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Comment by DancesWTurtles | Hacker News Reader

> No one on the board or the executive staff was trying to be stupid. But to save $10,000 or so, they unintentionally launched an exodus of their best engineers.

Maybe the insight here is "keep your engineers happy, it's important". But I believe there is more to it on this story. The engineers heard "we could give you soda when we were small, now we're big, we cannot give you soda" and, to the rational mind, that makes no sense.

Maybe they left because they were sitting on a precarious equilibrium and the free sodas tilted the balances. But I think it was also that the engineers saw the sign on the wall, and thought "this guys have lost their collective corporate mind, let's bail before they have any more bright ideas".

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I think there’s something a bit deeper going on, and it’s implied in the post. Small companies (on the whole) are more fun than big ones for a certain kind of person. At a small co. you get to wear a lot of hats and have a much more holistic feel for the business. As the business grows, you get more specialized, and restricted. Some people, and I am one, get bored and frustrated in that sort of environment. Things getting more “corporate” is a signal that transition is happening, so the people who don’t like that kind of environment leave. Some companies handle the transition better than others.

> At a small co. you get to wear a lot of hats and have a much more holistic feel for the business

I like the hats.

Once, a (junior) coworker asked what I expect from the job.

I figured it was 6 things:

- Money, of course

- Interesting work

- Learning, or at least putting good stuff on my resume

- Ego, wanting to say "_I_ built that"

- Control, wanting to say "I built that _with my tools_" or getting to work on "_my_" projects

- Socialization

I ranked them in order of how concretely the company offered them to employees.

Money is the most concrete, it's in every contract. Socialization is the most abstract, the company can't make any promises about that.

The middle ones were fuzzy. The company's product is somewhat interesting, and won't change often, but learning, ego, and control were not in any contract. These were things I quietly extracted under the table because I just really wanted them.

I would like to reify them. I'd like to say to my manager "I'm going to work on some pointless internal tool nobody needs, just so I can play with this new language. Then when I realize we could never deploy it, I'll feel better about using an older language on our real product. I can't control my inner child, and letting me play with blocks and Play-Doh is cheaper for us than hiring a company therapist or firing me."

A couple times my boss' boss teased us about "10% time, like Google does", and it never manifested. I've just been taking it anyway. Probably less than 10%. My last performance review was great and every month they give me money, so I haven't been caught. Maybe it works because, unlike Google, I'm not trying to write a new chat app every time I need a promotion. I'm just occasionally doing things nobody told me to do, based on my intuition, to satisfy some sub-conscious wannabe hacker drive.

One more thought - Sometimes I wonder if manager-types read these threads and think, "Okay, so when it's time to stop being a startup, we drop the free soda and replace the whiny unherdable hacker cats with work-a-day copy-pasters. All according to plan."

So I wonder, maybe if I ever stop liking my company, it doesn't mean the company's bad, it means I just need to find another startup and ride it for 4 or 5 years until it gets too big again.

What part of "free soda doesn't scale" is irrational? I get that it signals a change in management priority -- specifically a change away from prioritizing staff and toward prioritizing money -- and I'd probably leave too. But I don't see how you have to lose your mind to achieve that perspective.

> What part of "free soda doesn't scale" is irrational?

All of it.

Free soda for 10 people is hard. They have different tastes. There are too many things to keep enough refrigerated at the same time to make sure you hit soda rush times of the day. And you're probably running to a local grocery store, at least sometimes, to make sure you don't run out.

With 100 people, you've probably settled into something more standardized, no more special Puerto Rican pineapple soda for that one person with the interesting tastes. Everything can be delivered by the same one or two vendors. You know roughly how much you need and when - much more predictable. And you have more fridges now, constantly stocked with more soda. Moreover, the free soda now costs less per person.

Etc.

The only problem with free soda for a big corp is that people are more likely to take the mick and take more than their fair share, as they’re less likely to feel obligated to the company to be reasonable.

> more than their fair share

There's no such thing.

There's a fairly low natural limit to how much soda one human can drink. Yes if they're dragging pallets out to resell on the street that might be an issue - an issue of the company not paying enough such that hocking loose cans is worth it for their employees.

“free soda” doesn’t have to do with scaling, or being small, or anything other than what a company is willing to pay for their employees really.

A company cutting employee perks without further explaining what employees will get in exchange is irrational and being stupid. I mean even drastic lines like “you get to keep your job that otherwise we would cut” are usually explicitly stated to try to convince the employees there’s something in for them.

Our next "funding round" is your soda.

We decided to be hostile to you, soda-drinker, personally, we are some combination of tremendously greedy and out of money, and the trend is towards more bright ideas of this sort.

You're working very hard. Now and then, you grab a free soda. You work so hard that the corporation has a chance to grow. What is your reward for all that hard work? The chance to pay 50c for the previously free soda. From this point of view, there is nothing rational about it.

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