Damn! My current CEO wants to do the same. But he wants people to vote across teams. EG, backend engineer nominates machine learning researcher. Machine learning nominates HR. For a $1000 bonus, or a new ipad previous generation. Reasoning is that the manager cannot approve because that would reward favoritism, so random people nominating random people it is. Bad ideas coming from a good place I guess, but people are going to feel demoralized for sure in the end.

It's surprisingly easy to accidentally be designing a game and not realize it. And designing games is hard. And one can closely approximate the percentage of the population that's put so much as one thought toward how to do so—the limits of the practice, the balance, the ways your rules can be abused or encourage behavior you hadn't anticipated—ever, as zero. That when someone starts to recognize what they're accidentally doing they tend to give up, or abandon any effort to do it well, or ditch it and go with some familiar, proven pattern instead even if it sucks and doesn't fit the situation, makes sense. It's hard, and very few people are good at it.

It's easier to recognize that you're playing one than that you're making one, it seems.

Obligatory: https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

These schemes always suck. After a major datacenter migration and other big transformation projects, that place I worked at setup an awards committee and had unbiased judges rate nominations. I was the only technical reviewer... the rest were customer success manager types, hr, even accounting.

End of the day, the most passionately written nominations were for people in IT support, mostly for doing shit they weren’t supposed to do. The “customer champion” replaced toner quickly at our expense, (it was supposed to be paid for by the customer for reasons). The other big one, that came with cash, was given to someone who was a notorious master of getting other people to do their work.

I felt bad for the organizers, as they really intended to do a good thing.

Early on in a recently IPO'd security company, HR thought it would be great to allow anyone in the company to give an award to anyone else. It was points worth about $50. Eventually, word got out that nobody was paying attention to the awards going out, and it was an automated system, so the points would be applied automatically.

You can imagine what happened. My favorite was two folks that were related to each other awarded the "Nepotism Award" to each other.

A challenge coin! Are people who tend to run companies total children, or do they think that those of us working for them are children?

I think it's more a cultural thing. Not everyone is financially motivated, they want the recognition. A challenge coin is a tool for doing that. It's in a similar vein to a medal.

It might have been misjudged in this instance however, but they're a thing in military circles so I can imagine how it seemed like a good idea.

Tbh I'd have been really pleased, but I can appreciate that's not universal.

If you are in the military, you can use challenge coins to get yourself free drinks. The idea is that when everyone is at a bar, the guy or gal with the challenge coin from the highest ranking officer never has to pay for rounds of drinks.

I've never seen a civilian use one. We don't spend much time in bars, and the feeling I get is that if I did try to whip one out in the presence of uniformed personnel -- a challenge that I would almost certainly win, given who this coin was from -- that would be a tremendous faux pas.

So at best, this is the sort of object that carries some real meaning in a very particular social context among a very particular set of people, but that meaning doesn't carry over to anywhere else. Like baseball or Pokemon cards, I suppose. How would you feel about your boss switching out Christmas bonuses for packs of World of Warcraft cards?

How long are challenge coins "valid"? If someone had a challenge coin from Eisenhower (not sure those exist, let's pretend they do) would that person essentially always win, forever?

From my weird lay understanding, it's somewhat similar to childhood games where people would try to determine who had the "coolest" Pogs [1]. There are multiple "axes" that determines which challenge coin "wins": highest rank associated, most interesting challenge involved (some coins represent specific deployments or activities or actions), perceived rarity (there only three of the coins ever made), etc. To some extent the challenge coins serve what medals/badges always have: an excuse to tell a cool story, maybe brag about something. Similarly the "free alcohol" rules follow the same general principles of "that's a really cool story, I owe you a beer for it", just reduced to simple evocative coin form.

Which "axes" are in play, and who "wins" (or ties, a lot of the rule variations I've heard are set up to optimize towards ties; the most common challenge is just whether or not the other person has a challenge coin of any sort, not necessarily trying to figure out which wins if both people have coins on them) varies a lot between groups.

Also, challenge coins have seeped into some parts of lay culture, especially bar culture (given that alcohol has always been the big bet, it shouldn't be a surprise). For instance, the liqueur Fernet has its own challenge coins that bartenders tend to challenge each other for free shots of Fernet. (Bars try to keep one in reach of the bar at all times in case the bar is challenged, and the number of people that have them that have them that aren't themselves bartenders is supposedly kept quite rare.) https://talesofthecocktail.com/history/part-family-behind-sc...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_coin

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_caps_(game)

Interesting, I love Fernet. Now I just have to figure out how to get a coin...

I'm inclined to believe that it's the story and tradition, less the coin itself.

Incidentally, Howard Tayler's Unofficial Anecdotal History of Challenge Coins is excellent.

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/assets/img/uploads/UAHCC/UA...

I honestly don’t know. The guy whose coin I have is now retired.

Public can be difficult to award people without running afoul of ethics rules. You're suprisingly constrained on what, and to what extent, you can award with congressionally appropriated funds. Sometimes people just eschew the whole idea because it's so difficult.

It’s a big thing among some Infosec people who get a rise out of the cyber warrior nonsense.

One guy I know has enough of these things you’d think he was a navy seal, mostly from training sessions. His actual job is monk-like copying/summarizing of NIST documents and CVEs.

Well, it worked for toilet-training our daughter. "Pogs" (colorful cardboard disks) were in at the time, used here as rewards.

Yes.

It's always like that. Such a common trick. Something in humans is eager to prove themselves to the hierarchy.

Ouch. A slap in the face to you and they might as well have burnt that $150 (Likely $300 dollars before taxes) since it had the total opposite effect.

> Likely $300 dollars before taxes

The net bonus was probably $150 before tax; it's a rare employer that pays the tax for you.

Net by definition means after certain adjustments have been taken out (like taxes). Regardless $75/$150/$300 in any case, it's a slap in the face. A slap that you need to pay taxes on.

> Theoretically, the challenge coin would be worth a lifetime of free drinks in bars frequented by military members. Or so I’m told. I don’t drink.

This may be frowned upon in the military, but you could rent the coin out to people?

The free drinks are because the coin impresses people enough that they volunteer to buy you drinks, it's not an official voucher.

Besides the overtime everything else would be part of the job you were being paid to do. As a federal employee depending on your job classification you were paid either 1.5x your salary or 1.5x the salary of a GS-10 Step 1 adjusted for your locality for the overtime. Most likely in private industry you would be a salaried employee and not have received overtime pay or a bonus which exceeds what you received in overtime pay.

Also challenge coins, especially given to a civilian employee, are considered an honor in the DoD. Your post gives the impression of a great sense of entitlement on your part.

Maybe they are to uniformed members of the military. I've never once seen a civilian use, display, carry, or talk about a challenge coin. They typically get thrown in the back of a desk drawer and forgotten about. We literally have no use for them whatsoever. They don't even make good paperweights.

I have a stack of fourteen of them. Most of them I was given for spending thirty minutes giving some random officer a tour of the lab. They're not exactly hard to get.

I’d say most “gun nuts” at least know what they are. They’re not that obscure.

I still don't have an email address.