Cost cutting at Dropbox and Silicon Valley startups | Hacker News Reader

Cost cutting at Dropbox and Silicon Valley startups

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102 pointsjboydyhacker88 comments

You know, if you move out of San Francisco and let your employees be remote you can save an insane amount of money on office space, pay employees less and allow them to have a higher quality of life. Tech's insitence on being in one of the most expensive areas is just bizarre when most employees can pick up a laptop and work anywhere there's wifi.

I think it is not that easy. Meeting will be a huge pain. And the communication is not as easy as you can do in person.

Also some ideas/conversations sparks during casual talking, if remote, those small things will be missed.

"Meeting will be a huge pain"

Not sure if that's true - I work in a company that has a very flexible approach to remote working and pretty much every meeting we have has some people remote (or indeed I am remote) and I don't think it makes much difference to the quality of discussions.

You work for Cisco?

I didn't say meeting is impossible, there are a lot of solutions out there. But it is not the same quality as meeting with real person. The images are laggy, and audio is often here and there. And as the person remote, I feel like, it increases the distraction, so the quality of conversion is not the same as you might have if present in the meeting.

I just don't buy remote is the remedy to cost-cutting, it brings new drawbacks. Personally, I don't feel the same level of collaboration with my remote 'colleagues' than onsite ones. But it could be personal.

It's a cultural thing - you're just not set up to do it well. Image the problems working from home would solve: housing costs, high density living, pollution, no commute time, improved communities, improved family life.

We need a cultural shift.

It's only not the same quality if you're the only one who is off-site. But consider the hypothetical case where there is no central office, and everyone's working from home. Then you don't have to deal with the problem of terrible conference room microphones, since everyone has their own headset. You don't have to deal with not being able to see the whiteboard, because people use other collaboration tools.

As sibling commenters are saying, the terrible experience that off-site workers have today is because companies haven't invested in the infrastructure to allow off-site workers to collaborate in the same way as workers in the office. Slack can replace the hallway conversations. Shared Google Docs can replace white-boards. Skype can replace meeting rooms. You just have to invest in the infrastructure, both physical and cultural to make it happen. And, as a side benefit, it's a lot easier to record the outcomes of meetings with these new tools, which makes it much easier to go back and reference what people said.

I see what you're trying to say, but you need to understand that those "distractions" or "drawbacks" you refer to about remote workers also exist, differently, for office workers. This does sound personal and simply that your company (or your experience) doesn't have the infrastructure to properly support remote workers. Because of this, your experience of remote workers is skewed (understandably).

That would affect the remotes as well and doesn't set anyone up for a good working environment. If your desk were all wobbly, lighting dim and office space generally just lousy, you'd say the same thing about the office space and how it isn't conducive to a positive work environment.

I work remotely for an SF company and, honestly, I dislike making trips to head office sometimes. Why? Because the entire place is a distraction. I observe (and get dragged into) multiple coffee walks/chats a day that take up 20/30 minutes at a time. The constant distractions of an open plan office are something that office workers don't notice, but remotes do. I can get more work done in 8 hours at home that I feel I can do in three days in that office. I've spent most of my career in an office and only became a remote worker a few years ago, but it's clear to me now just how much of a distraction an office is. I would argue that this is already a more than justifiable benefit of having a larger remote workforce.

A large % of my colleagues are also remote, and it works great. Almost every meeting happens with at least someone on VC, and it works. In-person meetings happen in the office, but Slack has become our primary method of sharing ideas and having conversation. Ideas have definitely formed over lunch, but more of them form when there's an active conversation in a Slack channel.

All of your reservations are justified, though, because that seems to be the default thinking of many people who either haven't been remote themselves or who have had a less than stellar experience of remote working. I can honestly say that the majority of our remote force across different teams (eng, support, sales) are the best in the company. But remote working isn't for everyone, and there have been people who thought it was be perfect way to work, only to crash and burn because they couldn't handle it.

Ahhh, the old "ideas during casual talking" trope. In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch - for most companies, the concept of unexpected collaboration based on overhearing something in the office just isn't true and is mostly not required.

