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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

It's a few years old, but here's their office:

https://www.businessinsider.com/pictures-meetup-office-tour-...

Filled with things like a fully stocked beer fridge, and I saw many Aeron chairs.

Their office on Broadway in NYC is probably around $64 a square foot, so if it's leased, they're probably paying over $100k a month.

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Beer and chairs are not a cost worth mentioning.

Broadway rent for an office with 0 need to be near New Yorkers is the main problem.

> Beer and chairs are not a cost worth mentioning.

I mostly agree, but it says a lot about a company's command of their expenses.

Does it? An Aeron chair runs like $1000. Probably less in bulk. <1% of an engineer's salary. It's in the noise.

Is it? The parent poster was specifically trying to say there is signal -- vs just noise -- in purchases like aeron chairs.

Please see my other comment:

Are you not familiar with the addage: "The success of your company is inversely proportional to the number of Aeron Chairs you have"

---

We designed and built out (first dot com bubble) an office in SF for Quokka Sports.

They got a crap ton of VC$ and they built out this really nice brick and timber office, fish-bowl conf rooms etc...

They crashed and burned BEFORE they were even able to move into this amazing office, near the Ferry Building in SF....

I had to go there and take a bunch of pics of the newly built office, but which was never moved into.

They had a FUCKING BOATLOAD of Aeron chairs... all stacked up to the ceilings in all the conference rooms.

Those chairs at the time were ~$2,000 a piece - and they had like ~500 of them or so....

So, that used to be an actual measurement of fiscal responsibility in startups 20 years ago; How many Aeron Chairs did you buy with VC Money.

They are even cheaper when you buy them from failed startups. Used chairs are like used cars; they work great, but they lose 80% of their value when you drive them off the furniture delivery truck.

eBay is filled with these. I bought one (not an Aeron, but a Teknion Contessa which I like better) for $300 from eBay and the proprietor brought it to my apartment at 9am the next day. If I ever start a company with an office, I will just get a mishmash of those. Essential to the creation of software, and costs less than a couple hours of engineering time.

(Aerons are great chairs and are about the same price on eBay. Plus these people with listings on eBay usually have a stash in a warehouse somewhere and will let you go look at them and buy them in bulk. Yes, I do sometimes wonder where they all come from, but in New York, you don't ask questions you don't want to know the answer to ;)

Yeah. I quite like the company I work for, and they do a lot of things right on this front, and cut no corners on developer machines, extra monitors, etc, but...

...they went for really crap chairs. I don't really understand the logic. They're uncomfortable, and they're falling apart after a couple of years. The amount of time the engineering team has spent talking about them, complaining about them, and stealing still-working ones from other desks when theirs breaks has probably cost them 5 times what actual good chairs would have in lost productivity.

I think it's just sticker shock from the chair manufacturer's website. The 30" monitor is the same price everywhere. The chair is $3000 and has a 19 week lead time on the website... or it's $300 from some random eBay seller.

A company doesn't lose control of their spending the first time they incur expense that's 1% of an employee's salary.

It happens the fortieth time they do it - but the logic is the same as the first time they do it.

Then all of a sudden it's a $$$$ chair at a $$$$ desk with a $$$$ computer and a $$$$ screen and a $$$$ company phone and $$$ in snacks and $$$ in soft drinks and $$$ in beer and $$$$ in lunches and $$$$ in dinners and $$$$ in training and $$$$ in conferences and $$$ in free laundry and $$$$ in parking and $$$$ in the annual corporate ski retreat and $$$$$ in premium office space, and of course we extend the same benefits to the janitors and receptionists, they're employees too, and of course we drink beer and play foosball on company time that's team-building....

The chair lasts much more than a year. 12 year warranty.

If you have a decent CFO, all that would probably be single-digit percentage of salary costs, and you'd know what digit it is. It's not rocket surgery to know all these costs. If you don't, get a decent CFO :)

Premium office space OTOH can really hurt. I am still wondering why so many companies suffer SF office space prices only for their workers to commute into SF because they can't afford SF living costs either. Maybe stop hurting each other and just relocate within 20-30 miles where it's less insane (though still quite insane by non-SV standards...)?

Just because the finance team has an eating disorder, doesn't mean I should have to go on a diet. Investing top dollar in a chair, monitor, work machine, light snacks and drinks is plenty. I'm not the one asking for new offices and sponsored ski retreats, give me a break.

Furniture isn't a big deal because it's not a reoccurring expense. The problem is hiring more people than you need and then having to order even more expensive furniture that you don't need. If you have a small business that only needs 20 people then buying 20 chairs just doesn't matter. But if VCs steer you into hiring 70 more people for the sake of growth then of course all that furniture is going to bog you down.

Disagree. Good chairs are one of the best investments you can make in a tech co (Want people at their desks working? Give them nice desks...it’s peanuts in the grand scheme) And beer, Red Bull, etc are rounding errors. A good engineer costs $150+ and another $50+ in overhead. Let’s presume perks like beer and red bull costs at the super high end $1k/year/FTE. You’re increasing costs by 0.5% or less but building an atmosphere people want to work in.

> I mostly agree, but it says a lot about a company's command of their expenses.

