The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)
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Then one day a guy came in with a hand cart, loaded the coffee machine on it, and rolled it away. A week later the layoffs started.
The lesson here isn't that there's something intangible or magic about free sodas or coffee. It's that when you used to give out free sodas and coffee, and then you stop, you're telling everyone in the company that business isn't as good as it used to be. Beverages are an easy thing for the bean-counters to get approval to cut, so when times get tough, they get cut first. But they're also a small line item, so while they're the first thing to get cut, they're usually not the last.
In other words, the free sodas are the proverbial canary in the coal mine. When they die, it's time to get out if you don't want to die with them.
This is why, when I visit clients these days, I make a point of going with them to their break room to get some coffee before our meeting starts. If their beverage situation has been upgraded since my last visit, they're doing well. If it's been downgraded, I know to be on guard for bean-counters coming after my relationship with them.
Take, for example, Tumblr, which right now is a pretty big success. Just a month ago, they laid off their entire editorial team. Who knows if it was at all related to the Yahoo purchase, or if it was a decision made because Tumblr really need to cut expenses? But sometimes companies change course and cut because of ostensibly responsible financial concerns.
In the case when an exciting company has to trim (but not just die), how should it handle the case of having a fancy coffee machine and possibly saving a job? It seems it would be a bit awkward if the company laid people off but kept all of its original ostentatious perks.
Since the process of layoffs generally involves a rank-and-yank, the people who remain are precisely the ones who have the option of working elsewhere. They can generally (depending on the location) get an offer within a day.
Companies just see an easy line item savings without thinking of the impact on the employees they desperately need to hold onto. On top of any potential insult to the employees, the companies that do this are giving off a terrible impression. "OMG. They can't even afford free soda anymore. This ship is definitely sinking."
Coffee - not as familiar with the economics of coffee, but of course dedicated machines will end up costing somewhat less than going directly to starbucks.
And most Cokes in a convenience store are now $1.50 or more, at least where I live.
I have no knowledge of Tumblr's internal workings, but I would bet if you talked to the folks who used to be on that editorial team they'd have stories of their own budget being squeezed in trivial ways before the layoff. Laying people off is hard, managers don't like to do it, so they almost always look for other ways to save money before biting the bullet and canning people. And when management decides that a particular division isn't critical to the overall business, it's typical for the bean-counters to be unleashed on that division to look for "economies" that other divisions more beloved by management don't have to bear.
Dan Ariely talks about this in Predictably Irrational, and he gives a great example of this involving an Israeli daycare center: http://www.npr.org/2008/03/31/89233955/dan-ariely-takes-on-i...
[0] Of course, you could make the argument that this principle applies on a corporate scale, not just a personal one, which is the point of TFA - Ariely's study just happens to focus on the individual.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-cost...
It's a cut of a very small benefit, but it is still a cut. To do this without any prior discussion from the people receiving the benefit will only be taken badly.
The other thing that happens here is loss aversion. Losing that "free" coffee or soda is painful.
A few years ago, they studied a day care center in Israel to determine whether imposing a fine on parents who arrived late to pick up their children was a useful deterrent. Uri and Aldo concluded that the fine didn't work well, and in fact it had long-term negative effects. Why? Before the fine was introduced, the teachers and parents had a social contract, with social norms about being late. Thus, if parents were late — as they occasionally were — they felt guilty about it — and their guilt compelled them to be more prompt in picking up their kids in the future. (In Israel, guilt seems to be an effective way to get compliance.) But once the fine was imposed, the day care center had inadvertently replaced the social norms with market norms. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they interpreted the situation in terms of market norms. In other words, since they were being fined, they could decide for themselves whether to be late or not, and they frequently chose to be late. Needless to say, this was not what the day care center intended.
But if it was just a social contract keeping me from picking my kids up late, I'd feel guilty about it and make sure that it didn't happen again. And the teacher might only have to stay a few minutes later.
