Clothing is the most universal & oldest manner in which most people express themselves. To tie your company to your identity so explicitly is unhealthy, and swag signals that to everyone within eyesight. My disdain most applies to every fashion with blocky company branding.
There is a way to do swag tastefully. I love MSFT's patent cubes and laptop stickers, it stays limited to professional life. Useful electronic gifts (tablets, headphones) are great, because the branding is an organic part of the product you buy. Even clothing can work, if the branding is undetectable. (Themed around tech, but not the company).
No, don't give me a 300$ Patagonia jacket or hiking bag with massive unremovable branding. I want to go climb my target mountain on it, and I do not want 'company name' plastered over some of my fondest memories. NO ONE has ever looked at a person wearing 'company brand' t-shirt and thought : "Gee, they must be smart, they work for big-name company'. This is further exacerbated by the fact that big name FANG+ companies are effectively in the business of advertisement and attention exploitation.
As long as tech people keep wearing terribly fitted company swag for everyday activities, I can't sympathize with their complains about tech careers perceived negatively in the dating market. We brought this upon ourselves.
I'd much rather wear a logo of a company I choose to spend a third of my day supporting than that of a media or clothing franchise. If branding is unhealthy then surely the one chosen is healthier than the one prescribed.
Ok, then that's your answer. The argument for "none of the above" is because some people (which I'd include myself) would say that all branding is unhealthy, and that there is no "relative merit" to any of it.
I admittedly went a little overboard with the tone of my comment.
I bet most people do not think as much about company swag. Why rain on your parade right ?
I do think tech generally has an unhealthy problem of over-identifying with their company and that there is a certain insular monoculture resulting from it.
At the end of the day, tech is situated within the greater social context around it. Any one who has their ears to the ground will know the most common complaints by young people in tech and how it ties into society's perception of young men in tech.
I deeply respect anyone does not care about how society perceives them and can march on un-affected. At the same time, I see propagation of incorrect myths and resulting insecurities within younger tech workers. If you are an average human that's susceptible to all the common markers of status around them, then some counter to big-tech koolaid might be in order.
You're right about the creepy over-branding that tech companies often indulge in. But it feels like now, four years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal implicated Facebook, three years after HBO's Silicon Valley ended, two years into the Great Resignation, and at the precipice of an impending recession, people are not looking at tech companies in the same starry-eyed way they did a decade ago.
tbh I think this is not true in tech. More like laptop stickers and luxury Twitter bios. Sometimes I wonder if my coworkers know they have a physical form
> Clothes are part of self-expression and play a role in a lot of social dynamics.
... for you.
Many are more utilitarian with clothes. Clean, comfortable, and suitable for the activity/environment are most important. Color, pattern, design is more of a minimum threshold filter (e.g not going to wear something offensive)
It's similar to food. Some people "eat" because calories are required and they don't care much being that, while others "dine" because they want something more out of it than generic calories.
Its a signal that i don't give a shit and enjoy clothes i don't have to pay for.
If that marks me as "uncool" to certain people, that seems like an added benefit, as i can't imagine i would get along well with anyone who judges people on such a shallow metric.
My standard test to see if this is true: "what if someone gets you this <slightly different style from what you commonly wear> piece of clothing?" It doesn't even need to be completely opposite, just different enough to be noticeable.
If you can see that the person is pondering about the answer, it tells you right away that they do care.
There is a lot tied up in "slightly". Like a burlap shirt is a slightly different style, but i wouldn't wear it because that sounds really uncomfortable.
Similarly i might not care generally, but there is a line where i start to. I wouldn't wear a shirt with a picture of dead babies on it. Does that mean i care? Maybe technically, but in context i dont really think it shows i care in the way that was implied originally.
I really don't mean to be tricky about it. I mean really small things; like getting a t-shirt in the same normal fabric and adding a breast pocket [0]. Or if the person only uses neutral colors, would they wear something like [1] if they found it on their wardrobe?
Vast majority of people could not possibly care less about these differences between their clothes. You're hugely over-estimating how many people in tech care about what they wear.
> How can it be that so many people say they "don't care" about what they wear, yet their overall style is so uniform?
