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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Do you work in software? I have never heard of a software company not providing free coffee. The increased productivity completely outweigh the couple dollars for the hot bean water.

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> I have never heard of a software company not providing free coffee.

Countless software development companies exist in offices without so much as a break room (much less a kitchen). SMH

I have never encountered such a company in software or hardware engineering across multiple countries.

I didn’t like the skiing or whatever bit in the article, but coffee machines, etc are pretty universal

Closest I've come to no office coffee at a tech company is one that just had a Keurig machine and the very cheapest K-cups they could find. The only ones that even had a flavor were the ones labeled "dark roast", and that flavor was very bad. I'm pretty sure an electric kettle and a jar of instant coffee would have given better results. That place had 500 people and was growing fast. Nowhere near SV, though.

I guess clean up for those is easier?

traditional drip coffee and shelf stable creamer was the norm when I started.

Big tech is not all "free" and perks, and it depends dramatically on company or even just the division. There's the the big one of Google, with all its free food, etc but the other big tech don't do that - they have accumulated some free snacks and sodas, etc in recent years but they still basically charge for all food from the cafeterias. The free food at Google or startup-land isn't a huge selling point in practice - it simply is not worth much relative to the salary/wage comp.

This is unheard of inside the Silicon Valley bubble. In our defense, it also doesn’t make sense that an employer doesn’t provide it for free. Coffee is cheap. It also adds productivity.

One reason some companies dont is because they have significant NON tech work force also in the same building, and they dont want to provide perks for X that they dont for Y in the same building.

If the first 3 stories of your building are call center level employees who make barely better than minimum wages and the top floor is your well paid software engineers, then facilities just says "no free coffee" to everyone.

Though even in places that you would think would be stingy give out free coffee and snacks more and more. Most of the purse string people like having nice snacks too. Even small business owners will cater meals and buy nice coffee because they get to have a nice meal that counts as a business expense and their premium coffee blend they get on order and have every day gets to count as one too at that point.

> non-tech

A Stinging reminder that if your company is not primarily a tech company, IT is a cost center; the perks there are for normie employees and not to retain tech talent

The main thing I’ve seen is if the local executive uses the coffee. If he does, it’s free for everyone.

If the executive break room is hidden and secret, then there may be a lack of free coffee.

The cost to benefit ratio of coffee is so high that it makes sense to provide it to the whole office regardless of whether or not they’re IT

Then you're not looking very far outside your own bubble, because as someone like OP who doesn't have the pleasure of working in top tech companies in silicon valley, I never had free coffee at any place I had to show up at.

Heck, even being paid decently at those places was far fetch let alone all those perks.

You’re deep in the trenches if you’ve only worked in places that don’t even provide free coffee and teas.

No, I live in a place where the claim to technology fame is "We have an IBM support office here, we're a tech hub!"

Heck the biggest thing tech wise to come out of my city is founder and former CEO of GitHub Tom Preston-Werner being from here.

To elaborate the biggest "tech" company I worked at where I had to show up was John Deere. They had coffee, but it was just a Starbucks directly in JDIS (the "department" that handled software dev) and you had to pay to get a cup.

I've worked at a few places where the provided "free" coffee was just what one of us decided to bring in and share in the kitchen.

I have also yet to work anywhere where the added "agitation" of getting folks talking in the kitchen wasn't the largest benefit of having said kitchen. (That is, productivity was probably lower, but it increased the odds of a productive conversation happening. Nothing guaranteed, of course.)

> Do I work in software?

I sure do. Companies big and small. Some of them at one time offered free coffee but the bean counters took away that perk as a cost cutting measure.

Literal bean counting, eh?

Interestingly, Atlassian (somewhat) famously didn't have coffee. They offered free breakfast and lunch, unlimited ice cream, more booze than you'd ever want, etc. But their philosophy with coffee was that they wanted you to form groups and leave the office for a few minutes a couple of times a day. It was supposedly a method of bonding and spontaneous collaboration. In my opinion it worked well.

Dell doesn't

My time at Dell immediately brought this to mind. No coffee offered other than overpriced you had to purchase from the cafeteria. I brought in my own espresso and coffee maker, and got chastised by facilities as a fire hazard. We weren't even allowed to put in the tiny kitchenette, which was a sink with plastic utensils in a couple of drawers. Ridiculous.

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