In my case, I know that my kids' daycare will charge me if I pick them up late. But I don't know what the fee is, and I don't know if they've ever told me. I don't care... I'm not going to pick them up late (I've been close), because I know their teachers have other things to do, and I consider it rude. If I knew it was $50/hour or $100/hour, if I was working hard on somethings, I, on occasion, may have chosen to be late.
Social contracts are tougher to break than market based contracts.
Not all market contracts are necessarily stated in terms of dollar value.
There have been times when I ended up in SF or BART traffic. I misjudged my commute time and arrived late. (This doesn't happen a lot, maybe 1-2x/year)
Almost without fail, the staff were really negative about my lateness. Some have lectured me about how it messes up their schedule, makes it hard for them to board other dogs, finish cleanup, etc.
My thought on the matter is a simple economic one. If it's not worth it to the business to charge only $25-50 for a late pickup, they should think about what the "right" cost is. They actually have the power in this situation. Raising the cost would a) enable them to staff for this, and b) have a greater impact on habitual "late" arrivals.
As it is, I think,"Is it worth $25-50 to stay on this work call, knowing I may be late?" rather than,"I have to go, because I'll be inconveniencing the people that I trust to look after my dogs."
(Usually, it's more "I want to see my dogs," but you get the point.)
[1] Don't judge. I'd rather have them run around all day with a dozen people, a fountain to splash in, varied toys and 'playground' equipment, and a bunch of well-socialized dogs in their own size range than sit at home all day. :-)
I think seeking to understand the financial state of a company is smart for both employees and consultants, but the assumption that "upgraded beverage selection" unequivocally equates to "doing well" is naive.
Frankly, in my experience, a young company adding a bunch of perks is just as likely to be living beyond its means as it is to be doing very well financially, but that doesn't really matter. As a consultant, you don't mitigate the risk of not getting paid by asking about the soft drink selection or looking at the lunch menu. You mitigate risk by diversifying your client base, negotiating favorable payment terms and watching receivables like a hawk. All things you should be doing anyway regardless of the client or the state of the client's break room.
I had a client take cost-cutting to such an extreme, they no longer provided paper cups for employees to drink water. In theory they could've halted the water deliveries, but that was too probably obvious an indicator.
Sadly, them cutting the paper cups fooled a lot of their employees, in which they genuinely didn't think things were that bad. Anecdotally, the ones who thought nothing was wrong with cups being cut were the ones that were laid off weeks later.
Makes sense. The ones who didn't parse out the puzzle were probably the employees of lowest relative IQ and savvy, so they were probably the least valuable ones.
Perhaps the people laid off were the most intelligent but least politically connected because they were focused on their work to the exclusion of water-cooler chatter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/education/09harvard.html?r...
A simple, "I'll bring it up in our next meeting" would soothe me over much more than arguing over semantics and entitlement with me. Or even just being sympathetic: "Yeah, I know it sucks, but them accountants needed something to trim this quarter!".
But the defensive reaction tells me there is something lurking underneath the surface, be it frustration or resentment.
Obviously, it's the worst for the people who are being terminated. As a human, a good manager wants to assure them that s/he values their contribution, blah blah, but all they hear is what is said in the first 30 seconds. Hit the high points – we are laying you off, you are getting n weeks/months/years of severance, here is all of this in writing, plus your benefits package and final check, do you have any questions?
It's also very unlikely that the manager had much say other than in terms of force ranking people (if that). I found out at 9pm the night before that I would have to cut more people than planned.
Your boss may have been thinking something along the lines of,"20% of our company just lost their jobs and you're worried about the free chair massages???" because their brain is still in the context of not only "I can't protect my team," but also "I had an active role in their termination." They're often in the "bargaining" phase of grief and thinkin,"without x, I could have kept one person," or "One of my leads could do my job with this new team size, so my leaving will save 2-5 jobs in the next round." Those things go through your manager's head.
The best a manager can do is to take the "survivors" away from the office (conference room in another building, on a walk to a local park, whatever) while people have the opportunity to pack their personal effects. Tell the team everything you can about why the layoff took place, who was affected, and get as much of the bad shit out that you can.
