[astorsnk]

>> > Pichai was asked, in a question that was highly rated by staffers on Google’s internal Dory system, why the company is “nickel-and-diming employees” by slashing travel and swag budgets at a time when “Google has record profits and huge cash reserves,” as it did coming out of the pandemic.

What is this weird obsession with 'swag' in tech companies? My company sends packs of it on a regular basis as a motivational tactic. It's generally not stuff I need, or want, it's wasteful, and there are much better ways the company could be spending that money (and the HR/marketing employees time). I've stopped adding my address to the list at this point when they ask for it.

[manimino]

There's an influential article from 2009 called "The Sodas Are No Longer Free": https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Small conveniences and tokens of appreciation really help with employee morale. Many people, even those who believe they cannot be bought so easily -- definitely can be swayed by this stuff.

[Xeoncross]

It doesn't take much to invest in relationships in a way that returns much larger dividends than the stock market can offer.

Offering to take someone out for a $20 lunch can move mountains.

[danaris]

Conversely, though, if you've already lost the trust of your employees—by overworking over the course of years, underpaying them, and generally treating them poorly—those small gestures suddenly seem very paltry and, in some cases, insulting. Because it makes it seem as if you think you can make up for all that abuse just with a few free lunches and free donuts in the conference room.

[Xeoncross]

I was speaking about you personally. I've never known a company to take out a single person for a $20 lunch.

Fill the void for your friend when their own company is letting them down.

[ryandrake]

I think the main point of the Steve Blank article was about the people who are actually not swayed by these tokens. The mere removal of a perk could cause someone who doesn't even use the perk, and is happy with his job, to wake up and think about leaving. The removal itself is a signal to start looking, regardless of whether you care about the actual thing being removed.

[whywhywhywhy]

It’s not that you’re swayed. It’s that if the company is tightening the purse on something as insignificant as soda then alarm bells should ring.

Even if you’re cost cutting there should be a million places to make huge savings than the few $ of free drinks an employee goes through a month.

[VikingCoder]

"Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time. We believe it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish with respect to benefits that can save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity." -Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 2004

It's kind of nice to get a T-Shirt with a Team Logo on it when you join a team. Especially if you see other people on that team already have that T-Shirt.

It's kind of nice to celebrate a major accomplishment with a coffee cup that has some cool art on it.

It's kind of nice to see what interests other people have by noting the stickers on their laptops.

It's kind of nice to get a surprise nice new backpack when you wouldn't normally bother to take care of yourself by getting one.

It's kind of nice, as a manager, to send some token appreciation to your team when you see them working hard to solve a problem.

It's kind of nice.

Some people kind of like it. If you read the book "Love Languages," you'll see that different people feel appreciated through different ways. Some like token gifts. Some like words of appreciation. It's worth learning how someone else likes to feel appreciated, because it costs you very little to express your appreciation in a way that they particularly enjoy.

[htrp]

"Expect us to get bored of running google and go on to do dumb rich people things with the money you employees made us" -- Probably Page and Brin sometime in 2014

[crazygringo]

To be clear, it's not marketing swag which is what people usually think of when they think of "swag" that's given to potential customers.

It's more like custom team t-shirts, custom figurines, custom bobbleheads, and whatnot. Special rare acrylic desk pieces for every patent your team has generated. Stuff that says "hey, we're a team and we've been through some stuff, like important launches and inventions that we're proud of, and these are symbolic reminders of that".

Similarly, traveling -- whether to a conference or a team-building prototyping retreat -- is a way to build bonds and trust with your coworkers, in a way that just doesn't happen in the regular 9-5 in the office or (worse yet) over Zoom.

When you work in a 100,000+ person company, it's really, really easy to feel depressingly lost and just a cog in the machine. It's both the little mementos and the big travel experiences that help us remember the path we've been on and get to know the people we work with as human beings.

So it really does feel like nickel-and-diming when these are some of the most effective long-term investments you can make in a team.

[serial_dev]

I also don't understand the "swag obsession" (well, maybe except for the Rust Ferris, Go Gopher and Dart Dash plushies) but neutering conferences and travelling would make me frustrated.

Travelling to conferences is a huge learning opportunity: you can upskill by having fun with people all over the world for two-three days.

If I worked for a FAANG company where I am supposed to be or become an expert of a technology, and they don't want to pay me for one or two conferences per year, I'd also feel frustrated.