I'm sure that sometimes unexpected collaboration may happen that might have a small tangible benefit to a company but I can guarantee you that most companies do not need this and the benefits of a work from home culture on the whole city and America's general mental health will be better than whatever new feature you cooked up over your company provided lunch.

imagine the problems working from home would solve: housing costs, high density living, pollution, no commute time, improved communities, improved family life.

The odd piece of collaboration that may come out of lunch chat is really not worth the pain that our cities and resident workers are going through. Can't afford a decent sized house? Probably because everyone wants to be close to work so you're priced out. You'll feel the pain when you get married and want kids; very long commute or sub-standard living conditions, great choice...

Like you said, I'm sure small things will be missed but employees having a great standard of living is likely going to do the company more good than not. I do admit that we would need a cultural shift for this to really work though.

I did have that experience myself.

Me and colleague are talking about, back in last November, Paris attack thing. And we are working in the media sector, he just mentioned that we could use the user behavior stream to detect whether something big happens. Now it becomes a viral item detector, also providing real time metrics to other services.

It might not be significant, but it did evolve into something useful.

In response to your response (which I cannot reply to)- that's just one example. I did say that it may benefit some companies some of the time but I highly doubt that it's worthwhile enough to be a driver for EVERYONE to work from a central location in every company. That one time when something awesome happened at the office just doesn't outweigh the need to cut pollution, solve the housing crises and have better family lives.

America is experiencing its worst mental health and depression crisis ever, I would not be surprised if working conditions were a massive factor.

Companies should not live and die by water cooler conversations (and mostly don't).

You are talking the conversation far too extreme. No one is forcing EVERYONE to work every day onsite. No one is forcing you to give up your life, or pick a side in work vs home...

Merely, I just state remote has its drawbacks. There is a tradeoff. If remote is so superior, then everybody should already be doing it.

For me, what OP suggests feels like a myth, just too good to be true, by ignoring the potential frustration.

It's a serious issue. Just because you don't see it working that does not mean it cannot work. How else are we to solve the living standards issues? We can't all be 24 year olds forever!

>> If remote is so superior, then everybody should already be doing it.

I guess, you are missing here something very important. Onsite-work got entrenched in the society because of the earlier industrial revolution, which mainly involved working at factories on machines producing tangible things. There the concept of remote work, even for the higher-ups, was not even thinkable much. This onsite-work trend, unfortunately, got carried forward in the knowledge industry too.

What your parent is saying has a very large potential and his/her point is very important in this regard. The modern industry should give a serious try to remote working, it solves many, many problems of the modern day capitalism. It's good for both the workers and the employers and for the society as well.

"It's good for both the workers and employers"

It's good for_some_ workers. I find the increased housing costs to accommodate an additional office a net drain. The lack of work/life separation does nothing good for my stress.

As for nothing happening during lunch: my cohorts frequently grab a bite and pair on non-critical, but job enhancing, functionality. This type of interaction with others in the same problem space doesn't happen when you're lone wolfing it at home.

Work from home is great for some but it's not everyone's answer.

>>It's good for_some_ workers.

I do say, it is good for many workers in today's knowledge based industry. I have mentioned it earlier also.

As far as cohorts informal interaction, there are ways to facilitate that too: maybe a actual meeting once a week/month and then you can have private conversation over phone/mail/chat/telegram/whatsapp etc.

All good points. Since we agree neither is perfect for everyone I'm curious how many it would benefit. I guess one indicator may be the competition and availability of remote jobs. Where would someone even look something like that up?

It would benefit many from a standards of living perspective. The lack of high density housing and removal of urban sprawl would mean that your child will actually know what a nice back yard is rather than having to live above one family and below another; rather than having to hear upstairs use the bathroom at 2am. I didn't care about that when I was 22 and living full on party / work lifestyle but I do care now that I'm 30 and have a child. I really don't like missing my daughters bedtime just because some idiot crashed his car on the bridge (at least once per week) on the way home.

By not adopting work from home, you really are making peoples lives worse, just because that;s not you today, doesn't mean it won't be you at some point - wait until you need to buy a house within a reasonable commute to the office; a whole lot of money for no space and living with people banging around above you!

> In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch

That's nice, but probably trying to generalise your personal experience to everyone as though it were an immutable law isn't a good one. I've certainly had the opposite experience.

