My favorite story of "unintended consequences" of belt-tightening like this was when I worked at a startup about a dozen years ago. We did well for a few years, but it was clear to people we were reaching a point of market saturation. Nevertheless, the CEO kept agreeing to doubling of sales revenue year after year. Well, no surprise, the last year before big layoffs, we were way off on sales goals.
The CEO announces we have to "put our heads down." Pretty much the main change enacted was no more ping pong. The problem is that were really only two guys constantly in the ping pong room. Those two guys just happened to be the two most senior sales guys, and the only two that were meeting quota.
They both left about a month after this and not-so-slyly told the CEO he was an idiot.
2008 GFC, startup of 25 (15 dev), everyone drops to 4 days a week, the newly hired 'CEO' drops 5k on a top of the line laptop for himself to basically run Outlook and Solitaire after telling everyone they were cancelling 'birthday cakes' (which the staff mostly pitched in for anyway). RIP entire company.
It would be interesting to have a view showing all comments from the above submissions on the same comment page.
I guess the ranking would have to be proportional rather than absolute, since I'm assuming more recent comments would have gotten more votes due to a growing audience.
My reading of it is that it isn't the soda, it's having the bean counter become an authority that can make decisions.
If you work day and night to get a product out, and then a CFO slides in above everyone on the team, and on top of that they're a cheapskate, that sends a signal.
Right, I think that's exactly the point of the article. In no world should free sodas make a substantial difference, but it's rather the signal it sends.
Much like a single cockroach at the entrance of a fancy hotel isn't by itself a problem if it's limited to exactly that cockroach...
It’s sort of the natural evolution of companies as they grow in size. When they are small, things are just done, but as they grow and as they bring in more people, the cost of those resources also grow. The free sodas are a fun example (and here outlined as the wake-up call) but where it really starts is when someone higher up notices the cost of a department that has grown from 5 to 20 people, or something similarly eye raising, and then bring in the E&Y type consultants to help transition into a scalable business. Which simply involves reporting, cost-trimming and looking into efficiency. The sodas are where the rebellion break out, but the seed are sown long before that as the “bean counters” and “process people” slowly begin making business intelligence part of everything because it lets everyone report on everything.
You can’t even say that it doesn’t work, because it’s how every major company operates. On the flip-side, it’s not like Coca Cola has really invented anything of worth for like a 100 years. So while bean counters are financially good for investors, they are probably pretty terrible at running our society, because it’s the engineers that actually build things and the founders who come up with the saleable ideas.
Anyway, if my career has taught me anything it’s to do your thing. Being part of the transition from startup to enterprise can be a lot of fun as well, so long as you know that you can’t really fight the MBA types and win.
Indeed, but also it’s a sign that senior management collectively - inc the CEO - now see trivial cost cutting as a worthwhile use of their focus and a good way to generate value for shareholders.
Unfortunately, this anecdote re-enforces a stereotype. The CFO in this story is bad and so is senior leadership and the board for allowing the new CFO to run amok. Not all new CFOs are bad and not all CFOs with leadership will destroy a company.
It’s easy to attribute revenue to products, but difficult to fully account for their costs. It’s hard-to-impossible to attribute revenue to free sodas (and the staff who drink them), but easy to account for their costs.
Many business decisions are heavily influenced by this dichotomy in accounting.
I'd say its more sinister than that. It really is signaling a shift from creating to wealth extraction.
The no free sods is just a rules for thee but not for me situation. Do you think the exec floor with the said CFO no longer has free soda? Of course not. The execs have free soda, coffee, donuts, meals, open bar, beer, private jet reservations, wine and all kinds of other extravagances.
Free soda (well, usually coffee) is just the indicator...
The company is either broke, and can't afford soda (so it probably won't afford any raises and bonuses), or it's trying to save money on meaningless, cheap stuff (and will try to save money elsewhere... like on staff and wages). To me, this is a signal to slowly leave.
> No one on the board or the executive staff was trying to be stupid. But to save $10,000 or so, they unintentionally launched an exodus of their best engineers.
