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Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

Well the reality of industrial designers is quite interesting. I have a good friend who is doing this (his own small studio) and as someone with a software background the processes are mind boggling. The politics involved are amazing. Weeks of debating color choices. Back and forth between departments (including the realization at a couple of month in that production costs would be through the roof...something mentioned on slidset 1, week 1) etc. etc.

It was also eye opening for my naive world view that awards are simply bought. A red dot award is basically pay sum x and you are guaranteed to "win".

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I used to work for a mortgage broker, and there was a "Best Mortgage Broker of 200x Award" that basically rotated each year around the participating companies.

I strongly suspect that many awards in the legal industry work in this way also.

Every single industry that exists gives itself awards. Usually one or two are actually legit and prestigious, but there are often dozens (or hundreds) more of decreasing relevance that exist purely for marketing purposes, and many of those are pay to play (usually indirectly though, i.e., buy ad space or a booth from the awarding org and they’ll give you an award commensurate with your purchase.)

Even the legitimate ones will only have a few entrants, and if someone didn't win they may add a special category that you can be the only entrant for!

Surely I'm naive, but I realized just a few years ago that all awards of the kind "best place to work 2022" and such are all paid for, nobody "wins" a real competition. Your workplace pays the ranking company and is advised on how to improve some made up stats and after a while it "wins" an "award" within the small subset of companies that paid for that service.

By "realized this" I really mean "I was shown this reality by the people in charge of paying for the service". I guess I should have know better, but my cynicism failed me in this instance!

How would you even grade such a thing? I can't think of any objective way to grade best place to work. I work where we get free soda - I've been here for 10 years and still haven't used it, so for me this doesn't make it great. I have a sit-stand desk, I'm one of the few people who use the buttons to switch every day, so for me this is great, but for most it is a muh thing. There are ping-pong tables in some offices. There are bike racks and showers in some. to me the best part of going to the office is the people - how do you rate that when what people like in each other is different.

They tend to mention generic things like "great culture", "career plans", "managers who listen", "transparency".

You are absolutely right, it's all fluffy and intangible. I mean, it's all obviously good, and also every company says this about themselves. Whoever heard of a company advertising "toxic culture", "you'll never get a promotion", and "nobody knows anything about the company's health until it's bankrupt"?

The way it works is a questionnaire is created by the rating agency, meant to cover a wide degree of workplace factors. The do tend to cover the ones that have some academic rigor, like questions about autonomy or career growth, beyond the fluffy ones. Weighting of these factors hasn't ever been transparent to me as an employee. And it does seem to be pay-to-play to be considered, but there is an attempt at objectivity. But for your example, if 90% of the employees say they enjoy coming to work everyday, or they would recommend working to in that workplace to a colleague at a different firm, then independent of the factors enabled such opinions, that company did something right, modulo people just giving bullshit answers.

The impossibility to measure such a thing, at least within the modest means of the publication issuing the award, should be the clue telling you something is wrong.

I'm not sure I realized it before hearing about the payments myself though.

In the AV industry this is the norm at conferences and conventions.

Gartner and their "magic quadrants" and all that crap is also, at least in part, pay-for-play, no?

There is a limit to how low you can put the bar to these paid awards though.

There used to be a heart foundation tick on every second item of food in Australia. It was a paid award with a low bar. The award died when they started putting the tick on boxes of McDonald's chicken nuggets. Everyone immediately caught on that it was bullshit after that and the tick was seen as a laughing stock. The tick is no longer a thing at all since no one wanted their products to be seen in the same category as a McNugget.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2015-12-11/heart-tick-ret...

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