"Ahhh, the old "ideas during casual talking" trope. In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch - for most companies, the concept of unexpected collaboration based on overhearing something in the office just isn't true and is mostly not required."

I've done a lot of - perhaps even most - learning from talking to people who are better than me, whether it's over lunch, a drink, or during work. You can't disentangle casual chats and official meetings; in most companies you're not going to be allowed to just book an hour or two of meetings to discuss random stuff in the hope you'll learn something you might be able to apply to this project.

Hence needing a cultural change - we can get the same effect remotely if we actually try.

When I was a fresh grad, I also learnt a tremendous amount from the people around me; I don't doubt our ability to get the same effect remotely.

The issues we have with everyone wanting to live in massive urban areas (near work) are not less important then you needing to figure out how to learn from home, that's the type of self centred thinking that gives us high density housing, pollution, unaffordable housing, long commutes, strained family lives, broken communities and mental health issues (also known as commuting / working from a central office).

>high density housing, pollution

Low density housing and sprawl are actually worse for the environment btw. You have a clear bias against urban living. That's your opinion and that's totally ok, but the cultural trend is definitely back towards higher density urban living.

I'm a fan of periodic, 1-2 days a week remote work. But I don't like working on fully remote teams, and I've worked with managers who are very experienced and enthusiastic about it. Yes, remote working CAN improve quality of life, but it harms collaboration and communication and shifts a lot of burden onto the managers. This isn't cultural, it's simply what happens when you put people further apart.

To be clear, I dream of a day where collaboration remotely works really well. I'd like to live in a smaller city one day where I don't always have to worry about finding a job.

Like I said, cultural changes required. Urban sprawl is currently worse for the environment than high density because people can't work from home. Urban sprawl happens around cities because people want a house and want to be as near as possible to work.

Imagine if we moved from having large cities that people lived around to a series of smaller towns. The urban sprawl that we currently have would not be a problem.

You need to stop thinking in terms of how things currently are and look at how they could be. Your social centre could be your town, your work would mostly be remote, no more urban sprawl just so everyone can be as near as possible to one square mile of central business district.

If I didn't have to work in the city, I wouldn't be living anywhere near the city, I'd pick a nice town in the north near to some excellent surf breaks; why would I even be living within the urban sprawl if I didn't need to be in the city? We're killing our planet, destroying our families and ruining our mental health. Do you think the urban sprawl around london (known as greater london) would exist if people weren't forced to commute into London everyday?

" Do you think the urban sprawl around london (known as greater london) would exist if people weren't forced to commute into London everyday?"

London exists as it does today for historical factors, such as importing, manufacture etc. Only recently has it been possible for more than a tiny fraction of the population to work remotely, and even today that proportion is so low it would make no difference overall.

cultural change required. London is busy and expensive because people need to be there, if they didn't it wouldn't be!

If you don't work from home then clearly you'll have a commute; how long/expensive/stressful/environmentally damaging it is obviously depends on a number of factors. I don't work too far from where I live and I use public transport to get there, so I can read and listen to music, which means it's not remotely stressful. Working in an office means I can switch off when I leave; when I've worked from home I've got distracted so I feel like I should do more work to make up for it. People at home see me there and expect me to do non-work things because "it'll only take a minute".

I was talking about the `ideas via casual chat` thing, though, which is obviously entirely separate from any discussion about work/travel etc. It's different if you're remote because talking face to face is a different dynamic to talking over the phone/skype/irc/email etc. I mean I could sit and drink by myself at home and talk to other people who are also drinking alone at home; perhaps that's an environmentally way of relaxing after work; it would reduce drink-driving deaths, wouldn't it. It would also be a horrifically depressing insulating way of living and it's not for me.

I get the bus to work: 45 - 60 minutes to travel around 13 kilometres. I bough my two bedroom apartment for around 1 million aussie dollars, if I choose to live further away, I could have got a 4 bedroom house with a pool for $700,000, or a 3 bedroom house without a pool for $500,000. The prices are driven up as everyone wants to be as close to work as possible.

