[throwaway66666]

Damn! My current CEO wants to do the same. But he wants people to vote across teams. EG, backend engineer nominates machine learning researcher. Machine learning nominates HR. For a $1000 bonus, or a new ipad previous generation. Reasoning is that the manager cannot approve because that would reward favoritism, so random people nominating random people it is. Bad ideas coming from a good place I guess, but people are going to feel demoralized for sure in the end.

[asark]

It's surprisingly easy to accidentally be designing a game and not realize it. And designing games is hard. And one can closely approximate the percentage of the population that's put so much as one thought toward how to do so—the limits of the practice, the balance, the ways your rules can be abused or encourage behavior you hadn't anticipated—ever, as zero. That when someone starts to recognize what they're accidentally doing they tend to give up, or abandon any effort to do it well, or ditch it and go with some familiar, proven pattern instead even if it sucks and doesn't fit the situation, makes sense. It's hard, and very few people are good at it.

It's easier to recognize that you're playing one than that you're making one, it seems.

[TimTheTinker]

Obligatory: https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

[Spooky23]

These schemes always suck. After a major datacenter migration and other big transformation projects, that place I worked at setup an awards committee and had unbiased judges rate nominations. I was the only technical reviewer... the rest were customer success manager types, hr, even accounting.

End of the day, the most passionately written nominations were for people in IT support, mostly for doing shit they weren’t supposed to do. The “customer champion” replaced toner quickly at our expense, (it was supposed to be paid for by the customer for reasons). The other big one, that came with cash, was given to someone who was a notorious master of getting other people to do their work.

I felt bad for the organizers, as they really intended to do a good thing.

[jnwatson]

Early on in a recently IPO'd security company, HR thought it would be great to allow anyone in the company to give an award to anyone else. It was points worth about $50. Eventually, word got out that nobody was paying attention to the awards going out, and it was an automated system, so the points would be applied automatically.

You can imagine what happened. My favorite was two folks that were related to each other awarded the "Nepotism Award" to each other.