Maybe the insight here is "keep your engineers happy, it's important". But I believe there is more to it on this story. The engineers heard "we could give you soda when we were small, now we're big, we cannot give you soda" and, to the rational mind, that makes no sense.
Maybe they left because they were sitting on a precarious equilibrium and the free sodas tilted the balances. But I think it was also that the engineers saw the sign on the wall, and thought "this guys have lost their collective corporate mind, let's bail before they have any more bright ideas".
I think there’s something a bit deeper going on, and it’s implied in the post. Small companies (on the whole) are more fun than big ones for a certain kind of person. At a small co. you get to wear a lot of hats and have a much more holistic feel for the business. As the business grows, you get more specialized, and restricted. Some people, and I am one, get bored and frustrated in that sort of environment. Things getting more “corporate” is a signal that transition is happening, so the people who don’t like that kind of environment leave. Some companies handle the transition better than others.
What part of "free soda doesn't scale" is irrational? I get that it signals a change in management priority -- specifically a change away from prioritizing staff and toward prioritizing money -- and I'd probably leave too. But I don't see how you have to lose your mind to achieve that perspective.
We had something akin to this happen at my company. For context, this is a well established mid-sized company with around 5000 employees. Some beancounter decided that they could no longer afford to subsidize the plastic spoons in the break rooms. So they announced that when the current stock ran out, they would not be replacing it.
The backlash was pretty strong. Not because engineers can't afford plastic spoons of their own, or some other alternative, but because it was such a petty thing. These spoons come in cases of 1000 for under 10 bucks, so nobody can argue with a straight face that it was about the cost.
I don't know that anyone actually quit over it, but it leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
This reminds me of a startup CFO I worked with, who could see the big picture. In the early days of the company, they worked in an office that shared a bathroom with a half dozen other companies. And the toilet paper in said bathroom was terrible. Like, not just standard-office-building terrible. Really, really bad. So CFO takes it upon himself to rectify the situation. He orders a couple dozen rolls of standard-issue "premium" office toilet paper (still not that great relative to home-use TP, but good by office standards) and leaves it in the bathroom. Two days later, it's gone: someone (not clear whether it was someone at the startup or one of the neighboring companies) decided to take it home with them. Everyone in the office starts grumbling about the state of the TP situation again.
Not to be outdone, CFO places another order; several cases this time. And it takes a few more days, but sure enough, it all disappears.
At this point, CFO is fed up. He orders two full pallets of TP. After lunch one day, several volunteers unload the toilet paper. Multiple stacks, floor to ceiling, in the bathroom. More stacks in the supply closet. Stacks in the hallway. Stacks in the lobby. Everywhere you look, there's toilet paper. And if people were stealing TP after that, it wasn't at a rate that anyone could notice.
Including the ongoing costs for the subsequent 18 months until they moved out of that building, the "unlimited TP" policy might have cost the company $10k. But it bought a lot more than that in terms of employee goodwill. Knowing that the bean counters are focusing on "our employees are producing a product worth $x; let's figure out how to have them do more of that" makes a big difference.
> All these engineers were still heads-down, working their tails off, just as they had been doing since the first few months of the company. Too busy working, most were oblivious to the changes that success and growth had brought to the company.
This gets at the vague steps that the author mentions at the end about supporting transitions of _people_, but I was waiting for them to get concrete about how the engineers should have _positively_ been made aware of the success and growth. Pay raises to market rate? A bonus? I’m guessing that in actuality, it was little more than verbal pats on the back.
I guess it’s different for each company culture, but this makes it sound like the engineers worked hard, the company got solid, things were taken away, and then the superstars started to leave. I’ve seen similar patterns a few times. What are some positive ways that people have seen these patterns fought?
Based on how I've seen it mismanaged, the only way I see it working is hiring "provisional VPs". In the same way that you might have hired slow and fired fast in the beginning for competent ICs, you need to do the same with the now executive management skillset that's required to break off and scale whole divisions of the working organization. The other side of that is you need to equip them with the actual subset of the talent they need, and not hold back some employees who were there in the beginning for special considerations.