For my million dollars I get to hear upstairs go the bathroom, my child gets woken up in the early hours by upstairs walking around in high heels after a night out. Every building on the street has a minimum of 6 - 8 apartments within so there's never any peace and quiet. Sometimes the bus has so many people I have to stand for nearly an hour.

Sometimes someone will crash on the bridge which will make me an hour late home which means I miss my kids going to bed. Mental health issues here are through the roof, the stress of high density living is literally killing people through depression and hypertension.

My child doesn't even know what a back yard is, that's a foreign concept to her. The only saving grace is that we're near to two beautiful beaches, without that I think I would have had a mental breakdown.

The whole "it'll only take a minute" issue that you seem to suffer from goes back to my cultural changes, one the culture has moved to work from home, the current working from home complaints will mostly be addressed. Also, let's not compare being in an office to going out for a drink, you can still go out and drink in your town with your friends in your community, again, cultural changes required.

It sounds like you have perhaps a few issues of your own to deal with. I've always lived in/around london and I know others who do and we're not going mad. I know a bunch of people from outside the UK who live here and they'd hate to have to live outside London; it's like another world here compared to the sticks in terms of acceptance of foreigners, access to culture etc. Sure, sometimes there's a problem with the train/road, but so what? Whatyagonna do? Shift your whole life around just to try and avoid that?

I don't know anyone who lives immediately near me so why i'd want to go for a drink with them instead of my colleagues is something of a mystery to me. I mean, I don't drink anyway, but, you know, coffee or whatever. In many cultures you'd not go out for a drink, what with them being pointlessly expensive; you'd invite each other round to your own place; drink supermarket priced beer, smoke whatever etc without having to deal with randoms getting all legal.

What have half of your points got to do with anything?

Not knowing who you live around is because that's not within the culture, if your life was based around where you live rather then where you work (and was the same for everyone) I'm sure that would change.

Your whole point about going for drinks or inviting people round is irrelevant; the point is people will be able to build local friend groups rather than work friend groups.

"Whatyagonna do? Shift your whole life around just to try and avoid that?"

Well, my whole life gets flipped around everytime I can't et home to my kids before they sleep because of an incident on the tube or the roads.

I think you mostly missed my point - you looked at your life today and decided that working from home won't work for you - you're completely ignoring all of the issues with central working locations.

Someone claiming these are my problems is nonsense; a lot of people feel the same; we are in a mental health crisis and families are under massive strain because fathers are away from their children for so long. Nobody is saying that you have to change but a lot of people are saying that the current system is causing serious issues to living standards.

Your comment about having to shift your whole life around is unreasonable and shows you haven;t thought about this outside of your situation. Every father I speak to, every couple that can't afford a house near work that I speak to, they all agree. Housing crisis, family crisis, mental health crisis; they are all heavily contributed to by this issue.

I used to be 22 and living in shoreditch, I didn't care about these issues back then either. When I don't get home in time to see my kids before bed tonight because some idiot crashes their car and delays thousands of people, I'll just say to my wife WHATYAGONNA DO!??? Can't be flipping my life around!!!

Personally , i don't think the big silicon valley companies are interested in a great solution for the remote work problem(or in remote work in general) - or else we would have seen large r&d investments from them on that subject.

And i wouldn't be surprised most VC investors don't care for that either.

You are correct - there is no push from anyone significant on this - this is one of the few things I think the Government should intervene in, heavily incentivised a work from home culture to the point where we can get rid of central business districts (in their current form) in every major city.

Other than very long term costs savings (and nobody thinks really long term), there's no money to be made from a big cultural shift that makes workers lives better.

The big silicon valley companies don't need to care. They have deep pockets, and queues of kids round the block willing to work and live in cubicles for a chance to work with them joining every year.

The VCs don't care either, they want to keep their startups on a tight leash from Sand Hill Road.

For a bootstrapped startup that isn't tied to a Sand Hill VC, remote working is a viable option that gives them access to talent they wouldn't otherwise have.

Many of those problems could also be solved by adjusting zoning laws to increase density. Suburbs have a lot of problems aside from just commute times that can be solved by working from home.

The maintenance costs associated with the spread-out infrastructure required to support everyone having their own personal 1/4 acre of land cannot be supported by the tax base available in such a low density population. Most US cities could be much denser than they are with a higher quality of life and lower pollution if people could be located within walking distance of most of the places they need to go.