That kind of goes in with "not caring". I agree with your overall thrust here - clothing is a social signal whether or not you want it to be. Even the lack of someone signaling is in itself a signal. It legitimately took me a very long while to figure this out.
For me - comfort is all that matters, even in public, until I get into a social situation. Then it's simply dressing to "the average" as to not stick out. I used to describe this as not caring, but it definitely is caring in my own way. Plenty of other folks dress specifically to stand out, so the opposite is certainly a positive action as well.
In the end, me simply wearing pretty much the same dumpy thing everyday sort of became a personal brand in of itself.
That said, I'd be perfectly happy with everyday uniforms assuming they are comfortable. It would save me mental effort of having to imagine what other folks will be wearing in a given situation.
They aren't "not caring" in a sense they don't spend a minute of their time choosing clothes. It's not a binary choice.
Not caring in that context means minimizing effort, time spend and external impact on their lives, while maximizing comfort. Buying what everyone else buys maximizes that value.
I would say I don't care about clothes, but had to make some choices when I got cats. I used to wear primarily black clothes, but cat fur is extremely visible and hard to get off them, so now I just buy diverse colors, while still not caring whether the green is too bright and goes with beige or whatever.
Is there something wrong with saying you don't care about the logo on a shirt, but might care about other things?
Like i might not care generally, but part of not caring is that i don't really want to draw undue attention to the item in question. E.g. I probably wouldn't wear a shirt that was neon green sequins or something similarly ostentatious. That said, im not going to care about a pocket one way or another.
I suppose you could say not caring is a spectrum not a binary.
I wear swag based entirely on the comfort factor. I have around 6-8 T-shirts all emblazoned from some tech company or other (plus one car company) that I wear because they’re vastly more comfortable than the 50 others I could have chosen.
None happen to be emblazoned with my company logo (and we make swag), because the better swag we give out are hoodies and exercise pants.
(Small shoutout to Cloudability here, who gave away some of the most comfortable swag I have. I’ve likely worn their shirts (2) almost 100 days in total.)
I love my branded stuff. Most of my coworkers do too. It's nice and it looks good. I actually get compliments on a specific jacket that I have a couple of times per month from others saying they wished their company would do it (not developers saying this, of course). YMMV I guess? I don't think I would continue to work somewhere if I hated them as much as you seem to hate every possible employer.
I hate it too, and not just because it's making my body a free billboard that advertizes the company. It's because I don't want more clothes, period. I think it's fair to assume that anyone who works at a tech company - certainly in the dev department - is not going to be experiencing any personal shortage of clothing. Unless the point is to provide a corporate uniform, why give people more day-to-day stuff that they clearly already have enough of, seeing as they survived perfectly fine up until getting that job? It's profligate and gross.
And that holds true for pretty much every form of company swag, to be honest. Is there any product the average upper middle class professional is seriously lacking in their personal life that would be cost-effective for an employer to provide in a swag bag? Realistically, no. It's all just a massive waste.
A lot of donated clothing is still wasted, and for the stuff that eventually gets shipped to developing countries, some argue that it hollows out the local clothing industry[0]. Better to not produce unwanted clothes in the first place.
>>NO ONE has ever looked at a person wearing 'company brand' t-shirt and thought : "Gee, they must be smart, they work for big-name company'.
Depending on the company, this goes a long way. I remember when I was working at a big 5 tech company and the swag definitely helped in bars and restaurants with the ladies. I definitely took advantage of it. Not that I relied on it, but it made things simpler. Don't underestimate the power of a clearly employees only shirt, jacket or backpack in conversations.
Also ask the finance boys if those Patagonias with firm name didn't work wonders for them back in the day before branding was removed.
>NO ONE has ever looked at a person wearing 'company brand' t-shirt and thought : "Gee, they must be smart, they work for big-name company'.
I wear my FAANG tshirt out to bars all the time and it gets me mad pussy. Maybe that's because they think I'm loaded but it works better than a Rolex. shrug
It's true some swag has endeared me to companies, like my awesome, color-changing Weather Underground mug. But the vast, vast majority is low-quality garbage that I wish never existed, and certainly wish never become my burden to dispose of.
I say, aim for a tiny amount of high-quality swag. Or hell, just give people branded gift cards!
