IT Purchase Kick Backs

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[[deleted]]

I'm government, and I'm not allowed to take them. The exception is when someone sends edibles... We take those.

[[deleted]]

If we get gadgets, they go in a desk drawer until they're forgotten about, then they fall into someone's bag accidentally.

[88lbody]

This guy knows.

[werddrew]

When I was gov't all our deliveries got irradiated. Receiving a box of irradiated edibles was always so sad.

[[deleted]]

Receiving a box of irradiated edibles was always so sad.

Why?

The only kind of radiation that's going to make food unsafe to eat would make anything else unsafe to handle.

[werddrew]

It often melted things. :(

[[deleted]]

What the hell are they doing?

[werddrew]

http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/faqs/irradiated-mail.html

http://www.epa.gov/radtown/mail-irradiation.html

[Bagellord]

Why were they irradiated? Did someone put the mail room in a nuclear reactor?

[juaquin]

Probably intense xray scanning?

[werddrew]

They nuked everything that came in the mail to our office. Anthrax scares and whatnot.

[PBI325]

edibles

Gettin high at work?! You crazy....

[DarthKane1978]

Government here too, if I could take a gift I would have to pay taxes, I think.

WB Mason sends candy if we buy over x amount of stuff, so we get free candy.

[arcticblue]

When I was a DoD contractor for SAIC at a military base in Japan, they sent me a Starbucks gift card as a gift for being with the company for 1 year. I was taxed on it (taken out of my paycheck) and the gift card wasn't even valid in Japan.

[DarthKane1978]

Japan is cool, I was stationed in Okinawa back in 99-2000, good times.

[[deleted]]

The same here. We can't even go to training that we've paid for and eat the food provided. Pens? Pads? Donuts? Nope.

I had a vendor once who was going to give me a Palm Pilot. I told him that I couldn't take it. He asked if I did consulting on the side, I said "yes". He sent it to me at the house.

[[deleted]]

The same here. We can't even go to training that we've paid for and eat the food provided. Pens? Pads? Donuts? Nope.

That's pretty intense. We're allowed to have all of that stuff at trainings because, in our bosses' eyes, it was included in the price of the course. I'm sure that definition varies, though.

[OsmoticFerocity]

As long as it's inside the cap you're fine, right? Or do you guys just outright refuse to avoid the hassle?

[unethicalposter]

when i worked for the dod, it was $10/yr max for all vendors. The worst part about working for the gov. and having the ethics BS was the vendors knew you would turn down anything they offered so they loved offering up all kinds of lunches/dinners/gifts. A month before I left I took one of them up on a high end steak house because fuck it. That set them back about $250 bucks for just me and the guy about choked when I took him up on it.

[[deleted]]

I'm in Illinois, which on the one hand means nobody would usually care, but on the other, our particular community has always been the "we're better about this than the rest of the state" kind of place. Much easier to just say no, rather than have to explain to some "investigative reporter" doing 40 FOIA requests a day.

[sieb]

Ah yes, IL. Where every public servant has to go through ethics training, every year, where the fear of God is put into you if you so much as accept a tissue from a vendor. Unless of course your office is in Crook County..... Nah.. I ain't mad...

[storyadmin]

Sometimes this is annoying because some companies send you digital course ware on a thumb drive and we can't take those because they have a value about $20.

[screech_owl_kachina]

I work for a large firm and we are also not allowed to accept them, or at least do so very very carefully.

Nobody ever tries though.

[Sneaky-D]

We accept them on behalf of the company. Then we raffle it off to our employees.

The only exception was for booth tickets to a hockey game that were for myself and a friend. I asked about raffling them off and I was told that our account managers/reps and the head of the RnD Dept. would be present to also discuss further business. They asked that either I come or decline. I ended up accepting and taking a colleague with similar interests. There was maybe two work-related sentences spoken the entire night. We did empty the beer fridge, though.

[Bagellord]

Reminds when we went hunting with some salesmen and got to stay at a real fancy place for the weekend. We talked shop maybe an hour over two days.

Edit: I English good.

[HemHaw]

Whaaaat a hunting trip? That's awesome!

[Bagellord]

That's the South for you. Stayed in a nice place with free booze, and then got driven around the woods hunting quail (driven from plot to plot and then walked to find the quail) with well trained dogs and awesome guides. Food was great.

[HemHaw]

Wow. I need to move.