I'm not sure why you think commute times are only a problem in the suburbs. My wife and I are looking to buy a house and we can't afford anything near the office, which is in the middle of a large metropolitan area (the 2nd largest in the nation). If we buy further out, where we can afford, I'll have a very long commute, 100% of which will be within the city.

I never said long commute times are only a problem in the suburbs.

If you're staying within the city proper and still have a "very long commute" (which to me is 1+ hours, I'm not sure what the means to you) it sounds like the city is still insufficiently dense.

In my experience, the vast majority of people with long commutes are commuting from suburbs/exurbs into a city center. I'm sure there are some cities that are so spread out that one could have a long commute while still staying within the city limits, but that would imply that there are people even further out with even longer commutes from the suburbs.

The problem would vanish if we moved from city living to small town living. We only have city living because everyone needs to get to their office which created high density housing near the city centre and urban sprawl everywhere else; both of those things would not be a problem if we moved away from city living and focussed on smaller towns instead; that way we could still have services centralised to a local community that works for everyone rather than having millions of people in one place which cause extreme mental distress for many people (see the mental health crisis).

I commute through the city, if one person crashes their car it impacts thousands of people getting home on time to see their kids before bedtime, how is that a nice way to live?

That's exactly my point point. Nobody should be driving their car through a city.

As for mental health issues, some people like cities, some don't. Without the traffic it would probably be a lot more pleasant.

It's tough to have a successful small town without it growing into a city.

Agree - I've been thinking about what the city would be like if all cars (except taxis) were banned during rush hour. I'm struggling to see how it would lead to anything but a better public transport network and a better standard of living for most people that need to commute during busy hours.

In my experience, the American workforce is managed in a tight hierarchy, and management would not be happy to see their workers seeking out outside collaborations and coming up with ideas born out of random conversations. If any of those things happen to you, I would imagine you are more likely than not to get in trouble.

Another issue is that most Americans work from cubicle farms where conversations and unstructured meetings are actively discouraged. This is probably related to the previous point.

What country do you work in that's not America? I want to move there. OTOH, if you work in America, what country are you referring to that's not like this, and why aren't you working there?

> Ahhh, the old "ideas during casual talking" trope. In all my years I've never seen anything of significance come out of people talking over lunch

Depends on your job really, roles where creativity is required this sort of interaction is essential.

No it's not - there are very few companies that live and die by this - it;s not in any job spec I've ever seen and even if this is true for some companies, I never claimed this would work for all companies. You have cherry picked one thing from my overall argument.

> Meeting will be a huge pain.

VoIP exists. Video conferencing exists. Meetings are usually better when kept short, so the reduced/shortened meetings are a positive thing.

> And the communication is not as easy as you can do in person.

Remote working means you have to communicate via either text, audio, audio + video, or diagrams.. So the only thing you can't really do, is touch the other person. Im pretty sure most work places discourage that kind of "communication" anyway.

> Also some ideas/conversations sparks during casual talking, if remote, those small things will be missed.

Why, because you think remote workers don't have casual conversation? I worked for several years with a medium size company that had a couple of hundred staff all around the globe. I'd argue the amount of non project specific, but still technical discussion was higher than when I worked in an office.

> I worked for several years with a medium size company that had a couple of hundred staff all around the globe. I'd argue the amount of non project specific, but still technical discussion was higher than when I worked in an office.

And the good thing? When you're working remotely, you can tune out those conversations if you need to focus on something. Try that when people in your office decide to have a room-wide chat.

Research by Microsoft suggests that distributed development has no impact on various software quality measures (bugs, code churn, complexity, etc). See: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=1023...

Well of course I won't have any impact on code quality when I don't actually write any code, because I can't stay focused while working from home. I'll take a non-open plan office over WFH any day

That's a false choice I most cases, and msft generally had private offices anyway.

stop it. meetings aren't important. most of the time some dickhead is presenting shit or talking useless things. we've got tools like skype and zoom and whatever. quick and important decissions need communication, not meetings. and thanks to our devices we can communicate during the night, even, and steal everyones sleep.