I won a trip to a conference in Las Vegas. I didn't want to go but it was made clear that I couldn't turn it down. Looking around and just seeing the oceans of garbage being made to hand out to people who didn't want or need it on top of everything else that horrifies me about Las Vegas put me in a really awful mood.
FYI- I can't currently wear t-shirts since I've been either pregnant or nursing for the last 3 years. T-shirts aren't compatible with pregnant/nursing bodies, so I just decline them or immediately give them away when I receive them. Zip-ups are actually the most compatible, of all the clothing swag, and my partner can attest to how frequently I steal his swaggy zip-ups. :)
Generally I think that if there is going to be swag given away, people should get to opt in to swag or such swag should be wholly biodegradable.
Agreed. If it looks like swag then I'm not bringing it home. If it looks like a shirt someone would pay for then now you've got something more people will wear.
My kid had a birthday party at a local trampoline park and they gave him a t-shirt. I wasn't expecting much, but it was really cool. It had a piece of original art on the front, followed by the name of the park underneath. Even with the name of the business, it didn't look like an advertisement because the name of the business doesn't sound like a business. Everyone around here knows exactly what it is, but if we went somewhere else it just looks like a fun t-shirt from the kids section at a department store. They perfectly nailed the balance between serving the business and the customer at the same time.
I used to accept the free stuff given away at conventions and conferences, but after realizing most goes in the trash, I just say no now. What I like to think to myself when they are handing free swag out now is, "Here, you put this in the trash for me."
No, this is actually the worst to me. No, I will not actively wear your SWAG like it's special. I actually find it sad that so many employees actively wear company SWAG. It's even worse when the employees purchase it.
If anyone is interested in leveling up their swag at the expense of time, going directly to tailors in Asia (I use Vietnam) can massively increase the quality, while providing the same expense and delivering more money to those who make your clothes.
For the same price as a sweater with a logo on it, I got bespoke wool pea coats made for everyone on my team (made to fit to their measurements), with custom printed lining and an embroidered subtle logo on it. Final cost with shipping was about $70pp. Tailor made clothes look so much better and it makes people want to wear them more. The cost was time - it's about a 2mo turnaround and you'll be looking at about 8 hrs of spend on your end coordinating things.
I started by visiting Hoi An. It's a tailoring town that's kinda also a tourist destination. Highly rec visiting as the food is good and you can get your entire wardrobe custom made in a couple days. After doing it a couple times I made friends with a tailor out there. I just contact her on facebook messenger and tell her what fabrics / what designs I want. You can go as custom as you want with it.
As a counterpoint, I flat out refuse to buy anything from any company that gives out plastic destined-to-spend-1000-years-in-landfill crap. Spend your marketing budget funding open source project maintainers on the other hand, and I will listen.
So you aren't buying anything from any company ever? I'm pretty sure there isn't a single company that has been alive for a year and hasn't distributed some branded pens or other crappy items like that.
I have a very nice yeti cup company from a certain company. Use it daily. The company had a super serious data breach so we didn't use them and it makes me think about it from time to time.
I usually don't like conference swag because most of the stuff is honestly useless anyways. We all have probably thousands of pens, pencils and blocks of paper by now. Not to mention all the stickers that get thrown away immediately.
The only time I was jealous of other conference attendees was when they ran out of a multi-USB adapter set that was given out as branded swag.
Weeks of looking online later I finally found the manufacturer: van maehlen and its allroundo sets. [1]
I instantly bought it and it's since been always in my backpack. The only other swag I still have and actively use is a rubberducky and a teensy ;)
I'd rather they just not make swag and put that money into their employees so they can be happier and stick around longer. The best services I've used have the same faces when I need something. They build better projects that stay true to the core objectives.
The key with t-shirts is quality. Spend the extra $5 a piece for screen printed American Apparel, and I'll wear that thing every day until it has holes. But random cheap shirts go straight to the trash.
I hate most swag. The only good swag is tiny stuff like a sticker or a carabiner or something. Maybe a shirt. But... I probably don't like your tech enough to wear it.
Stickers are purely decorative, low environmental footprint, and unobtrusive mentally.
