The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free
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Like when you have to clock in and out at lunch time, but work unpaid overtime and weekends.
Or when you lose admin rights on your own PC
Or you have to start wearing a tie.
For me it was when we had to start signing in and out with a time. Supposedly this was for fire safety, but never seemed to apply to VPs.
We worked on banking systems and often had to work all nighters while the bank was offline. The time tracking system couldn't cope with the concept of being on shift for >24hours - the HR people treated us like it was our fault. Their solution was that we all went out at 23:59 and signed back in at 00:01 and that would solve the problem WE had created.
Generally working unpaid overtime for a long time and then during a quiet patch coming in early and leaving early (5-10 minutes early). I got personally told off by the team lead.
Having a virus checker on my machine that I could not remove on pain of huge financial penalties. It scanned every input, intermediate and output of my compiler and turned the computer into a sloth. Didn't help that the final output was 230mb in size (and had a translation step into another 230mb executable). I tried in vain to get exceptions added but to no avail.
These little things slowly chip away at you and you later realise that you left for the wrong reasons - but it is too late.
So I listened to my wife and moved backed home to New Zealand. I worked in a variety of other positions and decided that I'm not going to be satisfied in any particular 9-5 job for long. The next chapter is being written right now as I continue in my current 9-5 while spending all my free time working on Gridspy (http://gridspy.co.nz) which is the startup that will eventually set me free.
When I say free, I mean it will still be a lot of work, but I will be in control of my destiny. I'll decide what features to work on when, which technology to use and if we will have free lunches and soda. Hopefully I'll manage to democratise the process enough that everyone can enjoy themselves just as much as we grow.
The website at www.gridspy.co.nz contains elements from the site uimserv-net.dell.com.examiner-com.simpleworldhouse.ru, which appears to host malwar
There is a first time for everything I guess - somehow my FTP account was compromised and a script added to the end of the page that injected code into the page.
The script has been removed and the FTP account blocked. The logs indicate that the work was done by a botnet, quite interesting. One IP logs in and gets a file, another (different IP) logs in and replaces that file.
The static content that was compromised is stored on a separate server with separate passwords from the machine that hosts my actual application and associated data.
What really concerns me is how that password got into the open (the logs do not indicate brute forcing). Virus checking here we come!
All the passwords have been changed and the relevant computer quarantined. I'm still working on removing the virus, seems to be using drivers to mask its presence from the virus checkers I am using. I've got some ideas based on using a scanner on a live-cd.
What is really fun is that the virus definition for the trojan was added to NOD32 after I was infected, so I don't know how much help a virus checker would have been, if it was installed.
That will learn me for leaving saved passwords on an otherwise secure machine.
The infected computer has ceased sending suspicious packets. I don't know how I am going to trust this machine again.
I'd say this was the main reason. The original employees had already proven they could manage and grow the organization from 0->even, and hadn't slowed down expecting to move the company from even->profit.
Now they have "supervisors" who don't know anything about the business or technology, shoved in on top of them, who's only role is to act as liaison between them and the corporate officers.
Bristling at the lack of corporate loyalty shown to the people that made the company happen, those people leave. The calculus is really very simple.
I've seen this pattern happen a number of times, and the usual result is that these new managers show up, make poor decisions (because they don't understand the business) cycle out (taking their stock with them), repeat 4-5 times until a manager shows up who is so inoffensive that the remaining engineers simply end up running the show in the end anyways and the manager just shows up to weekly meetings so she/he can liaise with corporate.
In the meantime, the company stock has diluted as it fled out the door to the past managers, the company lost most of its senior engineering staff, forcing them to promote lower level, less capable staff to senior positions or to hire externally (again people who don't understand the business further exacerbating the vicious cycle).
Fixed it for you.:-)
That Paul Allen didn't liked to show up on newspapers doesn't mean he did nothing.
As an organization, it appears to be focusing on keeping as flat of an organization as possible. In addition they just simply cut to the chase, and hire middle-managers purely to act as liaisons rather than drivers, and save themselves the couple years of failure they are bound to endure while a new division gets organized "properly" (as in the old way).
