I don't think the soda cost per person would be different for 20 people though, so it seems a weird thing to raise the eyes about.
Think of it from the management perspective. It’s not about the soda, it’s about the “we’re giving this middle manager $1million a year to pay for his/her employees now, and we sort of don’t know what we get in return”. In startups nobody has time to think about that sort of thing, you simply do what’s necessary to get stuff done, and, the amounts are smaller. As size grows, so does the perceived need for bean counters.
I say perceived because I’ve never personally experienced a company who didn’t go that road, so I can’t say what would happen if you continued to trust all your employees and middle managers rather than start monitoring and structuring them, but I do know that a lot of the business intelligence and documentation systems that I have seen showed little actual value once they got disrupted by covid and everyone working from home.
Basically: who cares, the company will live or die based on products and funding rounds, and you're just trying to make the company not die at this stage.
But to an established company trying to make money, 0.7% of revenue is a huge (seriously, huge) line item in a CFO's accomplishment list. Consistent profitability is built on a long, grueling ladder of tiny incremental bean-countings. And to an established company trying to make money, that's where the focus turns. And those are the employees who get rewarded.
It's not that either side is "right", it's that they have opposing priorities and that growing companies need to manage that tension and not just give in to the temptation to lock the soda machine.
Ok, that seems pretty weird right there, 0.7% overhead of an early stage startup is now 0.7% of revenue even though we agree it is just increasing as the same rate of hires?
In other words while each new programmer hired will drink the same amount of soda as the others it should be evident that the percentage of revenue would be decreasing, otherwise they have some serious problems that getting rid of free soda will not fix.