I hate when companies use basically zero-value rewards like badges to incentivize very-real-valued work like giving people rides. All I can think of is the "fuc

I hate when companies use basically zero-value rewards like badges to incentivize very-real-valued work like giving people rides. All I can think of is the "fuck you, pay me" quote when I see this happening. My last company wanted us to comment our code thoroughly and write better repository readmes and documentation -- except they would never build in explicit time for these tasks. Being a manager, I was asked how can we get folks to do this in their own time. My response was "carrot or stick, take your pick, but it needs to have real value or cost or nobody will get behind it". They looked at me like I was crazy and proceeded to roll out a "kudos and accolades" program where people just verbally acknowledged each other for extra work like this in a public forum. You guessed it, behavior changed 0% and morale went down because all the engineers were like "do they think we are idiots?"