This has bad sides too, I've heard from numerous people that, when compared to other organizations, most of the engineers in Google have a very hard time understanding what their managers actually do. Additionally, it also can prevent unified visions from flowing down from the top in as structured a process as you might see in a traditional organization.
But we now have more than a decade to observe companies like Google applying this sort of obvious management philosophy and now have lots of lessons learned we can apply going forward.
I don't know enough about the internal organizational structure at Apple and Oracle, but I'd wager they are much more like the traditional management model than Google's semi-flat structure. Apple in particular is likely a very hierarchical organization (just a guess) due to the necessity in carrying out Jobs' vision.
There is really no reason to assume that these managers are not a net gain for the company. I dislike the fact that a storyline where managers/business guys are the root of all evil can always find some takers. It's silly.
Changing from a 5 person team to a 50 person team is tricky. Adding hierarchies & middle managers is potentially problematic. Moving from an engineer only company to a company that also has a CFO and an HR guy and such is also tricky.
This is all part of the story. The simple story is dumb. Just as dumb as the spoiled silicon valley rockstar story.
I say this because I just read in a book (A Drunkards Walk) how seniors in a home who could arrange their rooms the way they liked and could choose a plant to take care of were measurably happier and lived longer.
Restricting machine names, removing snacks, clocking in and out these all contribute to a negative environment.
Which employee (all other things being equal) is more likely to burn out: a) Diligent and responsible employee is essentially free to do what they need to do to get their job done. b) Diligent and responsible employee who gets shuffled into a 'highschool' scenario: hall-passes, attendance reports, dress code.
Obviously some places feel they require these restrictions. Maybe in a large corporation you'll end up hiring employees who you can't trust to show up on time, etc. But isn't that also HR's fault?
I'm not really a health nut, but when you look at the way soda and highly processed carbs are metabolized it's pretty scary. Given the rates of obesity and diabetes in the US, I rank soda and snack foods right up there with cigarettes in terms of long-term healthcare costs.
I then switched to sweetener, but the bees kept coming. They had either associated the smell of the coffee with the presence of sugar, or were addicted to caffeine.
I felt it was better to leave the coffee to the bees than to argue with caffeine-addicted africanized bees.
I can imagine that if they ever took that away there would immediately be a mass exodus of employees.
Oh, and I do drink the coffee without sugar or any sweetener and with skim milk (mostly) so it's not that bad for my health.
What I find strange is the insistence on cheaping out on the food I see a lot of places. Once you've commited on food, the incremental cost of healthy vs. cheap and crappy isn't all that bad, and keeps the premiums down if you're an employer subsidizing insurance. In any case, keeping employees healthy is in fact a good thing...
There is also a potential that they have a great idea related to your company that they pursue once they leave.
When morale is bad, people who are left tend to offer you resumes when you quit. In that situation I've been glad to forward resumes of people who are good, and have avoided forwarding resumes of people who aren't. (After all you get judged by the quality of people that you recommend.) To the extent that I'm someone people want to work with again, this results in cherry picking the best people.
The effect is even more direct when employees go through recruiters. Recruiters ask about the work environment where you are, and have no problem trying to track people down if they get the sense that good people may be available.
Needless to say, Carnegie Mellon students are heavily discouraged from working there by those of us who screwed up, and I definitely think that the huge dump they took on their recruiting pipeline has affected them negatively in the quality of people they'll be able to hire.
It worked well for the first several months. The delivery company brought a wide assortment of fruit, many "standards" and also some more exotic varieties like papaya, kiwi, etc. Over the months though the apples took a larger and larger portion of the delivery. And the exotic varieties disappeared.
People got sick of eating all those apples. We canceled the service.
The company also made pretense of being "green" but used extreme and wasteful packaging.
I have to ask, was this over the winter months when many fruits are out of season?
He said this at the engineering staff meeting following our day of carnage at which a third of the company was laid off. We also lost the free soda.
The coffee also got better right before the layoffs. In an effort to save money, they looked for a cheaper coffee source than the crappy business supply company they had been using. They managed to stumble upon a deal at a local coffee roaster to get cheaper coffee.