They'll rant at their managers, they'll rant at the company, and the managers have to take it. Try to avoid the company party line and give people as realistic a view as possible of what is happening and what will likely happen. Try to bring in the highest execs possible to answer questions, because a manager may or may not know, or be able to tell, some details about the financial forces driving the decisions.
TL;DR - It sucks for everyone, including your manager, so s/he may be crankier than normal. Extend compassion their way as well. If you're a manager, see the blowback coming and get in front of it and be genuine.
This is worth a Dilbert strip!
Unless you're filling swimming pools with soda or something, drink and snack expenses are rounding error on the salaries of your people. If it comes down to the free drinks, something else is broken. The real tragedy is when idiot bean-counters take over, and start imposing these sorts of nit-picky cost-controls because "that's what big companies do".
It takes a strong leader to stand up for company culture, because these sorts of issues often look like they're too small to be worth a fight. You grow to 200, 500, 1000 employees, and before long, you have to go out of your way to pull the Senior Bean-Counter for Drink Expenses aside and tell him to back off. That's when the bad stuff happens.
Diversion warning: it's surprising to me how many management decisions get made solely to make people feel like they have control in a situation where they actually have no control. It's the same mechanism the government exploits when making decisions about the TSA.
And that makes sense in the beginning. As Ben Horowitz said[3]:
If you don’t have winning product, it doesn’t matter how well your company is managed, you are done
But as companies grow, that is not enough. Ben Horowitz complements[4]:
Why even bother with management if that is the case? But the truth is: there are several things that are very important:
1: if you get into trouble, and if you have bad management, your company will probably die. Like the people will just quit, they are not bonded to it, the don’t like working there, they never liked working there, and that is that, it is a wrap. ...
2: if you succeed at building a company that everybody just hates working at, what have you done? You just made a whole lot of people a whole lot more miserable in their lives.
[1] http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin...
[2] http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272031754
[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
We used to get Dove Bars and beers all the time. It felt like free food was on offer at least once a week, usually with a pretense of some small milestone to celebrate. Why did we cut stuff like this? (I know the boring fiscal reasons why. I’m asking the deeper why, as in, “Was it worth the savings? Is Microsoft better now that we’ve cut these costs?”)
One day, a sign appeared on a soda fridge in RedWest saying something to the effect of, “Did you know that drinks cost Microsoft [ed: millions of dollars] a year? Sodas are your perk at work. Don’t bring them home.” This depressed me on too many levels to enumerate, but I’ll toss out a few:
- Someone had enough time to get these signs professionally printed and affixed to our fridges.
- It was someone’s salaried, 40-hour-a-week job to do things like this.
- Someone thought soda smuggling was a big enough “problem” at Microsoft to draw attention to it.
Really, this attitude is precisely the problem. You're looking at this as a confrontation from the start. Perks like this only work if they're offered and accepted in good faith. If you don't trust your employer to interpret your soda consumption charitably, your employer is getting no benefit from offering it.
Basically, if you want your employer to offer snacks and soda, be grateful about it and don't look for trouble.
Well, if they're spending millions on it in general then many employees taking 1 or 2 home every day is actually probably a much greater financial 'burden' on them than a handful of employees taking entire flats every now and then.
And you also don't tend to put up signs like that unless your goal is to change everyone's behaviour.
It is kind of staggering to think of 90,000 employees times 2 sodas every workday.
Those 90,000 employees cost about $45M a day to employ, $35k on drinks is meaningless. Especially against the PR disaster of a thread full of potential employees hearing you hide the soda at night.
But, as someone said, if someone is stealing from you and views it that way you should deal with them personally, directly, and immediately. Passive-aggressively hiding soda is only going to make them switch to office supplies, if you're lucky.
Yes, "you" do. You specificaly may not do that, probably most people around here will not do that, but lots and lots of people do, enough so that most signs are put down by this kind of people.
This was over ten years ago now, I have no idea what the state of soda smuggling is today.
These kinds of perks always seem to get ruined by that one idiot who goes overboard.
It's irrational, but so is most management in practice.