The ICs have been there for years, knife fighting with the market and the competition, and then someone comes in from some adjacent market or some other vertical entirely, and the expectation is that all the work done to go from zero to one needs to be fit to their agenda, and not the other way around. Everyone who has lived it knows its backwards, and yet I've seen the trigger get pulled on this so slow that it had a measurable effect on the exit.
A small, mildly entertaining, anecdote about soda:
When Oracle acquired the company I was working for, they made the soda free. That is, Oracle made the soda dispensing machines simply dispense soda when you pressed a button.
The same company that had a self-service "I Quit" page.
Free soda is an indicator about how a company treats its employees, but perhaps not the best.
I had a client that stocked kitchen fridges with free basic foods - drinks, meats, breads, etc. - and quality, healthy stuff too. That always impressed me, sending a simple, strong message that they cared about their employees and people like me, and it had a positive impact on me when I ate my share (and didn't have to worry about taking time to get lunch).
At one point they brought in a relatively large team of contractors to work day and night on a critical, time-sensitive project. A week after the team started I was there, talking casually to the manager. They told me that there were complaints that they were running low on food in the fridge because the contractors were eating it too. What would they do? Ban the contractors, with only arms-length loyalty to the business, working day and night, and on whom the business's fortunes depended, from the kitchens.
I worked for a post-startup company early in my career.
The Christmas parties were awesome, my first few years there included parties at the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum. There were subsidized vending machines as well. I knew engineers who would spend a dollar on the vending machine and get a few bags of chips for lunch.
Subsidized vending machines were the first to go. Then the Christmas parties. Then a bunch of other changes which showed derision for customers and employees both.
Is Oracle all that bad of a place to work? Everyone _hates_ Oracle for product reasons but I've never met any engineers that said it was a terrible place to work or particularly worse than any other big tech b2b companies (e.g. ibm, microsoft, etc).
To present an alternate point of view, I never grokked this idea of free soda, free food, catered lunches, sleeping pods, dry-cleaning, massages, ping-pong table as a way to attract talents. If I took a risk to work for a startup, I want a lean machine that pays me in ridiculous cash or ridiculous options, and obscene milestone bonuses. The only thing I think I'd really care about is "bring your dog to work" and "onsite/nearby child-care", there's no substitute or purchasing-equiv to that. A startup is an intense high-stress environment where focused work and time is invaluable; none of those "perks" directly drive the goals, if anything they seem hedonistic distractions from the goal.
I think the point of supplying food and drink on-premises is exactly that, to foster "focused work and time "
The objection isn't so much the price then put on the food and drink. It's the conversion of 'valued employee' to 'hourly crank-turner'. No longer a valued critical member of a team, now the corporation regards you as a 'resource'.
E.g. did the executive perks disappear too? No? Now you know what pigeonhole you've been placed in (demoted to).
I tend to agree with this viewpoint. I actually found that my happiness decreased when a company I was working for started providing free lunch every day. The lunch break - along with a change of scenery, a short walk, and the freedom to choose whatever I wanted for lunch - was important for my well being. Also, employees would often complain about the free lunch options on certain days, which is kind of sad.
I suppose it would have been different if it were a big campus at a FAANG, though, where they have lots of different restaurants to choose from spread out through multiple buildings. There you still get most of the benefits of the lunch break that I felt I was missing out on. And I assume there are certain efficiency benefits to be had at that scale vs. having thousands of employees all having to fend for themselves.
I thought I remembered reading somewhere that Google (or some company in a similar position) had worked out the math and figured that the free meals more than paid for themselves in increased productivity (or at least seat time) because employees weren't getting up to go off-site to find lunch. As often as not they'd be quickly back at their desk coding away.
I once worked on a company that made me understand the value of this stuff.
My project was late, I was coding desperately, sometimes skipping lunch to have enough time, I had to leave using a bus on a specific time so I couldn't just stay late.