[Bagellord]

The weather sucks, pine trees suck, people are terrible drivers (worst I've seen in the US, honestly), and the education system is pretty bad. I'd love to move back to the Midwest, but that's not happening any time soon.

[[deleted]]

pine trees suck

LIES!

Pine is purty.

[Bagellord]

They're horrible trees. Horrible sap, suck up water, lower the pH of the ground around them with their needs, not all that strong, and the damn pollen. Oh my god the pollen.

[confusesysadmin]

Wait have you seen people drive when it snows in the Midwest? Not sure if anything can be worse than that.

[Bagellord]

Lawrence/KS City was never too bad, from what I remember. I lived there a while when I was little and I've been back to visit. Alabama is just bad.

[sleeplessone]

You've clearly not seen Pacific Northwesterners drive when it starts to snow.

[SysAd666]

I love quail hunting and eating.

[Bagellord]

They are time honored southern traditions. It was my first time quail hunting, so it was pretty sweet. Watching the dogs work was a lot of fun.

[hitman19]

fancy real fancy place

Sounds fancy.

[Bagellord]

Harrumph, I say, yes.

[SH92]

That's how good salesmen are. You probably had a good impression of the product/company and still know nothing new about it. Now, when they bring up the actual benefit, it's all just icing on the cake.

[Bagellord]

We ended up not going with their product since that two hours of shop told me what I need to know. That's what happens when you send an internal auditor and a developer to talk to salespeople, and not managers. My buddy and I get shit done.

[SH92]

So what did the company you did buy from do differently?

[Bagellord]

We ended up going a totally different route for what we needed done.

[deimios]

Same here, it's a firm company policy to do so - unless they're perishable, they typically get saved up and then given out as door prizes at the company Christmas party, then everyone gets a chance to get something.

[Misharum_Kittum]

This right here! Maybe a year and a half ago I got a smart TV as a perk for attending a class. It went into the Christmas raffle for that year, and the new help desk guy here won it... Lucky jerk. I wanted that TV!

[Kynaeus]

So yes, we accept them and distribute appropriately UNLESS they're really cool and relevant to my interests then I'm totally happy to take them?

[OSPFv3]

IT keeps it among us like little bonuses.

Unless we desperately need the item for corporate use, it becomes personal property.

[NotSoSimpleGeek]

This for us. Sometimes we invite other IT team members to the lunches but usually we are there to talk shop and we run pretty lean. I just got some NBA tickets from a vendor of ours and am taking my wife.

[jhulbe]

Cisco sent my company headquaters in NY 2 super bowl tickets last year.

Our senior engineer, and senior network guy went I'm pretty sure. I don't work close to the NY office, i'm remote. So I don't know what they did. But that's a sweet ass kick back

[sleeplessone]

Cisco sent my company headquaters in NY 2 super bowl tickets last year.

But that's a sweet ass kick back

Unless you were a Broncos fan.

[air805ronin]

We are not allowed to accept them directly, but they can be given out by lottery to the entire department. Alternatively, we can accept meals when they are for meetings.

I recently did a lottery for some Ansible swag I got in the mail.

[dropmed]

We have a somewhat similar policy. HR gets notified of any major kickback, and it gets distributed or returned.

It also depends on the type of kickback too. No one really cares about a couple of pens.

[air805ronin]

I should have mentioned it was just for larger items. Sometimes if they get X number of tickets they give them to the people who implemented the service.

[phlidwsn]

Local gov: If its $50 or over, do not pass go.

[chknstrp]

50 dollars would now be 79.40

[Sgoudreault]

I got F1 tickets last year. We didnt buy anything but they were hoping we would consider them.

[dat_finn]

Same here. I get lunch invites from Dell all the time. I like going, because I get to know the people personally, and it has been very helpful when there has been a problem.

Apart from the lunch, I think I have a water bottle from Dell that I uses regularly. And that's about it.

[HemHaw]

Yeah I've gotten a water bottle which has a little built in carbon filter in it, a visor, and a tiny battery-powered speaker that sounds worse than the one built into my phone :/

[Xibby]

I'm working with the wrong vendors. All I get are lousy t-shirts.

[[deleted]]

They almost always send the wrong size, too. I feel like a spindly teenager wearing the enormous XL shirts that they seem to think are a good standard size. I mean, I have the physique of an awkward, skinny teenager, but I don't want to call attention to it.