It was pretty good when made correctly. One of the worst things than can happen at a company is for someone who doesn't like "strong coffee" to be the first one into the office in the morning. Not putting enough coffee grounds in the filter basket makes coffee taste bitter and horrible. If you want weak coffee, add water to a strong cup. Someone eventually had to put up signs giving this same advice.
A nice 'interim' way of making a change would be to have a $.25 'donation' for each soda which eventually goes to some animal shelter, which would then be a tax writeoff.
CFO's will suck the lifeblook out of a company if nobody stops them. That is their job. Shame on the others for letting the CFO mess with their culture.
On the whole it's probably a silly tradeoff, since the benefits to employee retention of free sodas almost certainly far outweigh the comparatively minor costs, but if you just look at the balance sheet it can be awfully tempting to get rid of.
Then people feel less bad about paying as they know it's not going to some vending machine company, and they can also request healthier snacks.
I imagine at least a few Pepsi employees might like some of the Coke brands (e.g. Dr. Pepper).
Pepsi wouldn't be caught dead selling Coke products in their machines. Some machines have both, but those are offered by third parties (Canteen/Vending companies) that buy in bulk from Pepsi & Coke and resell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Pepper
Wiki seems to indicate that Coke manufactures it, but only does so in Europe.
I'd really like to be able to say that this would make people start leaving, but no one here is really going to do that. I'll bet senior management knew (and was relying on) that.
Lesson learned: In startups, people are more likely to leave on principles. In big companies (even non-profits), almost no one leaves unless they're fired.
Be careful working at a job you "believe in", it puts you at a fearful disadvantage.
They called this "Frequent Cleaning"....
While no one quit due to any one of those changes, it did change the place from somewhere fun to work to somewhere that wasn't fun. As a result about three months later a large number of the architecture group and other key people quit within a 1-2 week span. So while no one may quit the day the water coolers are removed, that type of change will lead to higher turn over later on, especially among the top folks, who can find a new job pretty easily.
That might not seem to be such a big deal (as compared to an external, traditional PR problem), but if your best employees are the ones leaving on bad terms, then most likely the people they know are above average too. Now the company will have a harder time recruiting great people.
Sounds to me like they put out resumes shortly after the cost-cutting, it just took a few months to get a better job.
I was part of IBM's premier internship program (Extreme Blue) last summer, and of the 3 best developers in the lab, none of them wanted to work for IBM.
One of them actually cited "no free coffee and soda" as his reasoning.
Goes to show that this applies to recruiting as much as employee retention.
http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/11/why-companies-fire-pe...
Would you really prefer an extra $200 or so per year over free soda? I think you wouldn't even notice the difference in your bank balance.
And really I think you're missing the point by focusing on the soda. If you want the company to grow then you have to keep the employees content and productive. A company full of disgruntled workers looking for a new job will not help your stock go up in value. If the price of that is $200 in soda for some people then that is money well invested, and a direct benefit to you.
But what problem is the CFO in the article trying to solve? The author claims the startup is "fairly successful" but it's already a few years old, just breaking even, and still heavily dependent on financing. His true measure of success seems to hinge on the fact that the company continues to exist in a bad economy. Meanwhile, the CFO needs to address "Sarbanes Oxley compliance, a new accounting system, beef up IT and security, Section 409A (valuation) compliance, etc." This sounds like an important phase in the company's growth, and she's trying to find ways to pay for it. In the context of the article, this isn't an arbitrary decision that disregards morale, productivity or even QA. It's a growing pain essential to establishing the company's success. IOW, they do have much bigger problems.
There's no question that preventing disgruntlement during these stages is an HR challenge that needs to be handled delicately. But I think the need can be communicated effectively without losing valuable employees. The fact that it wasn't is the real failure in the article.
Decrees from the top that disregard the input of and value of the employees are the issue here, not how those decrees are handed down. I can't think of any way that HR could say "no more free soda" without it sounding like the stupid cost-cutting measure that it is.