I totally agree. The big costs are not in the perks but in the cost of locating everyone in the Bay Area. At GitLab we're remote only. You have to be thoughtful about organizing communication https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ but we like it and will promote it to other organizations https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-remoteonly-org/issues/1

During my job search I wanted to applied at Gitlab, sadly my niche is mobile development across all platforms and no mobile Gitlab app.

I'm sorry but indeed currently we don't have an official app. There are multiple community made ones https://about.gitlab.com/applications/

This is true in the aggregate, but there is substantive impact on culture, team unity, collaboration and all matter of things that happen when people are together.

I believe this is a consideration of many Sili-valley based companies that are opening engineering centers in Seattle. It is less expensive than the Valley/SanFrancisco (although costs are soaring), but you can still get the benefit of having unified teams.

Instead, Dropbox chose to cancel the commute support, to push employees to live in SF and spend more on rent

Inreresting that management decided to buy giant chrome idol and museum display before cutting back on employee transport and food.

This is obviously extremely off topic but I figure I may as well ask here by the off chance that someone from Dropbox or with contacts there could tell me which foundry was responsible for the chrome panda statue? From the few pics I've seen it looks like nice work.

I do some metal sculptural work myself as a hobby and try to follow other artists and foundries for inspiration. I would assume Dropbox used a local source and I'm not familiar with many in the Bay Area. I'm always looking for more to add to my list of shops worth following.

Apologies for the off topic question.

I assume you know that an economic approach is to make such sculptures from a softer material and then have the chrome applied. Not in your area but some examples: http://www.blach.de/blach-lackierung/chromlack/kunst/

Thank you for the link.

So about $480 a week per employee? What kind of perks are they getting?

Now for a rant. I know perks are suppose to help make companies attractive to potential employees they are trying to woo and boost morale. But I think it's crazy when I see the perks we get, while at the same time have to go begging for a mobile device to test on.

I'd certainly take 480 a week over 480 a week in perks.

Everyone says this. Problem is, no one ever talks about how much money they make. So when Dropbox bumps up your salary, you feel slightly happier in isolation, but it doesn't improve the company's visibility in any significant way.

Contrast this with perks. When Google starting giving all their employees free food, it only cost them $100/week/employee, but everyone talked about it, and how awesome Google's perks are. The amount of positive PR and word-of-mouth that they got out of it, far dwarfed any efficiency improvements they might have gotten by simply giving their employees a slightly higher salary.

The employees also don't pay taxes on the perks so it costs less than giving you the money to buy the things yourself

In the Netherlands, about everything besides coffee is seen as non-monetary compensation and is subject to income tax. Even lunch.

I'm sure the cost of setting up the kitchens (capital expenditure) and the cost of keeping them running (operation expenditure) negate this saving. Are there any published figures?

Well that brings a few other factors in as well.

1. The company can depreciate capital expenditures and deduct their costs from income whereas the employees would not reduce their taxes by doing a kitchen upgrade or going grocery shopping

2. The employees will spend more time at work because the kitchen with free prepared food is there instead of at a restaurant or their house so it technically doesn't even need to break even to be advantageous for the company

1. This reduces the overall cost by some small percentage but I doubt it actually makes it free

2. In theory this is correct, are there any studies that actually show productivity gains for companies in this respect? (I think the real reason for this is because a lot of the valley companies are in the middle of nowhere and therefore it's not really feasible for employees to go looking for food). I recently visited the HQ of my company in Silicon Valley and I was not impressed by how far it was from everything else.

Yet as an employee you can't redirect that money towards education, health-care, paying bills, holidays, buying gadgets or providing for your family in general, you know, things that actually matter.

So you get an open bar on Friday and massages. Wow. Awesome!

Open bar + unlimited guests was mentioned. I also believe I recall a stat that providing food service in SV is about $20 per person per day.

They are probably also including things like health insurance, vacation time, sick days, in that figure..."perks" that aren't really perks per se.

My guess is that for just about any tech software startup the only really meaningful cost is salaries. In a pie chart, it would dwarf everything else. Even lease costs for an extravagant office would be minuscule in comparison.