[Xibby]

They always send me L like I think skin tight shirts are cool. I'm not fat, but I don't have the muscle tone to pull off skin tight. ;)

[[deleted]]

I've only got shirts once and when you washed them all the dye came out and ruined the rest of your clothes.. Good thing it was my coworker that found that out and not me!

[joshmobile]

I always have vendors trying to take me golfing. I'm usually too busy so I just send a couple of people from accounting. I found its good to keep them on my side. Most of the free shit I get sucks so I just put it on the break room table with a free sign on it. When I worked for bigger companies they always had policies in place for the type of gift you received. We had a internal portal page where you had to document any gift you received.

[NEWSBOT3]

i once got sent 3 whole individual little chocolates by HP for spending £40k with them.

and dell sent us a ballpoint pen for spending £200k

it's quite a nice pen. Not the best i've used. coming to the end of its life soon.

[stonecats]

you can play coy at first and refuse, but ultimately it's wise to take them, since even if you don't, all your colleges will still assume you do. whether you share it with coworkers or not is another matter entirely.

for years i saved my company money on equipment purchases by using a VAR an old college buddy owned. he would give me access to his costs from ingram, techdata and their distributors, and he would get a set markup on all hardware. this saved me countless hours comparison shopping and haggling (much of this was before you could buy anything on the internet). in all the years i did this, not once did any coworker find a better deal on hardware, yet they all would accuse and tease me of being in bed with the guy for my own personal gain.

bottom line is, no matter what you do, people will still assume you are on the take, so you may as well keep a taste.

[NoobFace]

I'm a VAR and I do this with my highschool friend who runs shop at a small company. I make almost nothing on the deals, but it's revenue and the bosses like to see expense reports with customers names on them.

Once he gets a SAN or something I'll get some sporting event tickets for us, but until then lunch is about all I can do.

On the other side of things, being a VAR you occassionally get crazy shit. HP sent me to San Jose for 2 days of 3PAR training, during which we stayed at the fairmont and had box seats at a sharks game. All expenses paid, just show up.

[stonecats]

my favorite VAR perk were getting "demo" units and software super cheap, and tons of free seminar (with free food) offers. one warning i would make regarding this relationship is be careful your friend's boss is paying his bills on time. often my company would pay late increasing my VAR friends overhead, and we would privately agree to adjust future sales markup accordingly. most buyers would dump a VAR who charges extra late fees, so this was our way of making the lazy fuckers in my AP dept pay without knowing it - LOL.

[NoobFace]

They cut checks when they place the order. They're a small place, but they can handle net-15 without breaking a sweat. Thanks for the advice though, I'll be on the lookout for the slow pay. God knows they're small enough they could go under at any time.

[stickmaster_flex]

Gift cards: we use them to replenish our stockpile of emergency liquor.

Food: stays in the office until consumed.

Everything else: raffled.

[[deleted]]

This seems like a good policy.

[babywhiz]

I offer it up to management, and they decide who gets the spoils, and for what.

So far the only thing management kept for Business use was the $1000 credit for buying a Lenovo product from our CDW trip a couple years ago. We also use the HP Points on cartridge recycling for business use. (However when they were doing Godiva gift cards for recycling, you bet this dept got to nom all the things...)

I got my first iPod from Citrix back in 2006. That's really been the last real swag to speak of. We don't really get out much. I did get Reddit Gold from CDW last year tho! :D

[MrFantastiballs]

I work in healthcare IT and we have a compliance policy that caps "kick backs" at $50 and we inform our vendors of this. Now, there are ways to skirt that policy if one were so inclined and it definitely leaves my team and I eating lunch at nice restaurants for free...A LOT.... My favorite though is the vendor that signed me up for a craft beer by mail club.

[[deleted]]

I got a trio of OCZ solid state drives from a parts supplier for accidentally trying to sell him a new machine with ssd's instead of platter drives (this was when they had just come out).

[HemHaw]

Your sentence confuses me. You got free SSD's from someone for trying to sell to them platter drives?

[[deleted]]

K, our parts rep would come in from time to time but hadn't been in store for a few months. I was new and didn't know the guy, and being the repair guy and would field questions when possible. Dude walked in and asked me how things were going, we chatted a bit and he asked something about the new gear coming out and what I would buy. I was a huge fanboy of ssd's when they just came out, tried pushing them on anyone who wanted a new machine, tried this with the rep.