I realized then, that whenever I wanted to drink a coffee or a tea, there was one, hot, on my table, and I didn't fetch it!
Snacks too sometimes!
And whenever I left to go to the bathroom or some random reason, when I got back, my place was clean too!
This meant I could focus on my work, just coding, I didn't had to think about fetching coffee or tea, all I had to do was work, and whenever I needed coffee or tea or food, it would be there, ready, on a clean desk.
It made me realize the service staff worked as a sort of "force multiplier" for the company, you hire a few of them, and a lot of programmers can squeeze more work hours, and what you spend on the service staff wages, you save on programmers wages that you would be wasting if they were wandering around looking for food or caffeine.
Nothing saves time like not having to leave the office for snacks and drinks.
Maybe you're organized enough to have the stuff you want stocked for yourself and ready.
Many people aren't.
And as the article points out - this stuff doesn't cost much.
You're not going to get a significant raise if they don't have a pingpong table and Le Croix.
It's also a little bit of an accounting trick IIUC. Those things are expenses for the company and tax deductible. If you buy them yourself - you're probably paying >40% income tax on it.
I like the explanation from this article [1] titled "Why perks matter": because perks like that avoid context switches and remove "distractions and other things which could disrupt [my] flow".
As a human being who regularly needs to eat, not having to worry about having the right amount of snacks and/or change at hand can make or break my day. Trying to code while hungry is a waste of everybody's time and money, which is how free food pays for itself. And don't get me started on trying to code when all you really want is a nap...
I don't see it as unintended consequences of Soda Not Being Free. It's an attribution mistake, not entirely different from how SEM tends to get attribution for conversions it didn't really earn.
The Elves leaving is unintended consequences of the company getting larger, and not finding a way to manage it in a way that retained top talent. The soda exposed it, but it was going to get exposed one way or another.
It's worth watching the little stuff. When you see a retail establishment with a partly burned out sign, and it doesn't get fixed quickly, you know they're in trouble.
I used to be in a management role a number of years back and faced this same issue.
Thankfully I was able to convince executive management that for our several hundred employee company, running a Coke soda machine was basically the cost of 1 Tech Support headcount.
That's it.
One of the most popular in-office perks, the Coke freestyle machine was 1 tech support headcount.
That was years ago. And we still have that machine.
The cynic in me wonders if management and the soda industry colluded to make free soda a symbol of something deeper, namely, management pretending to care about their workers. Come for the free soda, and stay for the open plan offices and Agile Scrum meetings.
I once read an article, I think in the Wall Street Journal, about Levi-Strauss sending out promotional materials to HR departments about how to set up "Casual Friday" at the workplace. It was a promotion for their Dockers brand.
The 2008 recession was especially fun because of bean counters. Some of the big Indian outsourcers used this to remove all sorts of things from the office stating "we can save money with these things and avoid layoffs." Among things that were removed at the outsources I worked at? Paper towels in the bathroom were removed in favour of the hand drying machines.
If you study this story carefully, you'll notice that it wasn't a case of "new CFO was an idiot". The ENTIRE BOARD, including some experienced VCs, agreed that they were "too big for that now".
My analysis: What does "too big for that now" mean? Does it mean that they can't afford it? I doubt it. They were still going to sell the soda "cheap" (presumably 25-50% of the normal soda cost). So what was it? My theory is "big" ISN'T a synonym for "large-scale" here, but instead is a synonym for "professional". Why is free soda a negative indicator of professionalism? And to whom? I think that once you reach a certain level (non-startup or series-Z-startup), investors expect you to be extremely bean-countery. So the ultimate source of this problem is mega-scale investors which want to see a tight ship. The board was likely feeling pressure from them before the CFO was ever hired.
I've been around long enough to see this cycle through twice before, but it still rankles how stupidly myopic it is every time.
Beginning this year we're no longer allowed to have the company pay for an in-office team lunch without pre-approval of each individual time from a 3-skip manager, who's in a department that might as well be a different company. At the same time they want to mandate 60% return-to-in-office time. The actual leads had all ability to incentivize people to come back cut off, and know reactions are going to range from work-to-rule through quit.
