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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Ages ago when I did basic PC support we had a "attaboy" system.

The thing about it was nobody liked it because attaboys were random. They had nothing to do with doing a good job or anything, they showed up randomly.

Most of the time "attaboys" showed up for doing the absolute most basic thing that is part of the job. You do it every day... but randomly an "attaboy" shows up, because by the roll of the dice you helped a nice person, that's it.

In the meantime if you went the extra mile for someone, never would any sort of attaboy would show up. In fact you might even get complaints from those folks.

For the support team watching some manager trot out an "attaboy" for no apparent reason as if it was a merit type thing was kinda demoralizing.

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It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given to someone who they feel don't deserve it.

Personally I think it's risky to acknowledge these kind of things in front of a team for that reason unless it's better quantified. I've personally as well been in situations where

I've been outright resentful because the recognition of someone I knew was doing a bad job made it clear we could not expect recognition based on merits, and so what was the point of putting in the effort?

A while back I thought I had read something that indicated that merit based recognition was often a point of contention.

But random rewards, that were acknowledged to be random actually raised morale across the board, even among those who didn't get it.

The 'reasons' and so forth are often a big deal to people.

That wouldn't surprise me. A a merit based reward that feels like it wasn't justified and given for "political reasons" or what have you gives those who feel overlooked every reason to assume they don't stand a chance at all, and a reason to be angry. It's hard to be get angry or annoyed at random chance.

> It can be extremely demoralising for co-workers in all kinds of roles when they see that kind of recognition being given to someone who they feel don't deserve it.

This is why wages are secret. Everyone is convinced they deserve to be in the top half of earners.

In Norway all wages are viewable on a public website https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 It's pretty interesting.

Well, sort of. Taxable income is, but since Norway allows e.g debt interest payments for mortgages etc. to be offset against mortgage, taxable income can vary quite a bit even for people with the same exact income.

Businesses want wages to be secret and may even adopt policies that ban employees from discussing it, but in the U.S. employees' rights to discuss pay amongst themselves are protected under the NLRA.

https://www.insperity.com/blog/when-employees-discuss-wages/

Source? or is this a personal theory?

Personal theory!

I hope you landed on it independently via gut without thinking it through much, because this is one of the boilerplate reasons companies use to trick people into thinking that they'd be better off not knowing everyone's salaries, when in reality companies just want to keep it secret to have more power over salary negotiation.

Wages are tried to be kept secret by a company because a company wants to pay its employees as little as they can get away with.

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