Hacker News Reader

Comment by CWuestefeld | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how we got a cultural thing where coffee is usually expected to be provided free, but other beverages fall into a different class.

I assume that if it was provided from dispensers like at McD's, it would be similar in expense to coffee.

View on HN

Coffee is extremely popular, and too easy and cheap to meter when produced on site. Soda costs more and more hassle to buy (in cans/bottles), is extra work to make cheaply (install and maintain a tap), and mostly is grossly unhealthy and most people (outside of coder stereotype) don't want it at work.

SodaStream-style device fits the coffee mold, but it's less popular and not traditional.

I don't have numbers, but my expectation is that cost is of the same order of magnitude. I don't think coffee is all that cheap. I'm thinking of all the problems I've seen with the plumbing leaking, the machine being left on and burning requiring extensive cleaning, broken pots, and so forth, all on top of the material expense. Soda doesn't have to deal with the heat, but it does have pressure, so that probably kinda balances out.

When I worked for Intel, the coffee was absolutely not free. The only freebies were filtered water and toilet paper.

It never bothered me that much, but when I joined a company with freebies, it was like a breath of fresh air.

Coffee is free at Intel. Or was, back when people worked in offices.

Not if you're a green badge it isn't.

Contractors don't get perks like that anywhere, thanks to Vizcaino v. Microsoft. Withholding resources afforded to permanent employees is weird and counterintuitive, but it's how employers demonstrate compliance.

I think a lot of that changed after I left. (In 2005-2007) It just felt petty to have to use a coffee vending machine.

Recently joined a company with legit soda machines(the fancy ones with exotic stuff like cream sodas), slim jims, ice cream, cookies, cakes and which buys lunch for the engineers every weekend. It's amazing. I came from a place where you had to pay 2 $ for a soda!

It's definitely one of the things that you don't realize when you don't have it, but when you do it's like heaven. It's really helped me get more work done since I can snack away and it encourages me to get up for walks around the office.

Years ago (like, 1993 or so), our college CS class visited Jones Farm. One of the stops on the tour was a break room. All of the drinks were free at the time, whether it was coffee or coca cola. One of the engineers there remarked that at Microsoft only the caffeinated drinks were free. LOL. I just about believe it.

Eh, there's a downside to freebies, which is curation.

No matter how luxurious and all-encompassing, your free corporate fridges are not the supermarket, your free corporate cafeterias are not an east coast diner. They don't have everything you might want, just a decent selection.

We're deep in first world problems here, but there's a certain frustration to always drinking the drink that doesn't quite hit the spot, to searching the cafeteria menu for the least bad menu option. At least when you are paying the money yourself in the wider world, you can actually pick what you want.

Did you ever consider contacting the people responsible for the selection and making a request? They were probably just going by their best guess.

> At least when you are paying the money yourself in the wider world, you can actually pick what you want

Office vending machines have the same problem. If I want a specific item with me, I bring it.

people really don't understand what a blessing it is to not have sodas be free. that kind of culture with an expectation of it (and 'snacks') being free will create a lot of fatness in the industry

You want to feed your employee healthy foods because healthy bodies are more productive.

Also health insurance costs.

Coffee is a productivity increaser.

as is caffeinated soda

Not as much as you'd think; for me, at least, the sugar crash counteracts the caffeine.

There are a lot of caffinated seltzers now that don't have any sugar but do have flavoring and CO2

> caffinated seltzers...that don't have any sugar but do have flavoring and CO2

I think you've just defined sugarfree energy drinks.

I mean, some brands such as "Aha Sparkling Water" literally sell them as caffeinated seltzer instead of energy drinks.

https://www.caffeineinformer.com/caffeine-content/aha-sparkl...

Fucking hipsters.

I once heard that Microsoft subsidized caffeinated soda, but you had to pay for the caffeine-free options. That may just be an old wives' tale.

I'm pretty sure that's not true (worked at Microsoft in the 2000s).

Talking Rain was a popular caffeine-free soda there.

To be fair, I was told this back in the early 90s. It is the kind of policy that could easily come and go, maybe a couple times, in 10 years.

And it turns some people into jerks. (It has similar effects to cocaine.)

While the effects may be on the same spectrum, I don't know how comparable the two actually are. Maybe I should start my day with a line instead?

> Maybe I should start my day with a line instead?

Bad idea.

Once, when I was less than a year out of school, I was in a design meeting with two of the most senior engineers on the project. They were WIRED, difficult to reason with, and sent me on an obviously wrong direction. I thought they drank 4-5 cups of coffee.

A few hours later I realized that the nonsense email that I got 10 minutes before the meeting, from the department head, titled "Lines in the conference room" meant that they probably snorted cocaine right before the meeting.

About a week later I had to redo all of my work using the exact design I pushed for. 2-3 weeks later I was relieved when I was laid off.

---

If you want to legally and safely know what cocaine feels like, take 600mg of caffeine pills (3 No-Doze) as soon as you wake up in the morning, on an empty stomach. Don't do it before you need to do something important, or if you're doing something where you could loose your temper. Also, don't do it if you have heart problems.

Oh, I never would, and in that case I have no idea why people would do cocaine at all, because when I have too much coffee I get full of unsourced anxiety and the need to poop.

So is tea, and it’s partly why tea was introduced to factory workers during the industrial revolution.

https://baristaguild.coffee/blog/leaves-beans-of-history-the...

Two thirds of Americans (European numbers are similar, higher if anything) drink coffee every day, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, an addiction. I'm one of them for sure.

It's easier to just give people their fix, and there's a long history of this, paid coffee breaks were an early concession unions demanded during industrialization.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com