A tech company in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, gave 20 gold keyboard keycaps to outstanding employees as gifts for Programmers' Day in China on October 24. Photos: Jimu News

A tech company in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, gave 20 gold keyboard keycaps to outstanding employees as gifts for Programmers' Day in China on October 24. One of the keycaps, a gold space bar weighing about 35 grams, is worth more than 40,000 yuan ($6,000), Jimu News reported. 

The company, Insta360, an intelligent imaging technology firm, has presented gold keycaps to outstanding employees for five consecutive years, giving away a total of 75, according to the media report. Nearly 60 percent of its workforce is engaged in research and development (R&D), with R&D personnel playing a key role in driving product innovation. 

Each year, the largest gold space bar is awarded to the programmer who has made the greatest contribution to the company. This year, the company also introduced gold "F5" keys, symbolizing iterative improvement and innovation. Each F5 key is worth nearly 10,000 yuan, while all the keycaps are made of approximately 99.9 percent pure gold.

With gold prices fluctuating, the gold keycaps have unexpectedly become a kind of "investment product" in employees' eyes, although many choose to keep them as souvenirs. 

In a post on his Sina Weibo account recently, Insta360 CEO Liu Jingkang said that a young colleague had suggested giving this year's gold keycaps to artificial intelligence (AI) instead of employees, but he disagreed. While AI has made it possible to generate code in ever-greater quantities, the value that exceptional people can create has actually become even greater, Liu said. As more code is generated by AI, the company still chooses to reward human creativity with real gold, he added.



Global Times