Look at why it is provided. It's not a prize or a bonus. It is to keep you happy and productive while you work. The company feels that is worth the cost. Where in there does someone drinking soda on the way home figure? It doesn't.
If I were the person providing the free soda I would be upset at being taken advantage of.
Finishing your soda on the way home, sure. Grabbing an unopened one and walking out the door... that seems to me to be a good place to draw a line.
Personally I stick to water because HFCS is bad for you.
My beverage of choice is Ito-En bottled green tea. I'd prefer if it came in glass vs. plastic bottles, though, and it is $1/bottle even at Costco, so at home or office I tend to just make my own using either matcha teabags (also from costco) or looseleaf green tea.
Going back to the topic of expense to the company - healthier foods are also generally more expensive than junk food. But if you think it's worthwhile to keep employees at optimal performance, it's a small price to pay...
| HFCS is bad for you.
As an example, I asked my employer if I could borrow my steel toed boots meant for site visits to use during some work outside to help a friend for a weekend. I told them if I damaged them I would gladly pay to replace them. My boss told me that they would lose much more value from me missing work injured than those boots would cost to replace, so not to worry about it and then gave me a fatherly lecture about being safe using a chainsaw before digging out safety glasses to send with me.
It's hard to make a bright line for abuse, but for a general rule I won't take anything or take advantage of anything I wouldn't pay for myself without asking ahead of time.
(1) Will it cause a substantial loss/burden if everyone did what I'm doing. Everyone taking a case of soda home regularly would be a pretty huge burden. Everyone taking a can or two home every once in a while would not. You can apply that to pens, a pad of post-it notes, etc.
(2) Would I be embarrassed if someone saw me taking this item home and knew it was for my personal use. Generally, if you feel like you have to hide that behavior, that's a good point to stop and ask "why". You may not always come back with "I shouldn't do it" but you probably will most of the time.
(3) Assuming the first two aren't true, would my usage of the item embarrass my employer to their customers. This probably doesn't apply to the soda thief but does apply to a lot of other decisions of this nature. The best example I can think is "I ran out of paper, so I'll just use company letterhead to advocate people attend the annual KKK rally at city hall". I'm sure there's less extreme examples, but absurdity goes a long way toward making a point.
As for office supplies which are used for work at home, I'm guessing you mean more than just pens and paper. If the total take is over $20, I'd probably ask permission, but I've never been in this situation. My office supply is my laptop and these were officially given to me for work (and must be returned when I'm done working there), everything else I already have at home.
(I tend to be picky enough about pens/pencils/computers/etc. that I just bring my own from home to work in most cases)
It's a software company, after all, not a grocery store.
Would you take home a bunch of sodas if you were going to have a party that weekend?
What if your party guests were exclusively other employees?
What if your party guests were partially other employees, their families, and some unrelated families?
Would you drink an employer-provided soda at home if you weren't thinking about work?
What if you were at the office and not thinking about work?
I could, but I wouldn't. Too much work, and I'm paid well enough that it's easier just to buy soda.
No.
Yes, I do it all the time.
Yes, I do it all the time.
It is true that no matter how much you pay a person, they can still be cheap and "exploit" a resource. I don't think it's important enough to worry about on the whole.
If it's a private party, I'd look into purchasing cheap soda via the job's supplier, they're usually cheaper than grocery stores.
That would be ridiculous right you could be thinking, programming and improving the product to get a better bonus in the end rather than sell soda off of craigslist or ebay.
But you see that is how they think about it. You are stealing it and could be doing <insert the worst possible thing>. That is what management might come to conclusion about.
Another perspective + a story. (Warning: getting a bit prejudiced here). I have heard of foreign H-1B workers (won't name a country will stop at a vague level of prejudice) stuff their backpacks with soda. Stay late, look around, see if anyone is looking start shoving soda cans to fill the backpack up as much as they can carry.
It wasn't that management was upset, you see, it was other co-workers that were disturbed by that. Why? Because they realize they are working with "that" person. That would be disturbing to me. Is the company not paying them enough. Are they a kleptomaniac. Did they grow up poor and learned to steal food. What else are they stealing? Are they sabotaging our product? Do I want them around? Questions like that.