Pushing dinner later is just a signal for people that the company doesn't want them to have social lifes. Most cuttings from this list can be OK, but I think dinner time isn't strictly about cost cutting and I am not sure that's a good way to increase productivity either.

To the contrary, pushing back dinner is a savvy way to serve less meals. Most employees need to get home to family or other obligations. If the food is served at 6PM then many will eat and leave, which negates the benefits of employees staying later. Serving at 7PM means serving only those that can stay later, which is likely a smaller group.

For people who need to get back to family, they won't eat dinner even if it starts being served at 5:30 pm. I agree w/ the person before; moving dinner back is less about saving money and more about saying that you have to earn your dinner by working another hour.

Everyone at office is happy to gran some grub before going home. It relieves pressure on the home cooking effort, especially when the little kids don't eat grown-up food anyway

I haven't ever brought free food outside in a software company, although I could have (except when going out to the nearby park for lunch with a colleague). I felt it immoral. I feel that the price to pay for the food is to talk with colleagues (team building, even if it's not about work). It could be just disallowed (as a form of cost cutting)

I suspect it has as much to do with getting the company ready for IPO as much as anything else. Plenty of startups continue on with their "lavish perks".

Also, I'm skeptical of the 25k/employee/year estimate.

Source: An acquaintance runs a large group over there.

lets assume food (lunch, snacks, coffee, soda, water, carbonated water) runs $25/day. That's high, based on a previous employer, but let's run with it.

   $25 * 5 * 50 = $6,250

What the hell are they spending $25k/year/employee on? I share your skepticism.

Edit: I can't fully tell this story, because I remain anonymous on HN after a prick / top 10 poster here threatened my employer over my opinions on software development. But the partial story is still funny.

A former employer had a cool toy in the office. It was something people noticed. There was a techcrunch story with wankers going on about wasted money, extravagant bullshit, the usual. The speculation on cost ranged from $25k to $100k.

I had to register to point out that actual cost was well under $1k. How do I know? Friends/coworkers and I built it over the course of a couple evenings with tools borrowed from an employee's father. Parts ran well under $1k on amazon, even including the couple of six packs of beers we drank during construction.

Maybe they are including things like health care, 401k, etc? With that it wouldn't be hard to cross $25k.

True, but that's a strange definition for perk then.

Those are benefits.

There's an important distinction between benefits and perks, which is something you sometimes have to explain to startups looking to hire when you ask them about benefits.

I agree that one more commonly calls those benefits. But is there a bright line? It seems to vary a fair bit by country and situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_benefit

Regardless, I'd still guess the $25k number includes both.

I think they are...they do lump them together on this page: https://www.dropbox.com/jobs/perks

Did you read the article?

It mentioned unlimited guests to meals, with an open bar. As well as something like a gym washing service. It's clear in the article that there were more than meals, with these given as specific examples of cuts.

I did.

You'd have to average every employee having a guest for every meal to just double meal costs. Believe that? No? Even then the above math still leaves you well shy of $25k.

How much do you think gym laundry costs? The wash & fold near me costs a couple dollars per pound. Your gym shorts, shirt, and socks do not weigh much.

because I remain anonymous on HN after a prick / top 10 poster here threatened my employer over my opinions on software development

Which kinds of opinions were they?

I found the $25K per employee per year estimate difficult as well. However, having been at Google while things were being 'scaled back' I did get a chance to see how some money was not being well spent.

I am constrained from giving exact details however snacks (at least at the time) ended up going through a number of distribution "hands" each adding a bit of mark up which was doubling or tripling the cost to the company. At the scale of their consumption direct connections to manufacturers would have cut a ton of expense out of the snacks.

Still, if we assume that the number does not include the wages for 11 paid days off and 2 weeks of vacation, (nominally "perks") 25,000 / 50 weeks is an even 500 a week or $100 a day in consumables. Paying for additional staff for massages etc adds up quickly but its tough to hit those numbers.

Discussion from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11650835

"Save more [because we need another Chrome panda and we value it more than we value your job.]"

Seriously that's one dev's salary.

Theoretically, one dev should be returning more value than the panda.

A Panda. An animal that once thrived but now closer to extinction due to its diminishing habit and slow reproductive cycle. I would never want that as my mascot.

Winter is coming..

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