Secret Santa in IT: small, but with an inside joke
Doing Secret Santa in a development department is easier than anywhere else, because there is a shared language. A sticker with a joke about semicolons, a mug with the loopback address or a button that blames the user between keyboard and chair: everyone in the room understands that on Secret Santa night. Here are all products from our computer science range up to 15 euros, the usual limit for Secret Santa.
What goes down well in this price range
Stickers are the classic, because every laptop in IT is covered in them anyway and a good sticker lasts for years. Buttons end up on backpacks and jackets. Mugs go into service at the office immediately. And small desk gadgets survive every move to the next open-plan office. If you know what your Secret Santa works with, search for the language or the system; if not, pick a joke that applies to the whole industry, say about layer 8 problems or reading the manual.
Secret Santa gifts that admins understand too
Between developers and administrators there is a small cultural difference the designs are aware of: one swears at code, the other at users. Both are here. What a design means exactly is explained for many of them in our Nerd Lexicon, which helps if your Secret Santa is from another department and you want to be sure the joke lands.
