I see this constantly in my industry. Mid-level managers (and above) are always trying to max travel miles on company expense. If I ran my own company (dream!), I would never allow employees to reap "travel miles" from travel paid for by the company. It is ridiculous.
The company isn’t using the travel miles. You’re basically saying, “I’ll take away a small perk from people who are forced to travel.” It’s not like they’re stealing from the company, the company sent them somewhere else and they just got a tiny bonus for it.
The proper thing to so is stop those managers who travel too much.
The issue is that it creates an incentive to maximize the cost of travel as the employee directly get miles based on the price.
I see this all the time with employees/managers booking a 1000$ flight that will give them 10k miles instead of a perfectly fine 400$ flight that would only give them 4k miles.
Every travel system I have worked with at [big corps] required the cost of my flight to be within a specific range of the average for that route. I wouldn’t have been able to take a $1k if a $400 was available without an override by the person whose budget it was coming from.
Most of them we couldn’t pay on our own card either, so no points from that, but I’m not aware of any way to block someone from adding their frequent flyer number to a booked ticket.
Mine makes us take the "least cost logical" option, but it only looks at flights that match your current search (airport, day, time window). So if you have a specific flight you want, it's usually trivial to concoct a search where that flight is the lowest cost in a window.
I travel quite a bit for work, e.g. the last 30 days I've been home for 4 while travelling to 6 cities spread over 4 countries and 5 time zones, and that's not how I understood what they are saying at all. If you want a perk for travelling, these points based systems are the most Kafkaesque way imaginable to give so little for it.
And often it is like they are stealing from the company. I remember seeing on LinkedIn a ${seniorExec} of a place I worked at posting how they are a million miler first class traveler on airline X but they'll be switching to airline Y exclusively from now on because X's point system isn't as good anymore. The moral of the post was supposed to be something about treating your customers right for loyalty or something, what I took away from it is this person is throwing away my entire trip travel budget on individual flights because they are selecting how to get the best kickback. Meanwhile I'm trying to get approval to chop 4 hours off what should be an 8 hour door to door flight by spending $120 more than the recommended flight to avoid an extra hop and layover because that just makes no $ sense from a hours perspective.
The best perk I ever got for travel was an actual pay increase for it, many times larger than any hotel or flights points program has ever been worth to me. If you want to give your travelling employees a perk then that is a real way to do it, not a few brand specific dollars for each part of the trip you have to sign up for.
Are you going to ask your employees for their 2% cashback if you reimburse them for a purchase they made with their credit card too?
At the end of the day, it seems more practical to focus on ensuring that they picked the appropriate value product/service. If they picked appropriately, does it matter if the company gives them employee a kickback? Sure, the employee will then be incentivized to get the most expensive thing they can, but this was already the case because it's not their money and they want the best thing they can get away with.
It is surprising that business travel still exists. I would've thought that due to improvements in video calling tech during covid, the need for travel to customer site would decline precipitously.
Foraging was so good we only had to work like 2h a day. We had to start farming simply because the population growth from foraging was exponential and we have ran out of easy-to-forage ecosystems.
We've also ran out of freedom at that point. We used to simply walk away from bullies, but that was no longer possible, with the farm and all.
At some point bullies stopped charging for racket. They stole the land and told us we are now working under them, for them.
I recommend reading a book about consulting, e.g. in McKinsey's style.
Your PM job will be a lot more about influence and communication.
Influence is often about getting people to trust you and get the last 10% done. Prepare to spend 3 months on a very technically-difficult project, then have the CEO rip apart your demo because the copy on the first screen isn't what he expects, without every getting deeper in to the product. That's the last 10% and your job is getting your tired team to care about it.
The way decisions are made will be significantly different compared to the egalitarianism of engineering. Understanding how your organization makes decisions and adapting to it is key to success as a PM. (Consensus? Founder mode? Disagree and commit?)
Good PMs make impact and at the end of the day. Your career is almost entirely dependent on your manager's subjective opinion of your work. You'll need to learn to "manage up" - ensuring that your manager agrees with your decisions and thinks that you have had impact.
The persona that fails in PM is the pseudo-academic who was told they were smart as a kid, and can't hustle, make a decision, or sell others on their ideas. You need to be prepared for conflict.
> We have experienced an increase in temperatures within a single data center, which in some cases has caused impairments for instances in the Availability Zone.
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