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Comment by eitally | Hacker News Reader

This is the equivalent level of pettiness as removing free coffee from offices.

Many government offices had no free coffee already. This was the case in the mid-teens at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which houses the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), where the federal CTO and CIO sit, and the National Security Council, just to name a couple.

I've seen news articles like "here the government spent $5000 on a party" like it's some crazy story of wasted money. And then it was like their annual Christmas party, with 100+ people paying less than ~$50 per plate and they had to bring their own beer. Like, hardly affluent spending.

Or "government sent their workers to this hotel on tax payers' dime!!" with a picture of some suite, and turns out they just attended a conference about their area and they only saw the conference rooms.

I don't get why spending money on government workers is so frowned upon. They deserve conferences, a nice office and some social stuff just as much as anyone. My Christmas parties as a government consultant cost probably 5x as much, never heard anything, and also paid with tax payer money, just through a layer of privatization...

I spent the first 9.5 years of my career at a large defense contractor. We never had free coffee.

Just one person taking a coffee break to go get coffee obviates any savings. The free coffee isn't there for the staff, it is there to save the org money.

The federal government is so worried about the appearance of spending excess taxpayer money that employees set up water clubs and coffee clubs where the employees all chip in for a water cooler and a coffee machine every month.

If only they extended this frugality to not hiring 10 people to do a job that could be done by 2.

It does not matter how efficient they are, people like you will a use them of inefficiency.

So, this particular contractor was big into efficiency and cost savings, to the point that we were all required to do a project where we made something more efficient and documented how much money we saved in doing so. The whole thing was mostly bullshit, but one of the interesting things I learned by doing it was that saving engineering time was essentially $0, because from the company's perspective we were all salaried, and as long as the time we were saving was charged to the same contract we would be charging our other work to, it didn't matter.

From that perspective, which I do not agree with, the cost of coffee breaks was also $0, while the cost of providing it was not, so no coffee. On one program I was on we at least managed to get facilities to install a commercial Bunn machine for us, but we were still responsible for buying all the supplies.

Under that simplistic model there is no space for higher quality, higher reliability, etc. Then "efficiency" is one dimensional and you have basically no agency. The cost model should be agreed upon collectively.

-2000 lines

You're right, and there were definitely situations where we could have done things better, but didn't, because the impetus wasn't there. It was really frustrating, and I wish I'd been able to get out sooner.

> -2000 lines

Not sure what this is a reference to, but one of the fun things I tripped over while there was that code changes were valued on dollars per LOC. Changesets with net negative LOC were... problematic. I think I once had a change that was near -2000 LOC net.

https://folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

"We need you in the office for CoLlAboRaTIon." "OK, we'll have coffee after our morning standup." "Absolutely not."

And coffee itself is chiefly a productivity aid, to benefit the business.

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