> 2: Gift cards as an incentive aren't always bad. It's when they're confusing your personal vs. professional roles. For example, if a company reaches out offering a gift card in exchange for a personal G2 review or as part of a research initiative, I don't see a conflict there.

Even the "personal" outreaches, such as market research to poll you as a subject matter expert, no mention of your employer... might actually be to try to milk you for information about your employer.

It could be on behalf of competitors of the company, and it could also be on behalf of prospective investors in the company.

Just say no to anyone offering to pay you for a call like that.

However, they can be even more evil, and harder to weed out: rather than some market research pretext, they can pretend to approach you as a recruiter.

Curious for people who think this is unethical how they think about swag at conference booths?

The range of practices I’ve seen go from just come up to the booth to get some trinket to put in your email address to get something a bit more valuable to listen to our 5m spiel and you can pull something out of a claw machine.

Is there a line there that you personally wouldn’t cross? A line that’s prohibited by your company policy? A line that you believe makes a company unethical and should be prohibited? Curious where everyone falls on this.

One of the first things anyone should set up on a new corporate email account is a filter that sends messages containing “Sales Engineer” straight to spam.

A retail company offered me a $20 gift card for an interview about a product I bought. First and last time that ever happened. It was Raven, who made document scanners with a built in tablet. I accepted and tried to give them their money's worth.

And then they went bankrupt. I can't help guessing that was related to their largesse.

Pretty great that this random engineer has superior ethics to a member of SCOTUS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas#Nondisclosure_... .

I get these offers all the time, but work for a company that would fire me if they thought I'd accepted any of them.

I worked for a company that sent out remote controlled cars to their top 300 global targets, with the message “if you take the meeting you’ll get the remote”. Needless to say about 280 were returned, and the remaining 20 didn’t take meetings (I assume the cars look good on office bookshelves).

Agreed. Gifts and cash are forbidden in most corporte vendor management policies. Even the appearance of impropriety can get people fired. That's not worth a $5 gift card. If they even offer it I know I'm not intersted in them.