This reminds me of when Microsoft stopped offering the free towel service. In the buildings with large bike racks, there were locker rooms with showers. Normally they would have a free towel service so you didn't have to bring your own, like a gym. But then one year they said that they were spending too much money on it compared to the number of people using it. There was a huge uproar.
Then again, if it had been the free sodas, it would have been a mutiny. I remember when they got rid of the spicy v8 and a mutiny was considered, but declined.
[+] [-] snapetom|3 years ago|reply
The CEO announces we have to "put our heads down." Pretty much the main change enacted was no more ping pong. The problem is that were really only two guys constantly in the ping pong room. Those two guys just happened to be the two most senior sales guys, and the only two that were meeting quota.
They both left about a month after this and not-so-slyly told the CEO he was an idiot.
[+] [-] g5095|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway123x2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|3 years ago|reply
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30173379 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27445943 - June 2021 (3 comments)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19690250 - April 2019 (2 comments)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16801710 - April 2018 (2 comments)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13134712 - Dec 2016 (69 comments)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5751329 - May 2013 (390 comments)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750 - Dec 2009 (226 comments)
[+] [-] drivers99|3 years ago|reply
> Then one day a guy came in with a hand cart, loaded the coffee machine on it, and rolled it away. A week later the layoffs started.
> [...]
> In other words, the free sodas are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When they die, it's time to get out if you don't want to die with them.
[+] [-] betwixthewires|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PebblesRox|3 years ago|reply
I guess the ranking would have to be proportional rather than absolute, since I'm assuming more recent comments would have gotten more votes due to a growing audience.
[+] [-] raccer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|3 years ago|reply
If you work day and night to get a product out, and then a CFO slides in above everyone on the team, and on top of that they're a cheapskate, that sends a signal.
[+] [-] metacritic12|3 years ago|reply
Much like a single cockroach at the entrance of a fancy hotel isn't by itself a problem if it's limited to exactly that cockroach...
[+] [-] the_af|3 years ago|reply
> The engineers focused on building product never noticed when the company had grown into something different than what they first joined.
> The sodas were just the wake-up call.
[+] [-] EnKopVand|3 years ago|reply
You can’t even say that it doesn’t work, because it’s how every major company operates. On the flip-side, it’s not like Coca Cola has really invented anything of worth for like a 100 years. So while bean counters are financially good for investors, they are probably pretty terrible at running our society, because it’s the engineers that actually build things and the founders who come up with the saleable ideas.
Anyway, if my career has taught me anything it’s to do your thing. Being part of the transition from startup to enterprise can be a lot of fun as well, so long as you know that you can’t really fight the MBA types and win.
[+] [-] klelatti|3 years ago|reply
Not a good sign for any company.
[+] [-] stevievee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_toad|3 years ago|reply
Many business decisions are heavily influenced by this dichotomy in accounting.
[+] [-] citizenpaul|3 years ago|reply
The no free sods is just a rules for thee but not for me situation. Do you think the exec floor with the said CFO no longer has free soda? Of course not. The execs have free soda, coffee, donuts, meals, open bar, beer, private jet reservations, wine and all kinds of other extravagances.
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|3 years ago|reply
The company is either broke, and can't afford soda (so it probably won't afford any raises and bonuses), or it's trying to save money on meaningless, cheap stuff (and will try to save money elsewhere... like on staff and wages). To me, this is a signal to slowly leave.
[+] [-] DancesWTurtles|3 years ago|reply
Maybe the insight here is "keep your engineers happy, it's important". But I believe there is more to it on this story. The engineers heard "we could give you soda when we were small, now we're big, we cannot give you soda" and, to the rational mind, that makes no sense.
Maybe they left because they were sitting on a precarious equilibrium and the free sodas tilted the balances. But I think it was also that the engineers saw the sign on the wall, and thought "this guys have lost their collective corporate mind, let's bail before they have any more bright ideas".