The whole point of the article is that this cost reduction measure is really a political declaration of the new CFO. The engineers probably heard this message as... "You filthy lazy monkeys, leave the soda and go back to your TV-typewriters". The article position is that this bold declaration is bad business practice and that the new CFO should have shut up and implement more subtle and relevant changes, leaving the engineers to slowly realize for themselves that "things aint what used to be no more".
Said that, I agree that startup culture is riden with excesses. It is a whole live hard, die hard philosofy of compressing a decade of work into 2 or 3 years in exchange for big exit, screw life balance and all that. My opinion is that this is not a healthy way to live, but if you are into it you better get sure you are getting extraordinary compensation for your extraordinary effort. Working 80+ hrs per week for an average salary makes no sense at all.
Your last paragraph is particularly relevant. Startups attract engineers who want to work in areas that interest them and in workplaces that are fun. But eventually someone has to do the work they didn't want to do, and the change in the environment seems unavoidable. Anyone attracted to startups would do well to heed your advice.
"Given all that could go wrong in this economy, they were doing well. Their business had just crossed cash flow breakeven, had grown past 50 employees, just raised a substantive follow-on round of financing and had recently hired a Chief Financial Officer. It was an impressive performance."
The relevant pieces of information here are: 1. (Marginally) Cash flow positive: Even though the company may still be underwater, they are not adding to debt anymore. For a young company this is a nice place to be. Nobody expects you to be generating lots of money, but you are moving in the right direction and there is no immediate need to cut cost in order to survive. 2. Grown past 50 employees. Again, this mean they are in the right track. The fact that they are adding headcount means they are not stagnating, but growing. Besides, if they are cash flow positive, it is sustainable growth, not the crazy pump and dump trick of the dot com era. 3. Just raised a substantive follow-on round. This means they were not in immediate financial distress. They have a healthy operation and investors give them more money to keep making the right strategic decisions. No need to go cannibal here.
The political declaration stuff is my personal interpretation of the incident. It says nowhere that the CFO implied or suggested that they should put those techies on their place. It is my personal belief that some key people may have feel that way, and that it was a blunder to risking that mis-communication to happen in the first place.
Organizational culture is a delicate thing to mess with. And if you analyze the profile of people in the startup community (risk tolerant, idealism, and yes... hubris), it is a no-brainer that your local ubergeek is not going to take it like the average cube drone would.
I'd estimate the vending machine operating markup to be, conservatively, 25%. That makes my cash out of pocket $250. To get that amount of take-home, with 34.3% federal and state income taxes and 15.3% social security, my salary would have to go up $500.
Yes, I'd rather have the $500 increase, but an employer would be foolish for doing it this way.
These engineers joined a start-up in its early days because they wanted to work at the fun, informal sort of place that would stock free sodas.
(That said, it's not like keeping free sodas would have prevented everyone from noticing the changing culture forever; it's just an emblematic change that is difficult to ignore, even if you rarely look up from the screen)
If you're working completely independently, working remotely is fine. I'd also avoid a job where I don't have to collaborate with others.
The problem is not that the sodas are no longer free, the problem is that the company starts treating its "most valuable asset - its employees" as just another cog in the machine. As such, the company has started to transition from being exceptional to being average, and its exceptional employees leave to find another company which is exceptional, completing the transition.
Yeah, I probably wouldn't even notice if my company stopped handing out free goats once a month.
Maybe it's totally illogical, but I'd be more irritated with the idea that the company not only took away this perk, but is now trying to make a profit off of it.
Also, thank you for removing the apostrophe, icey. gnashes teeth at stray apostrophes
Sure 10K sounds like a lot of cash for soda, but a company with 50 employees is spending millions on salaries.
This, by the way, is the very definition of bikeshedding. Everyone knows about soda; everyone has bought it before. So cutting out soda is something that the entire executive team feels competent to discuss -- unlike, say, the efficiency of the QA department's staffing schedule, or climate control zones, or the use of electricity for lighting offices at 3am, or the difficult politics of downsizing particular business units. Soda is a simple theatrical stunt for making the CFO look good. It's a good show.
Of course, as Steve points out, it sends a very clear message to the people who've been drinking those sodas: Your work is no longer considered an investment in the future. Now you're a cost center.