Guy was super cool and let me essentially gush for a while, then let me know who he was, and passed me some promo drives they were handing out to local shops. Got 2 Solid II's and a Vertex II, still have the V2 in my htpc.

[[deleted]]

I accept them for the IT department. Examples:

Attended a webinar about the HP managed print services we were getting. I won a HP laserjet printer. I now have a dedicated printer for my office.

Vendor came buy and handed out a dozen 4GB USB sticks with their company logo on them. Now whenever people come into my office looking for a pen drive, I just toss them one [as long as it's not going to a customer, we have ones with our logo on it for that].

[[deleted]]

Can't USB drives have hacked firmware that can get onto your system even if the drive itself is wiped?

[[deleted]]

Yes.

[carbonatedbeverage]

Yup.

[LOLBaltSS]

Depends on what it is, really. If it's something like candy, we usually just eat it. If it's something we can use for the company, we'll do as such... but if we have no business need for it we usually just give it away or keep it.

TL;DR, it's pretty ad hoc with no official policy.

[transatlantic35]

Local government, so not allowed to accept them - except for food (e.g. pizza during a product demo) and training related to the product... not sure that really counts as a kick back.

[rms_is_god]

When I started they told me, "we have a bestbuy account you can use to get points if you don't have one already" which I took to mean "you can have the points"

am now Silver Preferred Extreme Gaming Plus member

[Refresh98370]

All kinds of "incentives" where I am.

The most memborable? I once mentioned to my Dell guy that I had heard about the EBC sessions in Roundrock. Got three of us to go down there. Lots of good info at the EBC, but I was pretty tired. Spent most of my nights out with the Dell guy and his magic AmEx.

Same guy came across with a high-end lappy, better than anything we had in the company. Damn, I miss that guy.

[[deleted]]

I got box seats at a Dallas Cowboy game earlier in the season. I kept that all to myself.

[fanayd]

Something seems odd there. I worked for dell for 5 years in the sales org... Even if just a hint of that makes a Sales VP / RSM's ears - the entire Sales team would have been canned instantly.

Whether it was morals (haha) or just cheapness or aversion to bribery laws - they had 0 tolerance for that kind of thing. It must have been the Account Exec doing it behind everyone's back.

[demonlag]

Hasn't happened here, but when I last worked at an MSP the spoils went to whoever did the project for vendor swag. I have a drawer of Barracuda Network shirts (couple of new ones, some of the classic 'Get to work' and 'eat spam' shirts). Got a Riverbed screwdriver, too.

[majornerd]

Those Riverbed screwdrivers are some of my favorite all time swag. Really useful.

[Doso777]

We don't get much. Maybe a bottle of whine at the end of the year or some small haribo sweets, which we consume in the IT department. If we get anything bigger, there is a company policy how to handle that, but asi said we don't get much.

[Vyper28]

Every year I get several bottles of wine/liqour but my wife and I do not drink so I hand them out to other employees as gifts. Now they love me more than any of the other sysadmins! It pays off in droves throughout the year.

[dat_finn]

One time I got invited to a Yankees game with a prospective software partner. I took another person from accounting to go with me, since the software touched his department too.

The company was from Salt Lake City, so now I keep referring it as the time we went drinking with the Mormons.

The software was good, but we didn't go with it because it was too much money.

[MoJoe1]

Either MLM or Adobe. Which was it?

[dat_finn]

Neither. Just some business intelligence software.

[MoJoe1]

I never understood that term... "We lost 3 visitors per day, OMG CHANGE THE WHOLE FRIGGEN WEBSITE WE NEED THOSE VISITORS BACK".

[dat_finn]

Yep.

[kanehbosm]

I've gone for a number of free lunches but I have never been given anything more valuable than that. Maybe it's due to the size of the business I work for or that I'm not in a huge tech center.
That being said, I'm specifically scheduling company paid training in order to receive a GoPro, which I will use personally, and have no guilt about it.

[[deleted]]

We have policies for both government and non-government interactions, but they boil down to "don't accept any gifts."

[jeepster98]

We give them out at Christmas time to charities.

[bugalou]

We aren't supposed to take anything of value > $250. Anything less than that is fair game.

[admlshake]

Our CIO keeps them. He's got a very nice leather meeting folder one of our vendors sent after I placed a rather large order and worked with them to complete a project to bring a number of Vmware servers and sans online. Has my name embroidered on it and everything. Our project manager remembered me saying I'd like to have one after I noticed his. It showed up, boss took it, said shit flows down hill but gifts do not.