[+] [-] hcayless|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stonogo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|3 years ago|reply
As soon as we hit a recession there were cries to cut back on the free food and sodas.
It sent a very wrong message to me, as many of the people I interacted with on a daily basis were horrible in their jobs.
It seemed that pausing hiring recs and a few well-targeted severance packages would have saved more money than cutting back a few freebies.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
The backlash was pretty strong. Not because engineers can't afford plastic spoons of their own, or some other alternative, but because it was such a petty thing. These spoons come in cases of 1000 for under 10 bucks, so nobody can argue with a straight face that it was about the cost.
I don't know that anyone actually quit over it, but it leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
[+] [-] jmharvey|3 years ago|reply
Not to be outdone, CFO places another order; several cases this time. And it takes a few more days, but sure enough, it all disappears.
At this point, CFO is fed up. He orders two full pallets of TP. After lunch one day, several volunteers unload the toilet paper. Multiple stacks, floor to ceiling, in the bathroom. More stacks in the supply closet. Stacks in the hallway. Stacks in the lobby. Everywhere you look, there's toilet paper. And if people were stealing TP after that, it wasn't at a rate that anyone could notice.
Including the ongoing costs for the subsequent 18 months until they moved out of that building, the "unlimited TP" policy might have cost the company $10k. But it bought a lot more than that in terms of employee goodwill. Knowing that the bean counters are focusing on "our employees are producing a product worth $x; let's figure out how to have them do more of that" makes a big difference.
[+] [-] conradfr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incanus77|3 years ago|reply
This gets at the vague steps that the author mentions at the end about supporting transitions of _people_, but I was waiting for them to get concrete about how the engineers should have _positively_ been made aware of the success and growth. Pay raises to market rate? A bonus? I’m guessing that in actuality, it was little more than verbal pats on the back.
I guess it’s different for each company culture, but this makes it sound like the engineers worked hard, the company got solid, things were taken away, and then the superstars started to leave. I’ve seen similar patterns a few times. What are some positive ways that people have seen these patterns fought?
[+] [-] ftlio|3 years ago|reply
The ICs have been there for years, knife fighting with the market and the competition, and then someone comes in from some adjacent market or some other vertical entirely, and the expectation is that all the work done to go from zero to one needs to be fit to their agenda, and not the other way around. Everyone who has lived it knows its backwards, and yet I've seen the trigger get pulled on this so slow that it had a measurable effect on the exit.
[+] [-] falcolas|3 years ago|reply
When Oracle acquired the company I was working for, they made the soda free. That is, Oracle made the soda dispensing machines simply dispense soda when you pressed a button.
The same company that had a self-service "I Quit" page.
Free soda is an indicator about how a company treats its employees, but perhaps not the best.
[+] [-] wolverine876|3 years ago|reply
At one point they brought in a relatively large team of contractors to work day and night on a critical, time-sensitive project. A week after the team started I was there, talking casually to the manager. They told me that there were complaints that they were running low on food in the fridge because the contractors were eating it too. What would they do? Ban the contractors, with only arms-length loyalty to the business, working day and night, and on whom the business's fortunes depended, from the kitchens.
[+] [-] RajT88|3 years ago|reply
The Christmas parties were awesome, my first few years there included parties at the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum. There were subsidized vending machines as well. I knew engineers who would spend a dollar on the vending machine and get a few bags of chips for lunch.
Subsidized vending machines were the first to go. Then the Christmas parties. Then a bunch of other changes which showed derision for customers and employees both.
[+] [-] voidfunc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cptnapalm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devchix|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|3 years ago|reply
The objection isn't so much the price then put on the food and drink. It's the conversion of 'valued employee' to 'hourly crank-turner'. No longer a valued critical member of a team, now the corporation regards you as a 'resource'.
E.g. did the executive perks disappear too? No? Now you know what pigeonhole you've been placed in (demoted to).