To me it says they either a) value their employees, or b) want to look like a.

Either one makes for a better workplace than 'justify every time you used the copier in the last 2 weeks, and have the spreadsheet updated with that info by COB'.

Not really. If you pay a person six-figures for (hopefully) multiple years as a developer, spending $1K one-time for a decent chair (that also can be reused if that person leaves) and how much? let's be really generous, $50 per week on beer? - which would be less than 1% of the cost of the salary by the most generous calculation - doesn't seem like something you should cut corners on. And I don't think anybody spends nearly close to $50 per week per person on beer. These things are pocket change compared to salary costs. Cutting costs on them is like buying a Mazerati but asking that the windshield cleaning liquid would be of the cheapest brand because you're cutting costs.

I don't think I could disagree more. See, eg: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear... (And this comment in particular: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...)

Or: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-09/why-getti...

Or especially: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2013/05/introducing-lefkowitzs-la...

Nice chairs and free snacks are a trivial expense, and are very helpful for generating a specific type of company culture (eg, if important people have nice chairs, and everyone has nice chairs, then we're all, on some level, important. Trivial, but these things matter).

Cutting them either means:

1. The company is going bust as we speak. They've either already made meaningful cuts (ie, firing people) or they're about to start, and they're now now doing the metaphorical equivalent of stealing pennies from fountains to try and make rent. You should leave for somewhere not imploding.

2. The company culture is changing, and it has been deemed important to remind engineering that they aren't that important. Making sure important people have nicer chairs than uninmportant people is an easy way to demonstrate this. Again, you should leave before the company finishes turning into a Dilbert-esque hell.

Either way, cutting snacks will not, under any circumstances, fix whatever is wrong (again, they're too cheap) and it's usually a leading indicator of bigger problems.

So when you say:

> It says a lot about a company's command of their expenses.

I sort of agree - it tells you they have no command of their expenses. :)

Fully stocked fridge, office decor, and Aeron chairs are either relatively small recurring expenses or moderate one-time expenses.

Servers, rent, and salaries are the real culprits.

Servers? I don't know how many total members there are but they are running 140k groups? That doesn't sound like you need a to pay Amazon millions of dollars to run it.

Can this meme die already? Durr Google is just a static webpage with a textfield. Why do they need X engineers lmao

You're not seeing a slight difference between a search engine indexing the whole web and a calendar with signups and comments? Yes, I know they do a bit more than that, but let's keep it in perspective.

What at meetup requires hundreds or thousands of servers?

It's a bit more than just a calendar. Thousands maybe not, but hundreds - I wouldn't be surprised, if you count also dev/staging/QA ones especially.

The point isn't the expenses, as much as those kind of luxuries say a lot about a company's fiscal values.

It's nice to realize I am living in luxury by just having a tolerable chair that doesn't give me a permanent injury and some beer in the fridge.

A sibling comment explained it better than I did, but it's not the comfortable chair or the beer or the lunches or the foosball table. It's the slippery slope of unchecked spending. Plus while an Aeron is a great chair, you can find a lot of great chairs for at least half the price (including used Aerons)

Why you assume it's necessarily unchecked? What you are complaining about are very basic things. Nobody is talking about giving employees daily foot massages, hiring celebrity chefs from Michelin-starred restaurants and having an olympic pool in the middle of the office. Such things could happen, but that's not what we're talking about here. A comfy chair and a fridge with some beers is pretty basic - and not really that expensive. Sure, everything should be in moderation - but what is described it perfectly moderate picture and not some excess luxury. If anything, if I see the company is starting to try to save money on chairs and buy cheap-and-crappy ones, I'd probably look for another job, because there's trimming fat and there's cutting the bone, and proper office setup is definitely the bone.

These benefits are available to all employees at all levels though. Why are people so set on trying to eliminate one of the few benefits even the interns can get to enjoy?

Why on earth would I ever want to work at a company that doesn't value my posture, reduced risk of RSI or the possible ideas/innovation that can come from me chatting/bonding with my coworkers over a beer.

It's a drop in the bucket compared to executive ubers, flights and hotels.

One of the places I worked, I remember talking with the admin. She was responsible for ordering food to keep the kitchen stocked. It was a few coffee machines, and a rack full of snacks. No beer, no drinks. IIRC she said it cost something on the order of $50-75k/year, and this was for an office of maybe 150 people or so.

I guess that amount of money is small compared to some engineers' salaries but I was surprised by how expensive it was for coffee & snacks.

The moment coffee goes I go. So you could say it's more expensive not to pay for it.

$50k/year per 150 people is 1$/day per person. How is that expensive?

150 people is a lot. Their payroll and benefits probably cost $10 - $15 million per year.

$50k/year looks like a lot, but imagine you lose an equivalent of just one person out of 150 for not having it - e.g. in people leaving and not being immediately replaced, training costs, time costs of going into a corner coffee-shop to get some joe and returning 1.5 hours later, costs of not being able to hire top people because they like to be provided coffee, etc., etc. You'll see very quickly how it is not a wasted money at all.

I hope Coronavirus kills open offices.

I'm pretty sure meetup vacated the broadway location in December.

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