Although the permanence of sticking makes them a bit less collectible, and I'd like it something like Velcro patches got popular.
Headphones? No. Absolutely not. I have Anker bluetooth earbuds. I do not want your crap without active noise cancellation risking my hearing if I actually try to use it.
Keychain flashlight? No. I do not want crap to carry around. It's dim and non-rechargable.
Water bottles? Better be self cleaning with UV light and vacuum insulated.
Pens? I rarely use them. When I do it's for less than 30 seconds. Cheap ballpoints can dry up even if not used, so it's not like I want to have a bunch randomly lying around "just in case" that won't work in a month when I actually want one.
I have a pile of at like 6 jackets worn once or never that I got as gifts. Lots of random multitools and crap like that. I. Do. Not. Want. It.
I don't even make much money. If I was making 40k+ a year I would want them even less.
I will not bog down my life with little bits of 20 years outdated low tech junk. Especially not from a tech company.
I can maybe see mugs. But... only because sometimes I'm lazy about washing the dishes, and having more makes it easier to go longer in between....
I am not a brand ambassador or a living billboard and some random company is not part of my identity, which is why I dislike wearing t-shirts with company logos.
A few of the Goodwills in San Francisco are full of company swag and it's kind of bizarre. Like hey, I could buy this Uber-branded Patagonia jacket having never worked there. Also weird in a way to subject less fortunate folks to wear company branded clothing, but I guess they don't have to buy it.
On the other hand, it's also common (and somewhat strange) to see homeless in SF wearing company branded clothing that was donated.
The AWS re:Invent conference had great and easy-to-get swag when it first started. Almost every booth was giving away some type of swag with value comparable to a T-shirt. All you had to do was stop by the booth, and they'd gift you something, no questions asked. 10 years later, you go to any company's booth and they're making you jump through hoops, fill in forms, do quizzes and exercises and contests to get a T-shirt. Many booths are not offering anything. The only freebies are stickers and trinkets worth a few pennies. Even Amazon's own AWS hoodie, which they give out at every re:Invent conference, has decreased in quality, greatly. I remember one particular year, the hoodie was so thin and cheap that I gave it to a homeless person on the streets of Vegas. Over the course of many years at re:Invent, companies realized that the ROI on swag was extremely low, perhaps even negative.
Two words to express my opinion: OPT OUT. Nothing chaps my ass like getting a box of landfill shit I didn’t ask for in the mail. Now I have to try to figure out how to deal with it in an environmentally responsible way.
I’m haunted by the endless piles of free XL-sized shirts I’ve gotten in my lifetime, because if you just order them big enough they’ll “fit” everybody, right?
Or maybe I’ll replace the nice things that I’ve purchased, specifically to avoid buying the made-for-landfill nick nacks that I’d have to discard and replace every year. Great design choice on that cheap aluminum alloy bottle opener. Surely it will hold up to repeated cranks against steel bottle caps without marring… Perhaps I should retire the weighty iron one that my buddy the blacksmith made for me that will probably outlive the liquid distribution method that necessitated its existence. I think not.
As an extremely lazy person, I quite like the t-shirts, as they reduce the amount of clothes shopping I have to do. Also sometimes people get quite creative with them; I prefer the ones that aren't really identifiable as swag by the general public (which I suppose makes them... not conventional swag, really?)
I had the opportunity to get a very high quality leather bomber jacket for my division at my company. The thing probably cost the company over $1k. I decided not to take it since I probably would’ve never worn it and didn’t want to waste such a beautiful thing.
I bet your manager and/or peers looked at you like you were a blasphemer. I don’t know how it became normal to want to advertise for an employer. Good for you, I would have done the same.
Might be nice if people could read comment threads like this one and realize that there is no "right" answer to many questions, only individual opinions that live on a spectrum of individual opinions.
My swag lesson: everyone likes bottle openers! But international travellers can't take pointy/blady things back in hand luggage. I had a lot of those things left over after that show.
