I think you're being downvoted because you are somewhat making light of a horrible and brutish reality a great deal of the world's population has to endure so

I think you're being downvoted because you are somewhat making light of a horrible and brutish reality a great deal of the world's population has to endure so that developed nations can have widgets and experience growth. The reason that you can have such activities at work is because you are providing a service, software engineering, that has a high demand but is in short supply. Also, this usually isn't done with the goal of increasing productivity... it is done to maintain morale and make the company fun to work at so you dont leave. Not many experienced workers particularly enjoy these races, like employee of the month because it eventually becomes a way to abuse workers. In a former life, I was a claims rep for an auto insurance company. We had a competition to do the most claims per day at rhe lowest cost. It was terrible. We were mobile, so one component was driving through Los Angeles traffic to someone's car or body shop. It encouraged people to drive like maniacs, skip all their breaks, and to stiff the customer on auto claims, which was shortsighted because they lost customers from us stiffing them and evetually were sued because this competition essentially limited our breaks. These things almost always end in a race to the bottom once labor supply increases or demand for labor decreases. History is replete with horrific examples of competitions and quotas amongst low skilled. workers/slaves. In the oxymoronic(al) Congo Free State, colonial Belgium enacted a labor policy demanding a quota of rubber. If not met, workers, their wives, and their children would have their hands amputated. Article if you are interested :http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/35/181.html http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/35/181.html > That is why most sweatshops suck they aren't run by decent and this wouldn't work. It has little to do with the moral character of people running the sweatshops, although that does not absolve them from being pieces of shit. It has more to do with the economic system, its incentives, and consumers turning a blind eye to the origin of their products. The Stanford Prison experiment showed how normal people could turn into monsters given the right conditions.