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.
Broadway rent for an office with 0 need to be near New Yorkers is the main problem.
I mostly agree, but it says a lot about a company's command of their expenses.
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 ;)
...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.
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....
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...)?
Are you not familiar with the addage: "The success of your company is inversely proportional to the number of Aeron Chairs you have"
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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.
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. :)
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'.