Nailed it.
Most "I will work harder" types at startups just kind of know when the pigs are trading them to the glue factory for a case of whiskey.
Personally, I hate working in places with these kind of perks. I think they're abused by both management and employees. If your salary isn't enough to cover your personal needs, free soda doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Not spending on soda gives them what? 3 more hours of runway before going out of business?
The crucial point here is that every minute management and/or engineers are thinking about soda, is a minute wasted. A classical case of "penny-wise, pound foolish".
This probably the most often forgotten argument in favor of freebie snacks: time/attention saving.
A good engineer can easily cost a company $1/minute (and be worth much more). Even if going out to ones car to grab some change takes 2 minutes, that $.50 soda just got a 400% markup. Actually having otherwise productive employees think about this as an issue is an even greater waste of talent.
In a large enough company, though, the ratio of dead weight to productive people, can be high enough that charging for soda isn't a false economy.
(It helped that there were three truly excellent cafes and a bunch of so-so ones within walking distance; this wouldn't work in, say, Silicon Valley.)
Notwithstanding my original comment, I make a point of leaving for lunch, even if there's food paid for by the company, including if I partake of the food itself. The break is important.
However, for some things, like an occasional small snack or a bit of caffeine-sugar water, it would be both a waste of time and of money to go out. Arguably, fiddling with a "free" coffee machine is also time-wasting.
For some, the severity of the interruption is more significant than the length of time or quantity of money involved. The variance in working style makes any one-size-fits-all policy questionable.
If your former boss made it very easy to get reimbursed for those trips out for coffee, his reasoning would carry more weight.
Do you have evidence for this assertion? I thought it was fairly well established that most large companies in mature industries are usually quite efficient due to various economies of scale.
(That said, large companies have a tendency to remain more efficient than the alternative by putting up artificial barriers to entry. For example the difficulty of negotiating access to patents makes large companies more efficient than possible competition, but the extra efficiency is due to solving an artificial problem.)
Large companies have economies of scale in the operational/business sense, but they're terribly inefficient in the people sense.
We don't get free anything where I work, and I'm fine with that. My company's job is to make more money, not baby me with things that I'm perfectly capable of paying for on my salary.
I work at an aircraft company. While I'm a salaried employee, the effects of the union being present at this site hit everyone. It's nice in some cases (benefits), but often it really screws us (hard to lose ineffective employees, no little 'fringe' benefits, etc). I'd be surprised if most companies w/ union involvement are much different.
It's my personal observation. Of course, it's probably different here on the prairie (Kansas City) than it is in The Valley. Maybe the Oracles, ciscos, Googles and Yahoos of the world still provide plenty of goodies for free out there.
I agree with many others in this thread that expenses are expenses. $16 per person per month is $10k at 50 employees. What about the 18-kilohuman corporation I work for right now? $16 per head per month turns into a $3.5M line item per year at that point. When does free soda become impractical?
Also, the original article posits that it's more a symptom of the culture change than anything. Having to rifle through your pockets to score that Mountain Dew that used to fall out of the machine with only a button-press is often the first tangible effect of that culture change.
It's almost nothing and it's definitely not something to try to spend time cutting.
No, this is too much tunnel-vision focus on the bottom line without even a simple thought of the people.
I know this is just an anecdote, but I worked for a non-profit for a number of years that had free soda fountains for employee use. It was a nice touch, and didn't cost them very much at all to maintain versus all the other costs of keeping the organization running.
"Last week as a favor to a friend..."
"The best engineers quietly put the word out that they were available, and in less than month..."
While both statements can be true together, it would seem to me that "in less than a week..." would be more appropriate, and devastating.
I realize I'm just fussing over unimportant details though.
"I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences."
(I assumed that "the board" in the next sentence referred to the board in the first part, which lead to the continuation. This is re-enforced by using "This company" and "the company" which would imply that the author was referring to the only company introduced)
Aw well, at least coffee is still free.
Your own personal laptop is a different matter.