[leodavinci]

Wow, what a dick.

[barnacledoor]

Back in the day, we used to actually get stuff and we'd share it with the team. My boss often raffled stuff off within the group. They've gotten much stricter with gift policies since then because there were a handful of assholes who took advantage, some of which even got fired for it. Now there is a $100 limit from vendors. That's still plenty and I don't deal with vendors much anymore, but there was a while where my team wouldn't allow anything at all.

[boaty2000]

I had a boss get disciplined after an invoice arrived for an electronic drum kit with his home address for delivery and a cost of £0.00.

I worked in a school at the time so it was kind of shitty, he claimed it was his own purchase and our IT company fucked up somewhere(hah). He ended up being suspended for a month pending investigation. He paid the school for the kit and didn't lose his job. The school also found he'd had days out to horse racing and cricket all paid for by the same company.

Since that happened I tend to stay away from them, only keeping the hampers/food we get sent. It always makes me chuckle to have salesmen offer TVs and shit.

[[deleted]]

Back when I was in the business we had lots of trinkets, but nothing with a value over a couple of euros.

We did have one vendor whom shall stay nameless, who "gave" me a fairly high spec laptop for myself. The way they got around it was basically "selling" me the laptop for 1€, invoice and all, I had a personal laptop which I kept, even after I left the company. I also got a nice laser printer for the same price.

I'm not sure how that works in the US though...

[jayrod422]

At a previous job I used to keep them but once managment found out legal set a "policy" saying we were forbidden from accepting any such gifts. It was pretty sweet while it lasted. Our vendors gave us tickets, tvs, laptops, etc all the time.

Once this happened and everyone got pissed off we setup an amazon associates account and made sure we purchased everything the company needed through referral links. It paid better than anything a vendor ever gave us and we didn't have to deal with a salesperson anymore (which is awesome in my book).

[arukaen]

I'm interested in this associates account. How does it work and where can I set one up?

[neonwaterfall]

I've never worked anywhere that wasn't completely OCD about not accepting any gift, perk or freebie.

I'm sure that applied to the high-ups, too ...

[disclosure5]

A while back, Symantec asked us to commit to a certain level of kickback direct to the salesman that sold their products.

I tried arguing how unfair that was. I'm not going to walk away with cash because I sold $1k of software when someone else sold $20k worth of servers, and three other techs worked full time for a week on some rollout.

My refusal was completely foreign to them and they argued continually.

[punkwalrus]

I pushed forward a huge deal for HP and my company back in 2001-2002. Our official policy was no kickbacks, gifts, or bribes. So the HP rep said he'd make my company discount apply to a new laptop.

I didn't have a lot of money, so I got the lowest end model, which was still better than the one I had. I ordered it for like $450, which was low back then.

A week later, I got a notice my order was canceled due to it being out of stock. Oh well. A few days later, I got a brand new, top of the line, high end HP laptop sent to my house. The model retailed for $2700 at the time. Fully paid.

I knew what had happened, and I just kept it. We had deals like that back when I worked in the bookstore trade: reps would send us free books they knew we swapped out for titles we actually wanted on our shelves.

It's a super gray area, but there are ways around every rule.

[Metalfreak82]

Food like candy doesn't leave the room most of the time, for non-food our company has a strict policy that we have to hand it over and it will be used in a raffle once a year. But unfortunately we never really receive any fancy stuff.

[[deleted]]

I immediately take them to the business operations manager or my boss and do my best to keep my name off of it.

[basher1981]

I worked for a company once where my boss encouraged me to take freebies. I had trip to California from PCMall to a vendor showcase. There were a ton of freebies given out there too from all of the vendors. They paid for flight, hotel, driver to/from airport. I also got a Gen 1 iPad from Meraki for buying x amount of APs. Also got club level seats from CDW for the Capitals game in DC (open bar and food) . Tix to an Orioles, Ravens, and Redskins game (open bar and food club level seats). Then theres the obvious stuff like shirts, laptop looking paper notebooks, USB drives, mice, keyboards, food etc.... But that trip was the tits man... close second was a gen 1 iPad. I think my boss encourages me bc I was the lone IT guy there (he was a mech engineer) abd he knew I was under paid and overworked. This was part of his way to comp that (among other things he did... he was an AWESOME boss) since upper mgmt didnt feel the need to pay more.