I cannot allow myself the tenacity to not match my socks with the tone of my shirt.
Yeah I did that a few years back and life has become so much simpler. I can't believe I did not do it sooner.I still keep a few fancy pairs for fancy occasions but otherwise I have black socks, all the same; and white socks, all the same. Life is too short to match socks!
I buy them in bulk from a factory outlet nearby, so the price is reasonable given my income. Furthermore I find they can withstand the hilly and muddy half marathons that I run, while keeping my feet in good condition. I like to run after work, so by wearing these socks to work I can give myself one less thing to pack/change into. (I dislike the aesthetics of dark socks with shorts)
As I must wear smart clothes to work, and white socks with a suit is a fashion faux pas, this means I must wear smart boots to work. But this works for me as then I choose zip-up boots to save time doing laces.
I acknowledge this 'life hack' is a minor time and convenience saving with some drawbacks, and clearly won't work for everyone. But as a working father with two young children, this gives me a little more time to spend on myself, and a little more time with them.
Socks are great because they’re like a grocery item and yet aren’t.
I love groceries for my birthday and Christmas. Things I wouldn’t normally get like fancy sauces or beef jerky or special sodas. Because every long-term item I already have, don’t want, or you aren’t likely to get the correct one.
Because socks are short lived, they’re kind of like that without someone feeling bad about the gift. Nobody but my wife feels comfortable getting me groceries.
I'm too cheap to buy myself nice wool socks, but they're a great thing to ask for as a gift: the giver gets to feel like they've spent enough to make it a Real Gift, it's a small package, won't get broken if they mail it to me, etc.
Especially if they are good socks. I've stopped wearing the cheapie white cotton ones. I love the "Darned Tough" ones -- which I originally bought for hiking boots.
This must be regional/cultural because for my family and friends socks is the kiss-off gift of a person who doesn't give a damn about you but needs to buy you a gift.
Definitely regional/cultural because in my region, socks would be something given within family or close friends. I've never seen an acquaintance or a company give socks here. (Not that I would mind to receive some, good socks are a great gift, it's just that it's not done here).
Yeah. I would be weirded out if my company gave me socks. Cups and coats are more the norm. Well, cash has been the go to recently. Cash doesn't offend anyone.
Call me overly sensitive but I absolutely hate about 50% of the socks when I touch them. I can't really put it down on material or texture, but they just feel wrong. In my hand or on my feet.
Agree if it's good quality socks. I have a ton of socks. Wouldn't mind getting more. But has to be good quality, shitty ones would go directly to the donations bin.
Why flag this? It's 100% true. My last place gave us cheap baseball caps and light jackets with the company logo. I would never wear either of those unless it was on the clock and a required part of something like staffing a booth representing the company at a convention or something. And they weren't even good quality compny advertizing, they were junk.
Imagine giving your kids a presentvfor their birthday, and it's a pencil holder with your name on it. You don't give "worlds best dad" mugs to your kids.
A place before that, we had company xmas dinners, but the compny was smaller and the dinners were always at some actually very nice local place, no junky chains, and we got plain bonuses, and for my 10 year anniversary they gave me a nice Tag Heuyer watch.
The watch was only about $1,200 or so in value so it wasn't exactly a lot of money spread over 10 years, and something like a watch is easy to not be appreciated because people have different styles and might not like what you buy. But it was pretty neutral style and I'll tell you, it did NOT make me feel unappreciated. I never bothered wearing a watch before that, so I wasn't even a watch wearer, and it turns out that the self-winding feature of mine never seemed to work (even while being active and shaking it) and I can't be assed to bother winding it so it's never actually tellng the right time or date, and I can afford way more expensive watches in whatever exact style I want if I actually wanted a fancy status watch, but I've worn that thing every day since 2010 just as jewelry. It only means anything to me and my wife, but it made me feel very appreciated.
>that form allowed the company to then tax me on that ‘gift’ as income,
Wrong. There is no "form" needed for taxation, it is required by the IRS (in U.S.) and the company does not "tax" anyone. Employer gifts (other than de minimis amounts) are taxable compensation. (see IRS Publication 15-B for details).
A good employer will "gross up" cash gifts to cover the taxes.
But surely the embroidering of a company logo on it vastly reduces the value of the item, and this must be accounted for. If I have a new Cotopaxi or Arc'teryx item I can sell it on Facebook Marketplace for 90% of its MSRP. But if it has a fucking TurboTax Information Security Team logo on it I doubt I could get 25%. So I hope this is accounted for in the taxation.
My understanding is that logo'd swag is (usually) marketing expense, not taxable employee gift. If it's a non-cash-equiv gift under $100 in value, it's almost definitely not a taxable income item. If it's more than that, but has the logo on it...
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