Moreover, if you want personality, just set up your ~/.ssh/config to retain the legacy name for yourself, e.g. "ssh middleearthname" to connect to server001.foo.com
Exactly. For instance, my firewall is called "charon". Personification is a good thing and should be encouraged. It's easier to visualize things that way. From an inside-out perspective (people such as accountants who see everything but, for the most part, do not understand it), naming servers like $function_$row_$rack_$slot or whatever else makes sense...it will simplify things.
The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective.
Think about it like this: you have things in your kitchen, right? Say you have a toaster, a refrigerator, a mixer, and a microwave. You would NEVER call them things like "appliance_counter1_left", "appliance_floor_right" etc. This would be confusing. It is for this reason that humans give things names; toaster, refrigerator, and mixer are all names, they're just very common ones.
> The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective.
That depends - I'd much rather a firewall rule that told me that Glasgow Database Server 2 can talk to London Mail Server 3 for SMTP traffic than one that told me MissPiggy can talk to Kermit for χάρτης traffic.
Especially when it's not a system I deal with every day and I haven't cached the name/function mappings in my head.
On the other hand, the UK postal system works well with a mixture of numeric sequences (house and flat numbers), cutesy names (road names, city names) and arbitrary government assigned gibberish (Post Codes).
I personally have very nearly experienced a disaster because the official naming convention had only one character difference between production and UAT...
Anyway, you've missed my point a bit. It doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things what the boxes are called. It DOES matter than your company is employing people to impose pointless, trivial changes and policies on people with real work to do.
The big win, though, for a more clinical naming is that shared context/training can be easier, and in a larger org the standardization of course makes things a lot easier to deal with. But of course, standardization can be done with the more whimsical names. And a lot of the time the naming scheme that is drawn up by committee takes just as long to learn as the more fun ones (mostly because they need to be abbreviated a bunch).
I suppose the one thing you can say for formal naming systems that is fairly inarguable is that once you understand the rules, you can look at an unfamiliar machine name and know instantly what it does. For machines named after fictional characters that's only true if you read/watch the same books/shows as the people doing the naming.
The confusion this causes for new hires and non-natives is real, albeit somewhat comical.
edit: ServerXX is no better-the names should give a clue to what function they perform (i.e. IRV-FNP01 = located in irvine, file and print server, 01 [oldest server])
I have nothing against naming things in such a manner (my computers at home are cartoon characters), but the problem is that it doesn't scale. The company I work for is under 10 years old, and while a bit too old to still be called a startup, we already have more print servers than there are planets, let alone DB, dev, QA, and web servers. The last couple start-ups I had also had hundreds of boxes, and I'd go insane if "db-35" was actually named "WASP-18b" and I had to remember a list of 50-ish planets.
If you had a Pluto before the IAU changed its classification from planet to "ball of rock" you have a nice excuse to use whatever spherical lumps of rock you feel like.
It may not solve your problem forever, but, then, you can expand the naming to "potato-shaped lumps of stuff". That should give you some mileage.
So, what type of machine is "mercury"?
I've never seen a theme-based naming scheme that didn't eventually run into ambiguities like this.
It's not hard to have DNS CNAME and TXT records for machines, so that you can have both a naming theme for certain classes of servers, as well as descriptive names that indicate function, location, etc.
The way I handle the problem is pretty simple. Functionality gets a subnet 'name' under the root, and there are TXT records and aliases within that to handle description. So, if you have a datacenter in Sacramento, your DB and web machines would be named and alised:
johnny.sac.mycorp.com => db1.sac.mycorp.com TXT Rack 1, Slot 1-4
devi.sac.mycorp.com => db2.sac.mycorp.com TXT Rack 1, Slot 5-8
spooky.sac.mycorp.com => db3.sac.mycorp.com TXT Rack 1, Slot 9-12
tenna.sac.mycorp.com => db4.sac.mycorp.com TXT Rack 1, Slot 13-16
zim.sac.mycorp.com => web1.sac.mycorp.com TXT Rack 2, Slot 1
gir.sac.mycorp.com => web2.sac.mycorp.com TXT Rack 2, Slot 2
For ambiguous names (like 'mercury' existing in both { planets } and { elements }), only one copy of that name can exist on the network. The people who work with that machine will know it's theirs, and for everybody else, there's CNAME and TXT records for when they're not sure.