I certainly don't, and I would like them even less if multiple companies were sticking them in my hand at a trade show. I think generally the tech industry could do with less focus on alcohol. I don't drink, but I used to be okay with going to socialize with coworkers at a happy hour. But it doesn't take very long to tire of leadership talking about inclusivity, and then only planning alcohol-focused team events, when they all know I'm not into it. But more to the point: a lot of harmful stuff happens to your team when everyone is drunk. It's hard to work with someone who threw up in your Uber the night before. I don't know why some companies keep rolling those dice.
Agreed! I stopped drinking at work event years ago in order to minimize the risk of bad stuff happening, and then stopped drinking entirely due to pregnancy/nursing, so I've no idea what I'd do with a bottle opener.
One of the nice things about remote-friendly companies these days is less pressure to be around alcohol-infused events.
Wait, what? I drink sometimes, I don’t mind events with drinking, but I would never think to drink the point of throwing up at a work event and would absolutely disapprove of anyone who does. Rather than asking people to filter companies based on the most noxious behavior from the most irresponsible team member, why not enforce a minimum bar for acceptable behavior? It’s not like puking is a job duty.
And how many different companies should I work at before I conclude that the industry in general could use a change and that it's not me that needs to make changes?
> You clearly have some issues with people who drink to excess. That's your prerogative, so maybe you should work with different people.
Wtf? That's definitely not on the poster. I don't have a problem with an (optional) work happy hour, but its still work and a base level of professionalism is expected. People drinking to excess at work events is a major red flag for the company.
I have no use for one. Haven't opened a bottle in a few years now. And maybe have done so at most 30 times throughout my life. (Don't drink soda and rarely drink alcohol.)
Most of the alcohol these days has pull tabs or twist tops. There was a time when the companies tried to pretend that old bottles with old caps were somehow better but I think that urge has faded.
Not true in the Netherlands, which is why the average dutch person can open a bottle of beer with various objects, such as a lighter, keys, anything small and stiff, tabletop or teeth.
Do they really? I'd think everyone who drinks already has a couple. I've got two at all times (one that's part of a multitool, and a separate titanium one from a Kickstarter).
Yeah, this reminds me of one of the swag items at KubeCon a few years ago. Someone was giving out DevOps Magic 8 Balls. My first thought: “oh that’s fun!” My second thought: “wait this is annoying to get back home on the flight.”
I consult on swag design, and its easy to stand out because most swag is trash.
I have gotten some good swag over the years, but the best was a set of sturdy metal pen/stylus/flashlight combo pens from a company who sells corporate document storage services I have not yet had a need for.
What makes swag good? It's like gift giving: it's all about actually giving something someone wants. People like getting clothes. People love getting mugs. The Yeti mugs are nice, but what I really want is a ceramic square bottom mug. It tickles something deep in my lizard brain.
While working for a large investment bank, I attended a presentation by a video game company. I well remember the huge crowd of people afterwards surrounding a table with goodies; very, very well-compensated Wall Street people pushing and shoving to get a free video game.
To be honest, if the swag isn't related to what the company does, i'd be more interested in the manufacturer of the swag rather than the company that ordered it.
I love android and hate most swag for the same reason: I'm not a fan of lots of single purpose analog items around(Including clothes, save a few band and book shirts I really like), and Android does a great job of replacing gazillions of other items and being almost a general purpose computer.
Clothing is the most universal & oldest manner in which most people express themselves. To tie your company to your identity so explicitly is unhealthy, and swag signals that to everyone within eyesight. My disdain most applies to every fashion with blocky company branding.
There is a way to do swag tastefully. I love MSFT's patent cubes and laptop stickers, it stays limited to professional life. Useful electronic gifts (tablets, headphones) are great, because the branding is an organic part of the product you buy. Even clothing can work, if the branding is undetectable. (Themed around tech, but not the company).
No, don't give me a 300$ Patagonia jacket or hiking bag with massive unremovable branding. I want to go climb my target mountain on it, and I do not want 'company name' plastered over some of my fondest memories. NO ONE has ever looked at a person wearing 'company brand' t-shirt and thought : "Gee, they must be smart, they work for big-name company'. This is further exacerbated by the fact that big name FANG+ companies are effectively in the business of advertisement and attention exploitation.
As long as tech people keep wearing terribly fitted company swag for everyday activities, I can't sympathize with their complains about tech careers perceived negatively in the dating market. We brought this upon ourselves.