[captainbland]

Yeah, I'm not with a FAANG but I'm having an experience where we seem to have replaced all learning opportunities with horrible online presentation style courses. It's like they've taken as many bad practices about providing a learning experience and automated them.

Monotonous speaker? Check. Visuals that don't relate well to the content? Check. Wall of text slides? Check. Lack of opportunity to ask questions? Check. Asocial learning environment? Check. Bad pacing? Check. Prescriptive teaching style which doesn't give learners an opportunity to broaden their understanding? Check. Uncompelling or just nonexistent narrative? Check. Badly targeted subject matter? In spades.

[htrp]

What happens when you start hiring execs from the rest of the F500 companies to do your "Learning and Development"

[Victerius]

Let's be real. Most of the traveling to conferences that Google employees do is just an excuse to get out of work and be paid to do so. Pichai is right to tighten the purse strings.

[yndoendo]

Traveling to conferences allows a person to get OUT of the same old day-in-day , while also allowing to network. This can help fight burn out. Changing up your environment, even temporary, can lead to better problem solving, often during vacation, because you remove the tunnel vision.

Would like to see number of psychology and socially studies around it.

My opinion of why Meta-verse will fail is because you are using their technology in the same environment. A bad environment is a bad environment no mater how expensive the VR/AR tech your using. And also lacks body language communication.

[ultrasaurus]

For a small company, networking can be the first time people hear of the company. For a company like Google, I wonder how often networking translates instead into chances for other companies to hire away their people (without really helping much vice-versa, everyone knows about Google's hiring process)

No matter how much that actually happens, I wouldn't be shocked if it gets echoed and magnified internally as a problem.

[aetch]

The benefits you described are the same as a vacation.

[zinclozenge]

Except the employee is paid for travel, transportation, food, and lodging.

A while back when I was working at a company that had significant spending in GCP, we'd get free tickets to Next. My director basically said that there wasn't any expectation for the employees he was sending to learn or network, it was basically a semi-vacation. Kind of makes sense honestly.

[piva00]

Those employees are making order of magnitudes of their salary in revenue. Google is having record profits. Why exactly should Pichai tighten the purse strings? For the shareholders? What, exactly, have those shareholders done to create this revenue (except for the ones that are employees and get golden handcuffs shares)?

[s1artibartfast]

Let's be real again, most employees don't touch anything that contributes to revenue.

[piva00]

Then why are they employed? If they perform any function that helps to materialise that revenue they are indirectly responsible for it.

Unsure why the HN crowd is so hyper-focused on direct attribution. As a worker in a corporation you are part of a machine, this machine uses you as a part of it and the machine as a whole generates revenue. You might not be the main piston firing and generating power but you are still part of the mechanism. If someone hired you even though you won't be creating any value it's not your problem that the machine is dysfunctional.

[s1artibartfast]

I just think it is a funny juxtaposition when workers shout about the "Value or revenue they created" on one hand and then claim and then claim individual value creation doesn't matter on the other hand.

The whole question of where the value comes from and "who deserves it" is central to the argument, and there are a lot of positions with different axioms. I hadn't heard that it is deserved simply for being a warm body in a chair independent of any productivity, so that's a new one.

The same could be said of shareholders:

Why are employees so focused on direct attribution? As a shareholder you are part of the machine, ect. If you aren't creating any value, its not your problem the machine is dysfunctional...

[unity1001]

> Unsure why the HN crowd is so hyper-focused on direct attribution.

Not only the HN crowd, but increasingly everyone, everywhere are so hyper-focused on direct attribution because...

> As a worker in a corporation you are part of a machine

...our work life, less, our actual society should not be made into a soulless machine for the profit of absentee shareholders.

[colinmhayes]

People aren't paid the revenue they create. In fact the revenue you create is nothing but an upper limit to how much you can be paid. You get paid what your company believes your replacement cost is. Google believes the market is cooling and therefore replacement cost is decreasing, so pay goes down.

[SoftTalker]

The shareholders own the company, bottom line.

[piva00]

Yeah, and that answers nothing about my question: what work have they done to create revenue?

I don't care that they own the company, that's meaningless for my question...

[vintermann]

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

[unity1001]

> Let's be real. Most of the traveling to conferences that Google employees do is just an excuse to get out of work and be paid to do so

Absolutely ok. In the world of work, that has been the case for a century or so. That's why those are considered perks. Because that's what they are. Everyone knows it. You just call it 'conference travel'.