That's true. However, humans do better with names than numbers. Otherwise, DNS wouldn't exist. The real question is who do you want to optimize for?
staging: dwarves
prod: elves
Or, actually, there are, but they are actually Elves...
And I can't go back and fix it either!
s/gnomes/hobbits/
Well, let's hope no hobbits read this website.
I bet you could save $10,000 a year by eliminating the arbitrary names and calling them ServerXXX.
Sorry for the attempt at a witty reply. Let's start again. Agreed, there are efficiencies. The point of the article is that when you institute changes like this, you may create unintended consequences like a mass exodus of people who liked working for a company where the servers were named after Muppet characters and associate "Server042" with a company where professional managers demand cover sheets for their TPS reports.
Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company?
If you knew what the consequences were going to be then they wouldn't be unanticipated, but if you didn't know then you couldn't accurately answer the question.
Aren't you just asking people to 'know the unknown unknowns' and never make poor decisions?
Wouldn't it be a more realistic suggestion to ask them to ask "Was this good for the company and if not, should we revert to how it was before?"
By the time management realises that soda should have been free, the opinions of the top engineers have irreversibly changed.
In the movie, the PHBs hold a meeting in which they solemnly instruct all their employees to ask "Is what I'm doing good for the company?" before they do anything.
The audience rolls its eyes in sympathy, for the reasons you've pointed out here.
You sigh and roll your eyes because it's a patronising request which stamps the bosses authority and makes it clear that the boss thinks all the employees are a bit slow. (Or perhaps because you think it should be up to the boss to decide what's good for the company then organise the employees to do it, and by asking the employees to do that he's trying to avoid work by pushing his job onto the employees while still keeping his position and salary).
The parent post I was responding to was suggesting "try to see the unexpected consequences" and I was countering "that's like trying to find all the bugs - you'll never know when you've finished; more helpful would be managerial humility and willingness to notice negative results and revert the changes".
Which is what disturbs me about the story. A CFO is paid to think big picture, to confer with the CTO about morale, and so forth. In a well-run company I would expect a middle manager to suggest quashing free drinks and the CFO to demur after conferring with colleagues.
Given the story as told, I wonder if an Engineering-Business war was breaking out and if the CFO new exactly what was going to happen.
Am quite surprised that people see this as linked to sodas and drinks. Those sodas are cheap productivity wins. So is systematic/meaningful naming.
(Perhaps this is the open vs. free software debate. The open source POV is that free sodas are good because they increase productivity, in ways that are not obvious in the short term but no less real. If they decreased productivity that'd be a different matter. The free software guys are more ideological about things. )
By contrast, "hq-web-001" is an early webserver at head quarters, while "br1-sql-020" is a later database server at branch office 1, and the next server name is the next in the appropriate sequence.
I'm not a systems admin, but I presume this is because you can write a for loop that counts through your machines and does something to each, right?
In that case, couldn't you just have nested arrays?
machines = ['mailservers'=>['Earth'=>'some IP', 'Mars'=>'some IP'],'devservers'=>['Dopey'=>'some IP', 'Sneezy'=>'some IP']] ...etc.
Now everyone can connect to a machine with a memorable name, AND you can loop through all the dbservers if you need to, AND anyone who doesn't understand the system can look in one place to grok it.
What's the problem?
I am a sysadmin, and I can tell you that I outgrew cute server names many years ago because they hurt more than they could ever help. Reading this thread, it is painfully obvious to me that most people here have not been meaningfully exposed to large server installations. The last time I had servers with cute names, there were 12 machines total. Since then, I've worked in environments with hundreds and thousands of hosts.
Even past a couple dozen servers, cute names become a liability and a significant distraction. Divining purpose, location, and other meaning by looking at a cute name when you have 30 servers is difficult and unnecessary. Applying the 3am standard (can a sleep deprived sysadmin do this task with minimal error at 3am?) cute names actually become rather cruel. The answer is to build an inventory system that lets the sysadmin map cute names to functional information. Or simply build that functional information in to the naming scheme.