[+] [-] freetime2|3 years ago|reply
I suppose it would have been different if it were a big campus at a FAANG, though, where they have lots of different restaurants to choose from spread out through multiple buildings. There you still get most of the benefits of the lunch break that I felt I was missing out on. And I assume there are certain efficiency benefits to be had at that scale vs. having thousands of employees all having to fend for themselves.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] speeder|3 years ago|reply
My project was late, I was coding desperately, sometimes skipping lunch to have enough time, I had to leave using a bus on a specific time so I couldn't just stay late.
I realized then, that whenever I wanted to drink a coffee or a tea, there was one, hot, on my table, and I didn't fetch it!
Snacks too sometimes!
And whenever I left to go to the bathroom or some random reason, when I got back, my place was clean too!
This meant I could focus on my work, just coding, I didn't had to think about fetching coffee or tea, all I had to do was work, and whenever I needed coffee or tea or food, it would be there, ready, on a clean desk.
It made me realize the service staff worked as a sort of "force multiplier" for the company, you hire a few of them, and a lot of programmers can squeeze more work hours, and what you spend on the service staff wages, you save on programmers wages that you would be wasting if they were wandering around looking for food or caffeine.
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|3 years ago|reply
Maybe you're organized enough to have the stuff you want stocked for yourself and ready.
Many people aren't.
And as the article points out - this stuff doesn't cost much.
You're not going to get a significant raise if they don't have a pingpong table and Le Croix.
It's also a little bit of an accounting trick IIUC. Those things are expenses for the company and tax deductible. If you buy them yourself - you're probably paying >40% income tax on it.
[+] [-] renewiltord|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] probably_wrong|3 years ago|reply
As a human being who regularly needs to eat, not having to worry about having the right amount of snacks and/or change at hand can make or break my day. Trying to code while hungry is a waste of everybody's time and money, which is how free food pays for itself. And don't get me started on trying to code when all you really want is a nap...
[1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/11/16/context/
[+] [-] cbsmith|3 years ago|reply
The Elves leaving is unintended consequences of the company getting larger, and not finding a way to manage it in a way that retained top talent. The soda exposed it, but it was going to get exposed one way or another.
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CWuestefeld|3 years ago|reply
I assume that if it was provided from dispensers like at McD's, it would be similar in expense to coffee.
[+] [-] HollywoodZero|3 years ago|reply
Thankfully I was able to convince executive management that for our several hundred employee company, running a Coke soda machine was basically the cost of 1 Tech Support headcount.
That's it.
One of the most popular in-office perks, the Coke freestyle machine was 1 tech support headcount.
That was years ago. And we still have that machine.
[+] [-] analog31|3 years ago|reply
I once read an article, I think in the Wall Street Journal, about Levi-Strauss sending out promotional materials to HR departments about how to set up "Casual Friday" at the workplace. It was a promotion for their Dockers brand.
[+] [-] givemeethekeys|3 years ago|reply
Few companies are good at promoting from within.
[+] [-] tushar-r|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phendrenad2|3 years ago|reply
My analysis: What does "too big for that now" mean? Does it mean that they can't afford it? I doubt it. They were still going to sell the soda "cheap" (presumably 25-50% of the normal soda cost). So what was it? My theory is "big" ISN'T a synonym for "large-scale" here, but instead is a synonym for "professional". Why is free soda a negative indicator of professionalism? And to whom? I think that once you reach a certain level (non-startup or series-Z-startup), investors expect you to be extremely bean-countery. So the ultimate source of this problem is mega-scale investors which want to see a tight ship. The board was likely feeling pressure from them before the CFO was ever hired.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] morelisp|3 years ago|reply
Beginning this year we're no longer allowed to have the company pay for an in-office team lunch without pre-approval of each individual time from a 3-skip manager, who's in a department that might as well be a different company. At the same time they want to mandate 60% return-to-in-office time. The actual leads had all ability to incentivize people to come back cut off, and know reactions are going to range from work-to-rule through quit.
[+] [-] cbanek|3 years ago|reply
Then again, if it had been the free sodas, it would have been a mutiny. I remember when they got rid of the spicy v8 and a mutiny was considered, but declined.