[canadianwriter]

I guess this might be hard to believe, but lots of people DO like it. It just depends on what kind of person you are.

Eg. lots of people love those forced team building things.

Different people like different things. For a large company though, it's hard to distinguish who wants what, so they default to just sending it to everyone.

[jezzamon]

I just opt out, or more often don't opt-in for a lot of the swag things that come my way if they're not something I'm interested in

[michaelt]

I've seen statistics saying an employer can get a bigger morale/retention boost from giving people a $500 monitor than $500 cash.

[mattbrewsbytes]

This makes sense, you'd be staring at the monitor for hours a day but likely would spend the $500 on <something> and forget about it or more likely it would be direct deposited and just end up washing in with whatever monthly purchases you normally make.

[pyuser583]

If my employer gave me $500, I’d put it in savings. If I spent it on a monitor, my wife would be pissed.

[ultrasaurus]

Taxes are a non-trivial consideration. Google employees in California have an almost 50% marginal tax rate plus I imagine Google gets better prices than retail monitors (plus someone else maintains it for you).

So they'd need to give you ~+$1000 in salary/bonus instead of a $500 monitor to get the same monitor for personal use.

[gamblor956]

In order to have a marginal rate of 50% you would need to be making over $625k. In order to have a marginal rate of "almost" 50% you wuld need to be making over $312k.

And if you're getting paid that much by a GAMMA its because California's economy, and the laws that gave rise to that economy, give you the market power to demand that sort of a salary. Because you're sure as sh3t not getting paid that much to do the same job in Kansas.

[solardev]

There's probably some division doing Swagalytics and measuring the ROI on forced employee advertising. Time for swagblock Origin, I guess.

[jimbob45]

This has always been my intuition as well. The employer gets free advertising and the employee gets free stuff. Ideally, the employee gets a bit extra to offer to friends and family for bonus marketing.

Maybe Google thinks they don’t have to market anymore?

[browningstreet]

My big company stopped sending swag/care packages to employees shortly before they started pressuring everyone on RTO. Before that RTO campaign there was a lot of language shared about employee satisfaction and "taking care of each other", etc.

They also acknowledge the employee NPS score has gone down but have used a lot of corporate speak to "speak to" that score without initiating any responses to it. I'm pretty sure they, and probably like many others, think the lower ENPS scores and RTO are the only correlation for employee attitudes right now.

So no, the care packages aren't really important, but they're usually commensurate with other endeavors from the top that may not sit well. As another example, the company has done nothing to acknowledge nor address rising attrition... which started before the economy turned (I fully acknowledge they may be happy with it). But the attrition -- even welcomed -- usually has a negative impact on morale overall.

[endtime]

I don't care about t-shirts, but the best backpack I've ever owned was given to me when I worked at Google. I probably never would have bought a $200 hackpack on my own, but it's great.

[pirate787]

Yeah I've used a small Google duffel bag for 12 years. The key is that the swag is higher quality and not landfill-bound junk.

[techdragon]

I’ve got a Google “exclusive swag” branded messenger bag, it’s a lovely timbuk2 hand made from excellent materials. It’s been my bag of choice for 7 years, only just started to show signs of wear despite travelling with it extensively.

I’ve never worked at Google, I won it at a charity auction for PyLadies at a Python conference and not only was it for a good cause but worth every dollar. I don’t think I’ve had a better bit of swag. Its even been a humorous conversation started at times when people assume I either work for or used to work for Google because I have the bag, particularly at software conferences.

Some swag is definitely higher quality and I think Google put some serious money behind their bag selection at least for the years between your bag and mine.

[dekhn]

I kept the backpack google gave me as a noogler for probably 6-7 years and most of my T-shirts are Google gifts. Those gifts made me feel valued as an employee and also acted as free advertising (I no longer wear those shirts in public, as I don't want to advertise for them).

[sdenton4]

I have /two/ best-ever backpacks that were team swag.

[tiborsaas]

> I probably never would have bought a $200 hackpack on my own

That's weird being on Google salary. It just resonates with me because I'm getting one soon, on a fraction of that pay :)

[crazygringo]

A lot of people are paying off student loans, and then they're saving up to buy a house, which requires a down payment, and then they're paying a mortgage, and then they're paying for day care on top of it. $200 for a backpack is a luxury, when it's easy to find perfectly decent backpacks for $30-50.