So sorry guys. As a professional sysadmin and fellow engineer I appreciate that you are looking out for what you perceive to be our sysadmin needs, but cute names are one thing we don't want or need. Unless perhaps you can come up with a justification for renaming the functions and classes in your code with cute names...
Names like server001 are great and fine for a cluster of more or less identical, interchangable machines (Beowolf cluster, cluster of VMware hosts, etc.). But it sucks ass for most other circumstances. Seriously. Try having discussions about a project involving a dozen servers (out of hundreds in the company mind you), each with names like server3056, server3087, server3109. It sucks, because 5 minutes after talking about it you find yourself wondering: Hmmm... was I supposed to reboot 3087? or 3078? :-)
Hell, from most of the stories I've heard from people working for bigger places, people who don't log into the machines frequently don't even know that the machines have names.
i used to work for a company where i wrote critical pieces of their software infrastructure. it's a series of interconnected apps which i named after marsupials. i have now left, and they are in the process of giving the apps boring names that more directly indicate what they do.
They're no longer in business.
Furious but didn't contest it.
In the course of the after-action report some screen dumps were shown to the executives in which the "whimsical" server names appeared.They were (understandably) in a rather agitated and non-whimsical mood, and incorrectly (in my opinion) correlated the seriousness of the problem which the perceived lack of seriousness of the naming scheme.
They could not see that the naming scheme was not whimsical - it was in fact quite methodical and conveyed more meaning to the engineers who lived with the machines everyday than the strict, sanitized names we eventually ended up with.
Somehow I just don't have that much respect for people who've gotten where they are by duping professors and wowing everyone with some impressive degree or family pedigree. It's not the same.
For any manager to be worth their salt to me, they have to demonstrate that they've had a lot of good old-fashioned practice in thinking. And the management fast-track just doesn't portend that to me. And I think that's why most companies > 50 employees slowly crumble as their engineers and other thinkers are crowded out by MBAs.
(I'm curious as to what seemed so out-of-place in a serious action report. Mythological gods seem like they'd be OK... but maybe Seven Dwarves or Deadly Sins or Slang Drug Terms would be embarrassing?)
Even if you want "safe" sanitized names though, I can't understand why people create these elaborate multi-part naming conventions for servers. Seriously, if the hostname is harder to remember and type than the IP address, YOUR NAMING CONVENTION IS BROKEN!
The HQ is for Headquarters, DC for Domain Controller, 01. HQDS01 for Headquarters Development Server 01, etc... It's an MCSE best practices naming convention to locate and indentify servers.
I thought the sales point of "business" types was that they were good at managing the irrationality of humans.
It's not irrational to recognize that the kind of thinking that would eliminate free soda on the basis of narrow cost-benefit analysis is also the kind of thinking that would transform their beloved startup into a stultifying corporate bureaucracy.
The reality is that it is revealing of a CFO attitude, let's take away as much as we can from the employees to help the bottom line. CFO's should first focus on growing revenue, not cutting benefits.
A good CFO knows that a corporation's job is not to save money, but to earn it.
So it seems the moral of the story is that hold off on sending overt signals to your employees until you have prepared for their (inevitable) exodus.
After all, you could hire them back if you offered them enough, and you'd do that if they were essential.
Maybe it was in fact better to replace them with people happier working in a medium sized company.
And if you're trying to "hire them back if you offered them enough", that rather negates the point of trying to save money by eliminating soda, doesn't it?
This is typical HR thinking, and is only valid for a certain demographic (i.e., the people on the mid-to-low end of the bell curve). In my experience the absolute top-level engineers cannot be retained with just money.
Let me put it this way - you're an ace engineer with oodles of experience. You are in high demand, and if you were unemployed, you probably would have recruiters banging your door down by week's end. These are the "top talent" that all companies claim they want to hire - and they will make top dollar regardless of where they go.
Having known some of these people, the motivator is not money, because money is not why they do this, and honestly they're swimming in it already. To hire these guys you need to do something more - a great working environment, a kickass team, a sane management structure, etc etc.
Money can only motivate someone so far.