And it's not just about a single $200 backpack. Many times people feel the need to either be the kind of person who responsibly saves money, or you just buy whatever you want all the time, and it can be hard to be in-between. If you're dropping $200 on a backpack without thinking about it, you're probably spending $1,000+/mo. on things you don't really need... and there goes a big chunk of money.

Personally, spending $200 on a backpack sounds like insanity to me. But I've also had the similar experience where someone got me a $200 something as a gift and it turned out to be amazing, and I would have bought it if I had known, but often you don't even know whether something is worth it until you've tried out owning it for a month or two. Nine times out of ten, the $200 item isn't worth it compared to the $50 version. So getting it as a gift and discovering you love it is just really, really nice.

[tiborsaas]

I think software engineers can afford luxury, sooner or later. But I get that saving is more important for some people.

I can only speak for myself, but I've looked for months to find something I really like so it's not an impulse buy and I'm not dropping 1k/mo on random things.

You have amazing people around you, it's great when people show you the good stuff :)

[endtime]

As crazygringo guessed, I have a mortgage...and a few kids, and my wife is a SAHM. I live in a HCOL area. Google compensated me well and I could have spent $200 on a backpack if I specifically wanted it, but I don't spend $200 just on a whim.

[luch]

Because people like free stuff.

More seriously, it's a way to build a "clique" organically, same as for sports teams. It's a non mandatory uniform in a way.

[dayvid]

There's a large number of tech employees who only wear swag clothing and supplement with Uniqlo when required.

[entitledtes]

The number of friends and colleagues that have chosen companies based on SWAG and free food is *insane*

In my mind it’s pure entitlement and another example of the staggering divide between the tech world and the real world. It makes me very sad.

[whatshisface]

Would it be less entitled to choose companies on the basis of salary?

[switchers]

I feel like that choice is at least more relatable, no matter what industry you're from.

[soulofmischief]

Yes, considering that's more and more common as you go down the economic ladder.

[whatshisface]

If the employee doesn't get it, it doesn't go to another employee, it goes to the shareholders. Words like "entitlement" are just the wrong concepts for that situation. "Those greedy Googlers, putting themselves before the shareholder's returns" just doesn't have a ring to it.

In fact, because of supply and demand, if Google competes less for labor, the pay at non-tech companies will go down. This hurts people lower down the ladder.

[soulofmischief]

At least some companies recognize there's little difference between the amount of value provided by a top engineer vs, say, a law firm. I think the gap needs to be closed even further, I plan to double my rates again over the next 1-2 years.

[agentwiggles]

I'm a sucker for a free shirt, hat, or jacket. Any other swag (like posters, pens, notepads, etc) is fine I guess, but I could take it or leave it.

[astorsnk]

Really? The clothes are my least favourite of the swag items. Send me it without the company logo and it's a great gift. But if I have to walk around looking like I'm in uniform then I'd rather buy my own.

[8note]

A hat is fine, but the ideal merch is socks

[Maursault]

> I'm a sucker for a free shirt, hat, or jacket.

When I lived near a large metro area, I liked to hit second hand stores, mostly thrift stores, to pick up really cheap T-shirts. When there's a lot of school districts concentrated in one area, there is often a nice selection of older style logos of local HS teams, which is what I was after. I was fully grown by my junior year, so I can still wear kids' clothes. Anyone that noticed my flare assumed I was local and from that area, so it was a cheap way to assimilate and be left alone.

[eli_gottlieb]

>What is this weird obsession with 'swag' in tech companies?

Cheap substitute for pay rises or benefits improvements.

[lm28469]

> What is this weird obsession with 'swag' in tech companies? My company sends packs of it on a regular basis as a motivational tactic.

idk how to say it without it sounding bad but lots of developers are manchildren and treating them like manchildren seem to work very well

[tayo42]

I feel like it's so wasteful. I have so much crap collecting dust. A denim jacket with the logo. A bright silver logo that actually shines. A jersey. Idk who is picking this either. Idk what to even do with it?

[malandrew]

Every time I get asked to give my size for a piece of swag, I tell them that the only “swag” I want with the company’s name on it as shares. Everything else is worthless and wasteful.

[perfectstorm]

not all swags are of same quality. some are much higher quality than others. i often wear my old employer's hoodie that i got on my first day 9 years ago. it's still going strong and comfy af. same goes for a Yeti tumbler. it's not a huge thing but definitely something to look forward to for some people.