They complain. How does management react. Well they could lay off so and so. But heck he is chugging along programming and we got him on H-1B sponsorship. Laying him off because of a soda issue is worse than just making everyone pay for soda and, in return we get to save couple of thousand dollars a year.
That is how I heard about* (from another party, so this might have been made up, I don't know, take it for what it is worth).
Putting a sign up in the kitchen is always the wrong solution.
And I don't think what you said was prejudiced either.
Don't feel ashamed, this level of cheapness has nothing to do with your nationality.
My dad was a physician, born and raised in the US. He earned a good living, worked very hard (he never had fewer than 2 jobs the whole 3 decades I knew him), and saved money religiously. And he was very frugal as well: he never went into debt for anything, drove cars till well after they fell apart, had clothing that I know was older than I which he wore till the day he died.
One of his great loves, though, was to steal things from the hospitals he worked at. Anything that wasn't bolted down - office supplies, filing cabinets, tables, chairs, desk lamps. At one point, he was bringing home hard boiled eggs that he pocketed in the staff room, because obviously we couldn't afford food. Several times when we were doing remodeling at home, I got to keep a lookout for security while we snuck bags of construction waste into the dumpsters at work.
Now, you didn't know the guy so it might not be obvious, but this was all about not spending a cent more than he had to. So, don't feel ashamed because some of your fellow country men are taking soda from work.
I find it seriously backwards that no one had the spine to walk up to the person, talk with him about courtesy, cultural norms, and basically use "implied shame" to do the rest. If the behavior continued, a more direct approach "I saw you take the sodas last night" could also suffice.
I mean, why would putting a suitcase full of sodas == sabotaging product? It's pathological behavior in the over-abundance environment, but seriously?
Is Redmond a foreign country or something?
Not so much in Seattle, but in MTV people seemed to raid the MKs on their way out of the office. It felt like some sort of communal effort to ensure that the next day's stock would all be fresh.
I started as a Noogler in 2009 and my original cubemate was a pre-IPO Googler who started around 2002. I asked him what some of the biggest changes have been since he started, and he said that there was less of a feeling of community and more of one of entitlement. The snacks in the microkitchen was a specific example he used, that in the beginning everyone understood they were for office use only but around 2006-2007 he started to see people stockpiling them.
More generally - the perks you get as a Googler are not because you were so awesome that Google decided to hire you. They're there to build a sense of community and common purpose. General guideline for when something's okay: Are you in this together with your coworkers, or are you in it alone?
| Smuggling? Really?
If someone is rolling out suitcases full of soda, it might not warrant removing the free soda perk, but it definitely warrants calling attention to it, and finding out who is doing it (and possibly giving them the boot).
But I guess they did have a big theft problem N years ago that justifies this behavior. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this would be a real problem.
For what it's worth, I bring in my own leaves to the office.
Chai is an Indian flavor, I can get something decent at the local Indian restraunts, but that's it.
It's the same with any perk. Flexible schedules are nice, but not if people don't work at all. An equipment budget is nice, but not if people use it to buy stuff for their friends.
If my teammates were dishonest like this, I'd feel uncomfortable working with them. But in any case, I much prefer that those individuals be confronted than that the perk be taken away from everyone.
The point here, which you missed, is that all these perks only work if everyone plays by a sane set of rules and doesn't try to stretch things to their advantage. Having free soda is fine. Playing games with what you're allowed to get away with wrecks things for all of us even if you never get punished.
Whiners ruin it for everyone.
Interesting theory but the major flaw I see is that the Employee Is Not Always Right. Often times, you get someone who is just a Jerk. Such people often think along the lines of, "Free soda is a perk, there is no explicit rule limiting the amount of soda I can use so I am within my rights to take as much as I can carry."
I've encountered people before whose feeling is "if there's no written rule against it, I'm entitled to do it." Is the best solution to the "soda problem" just to fire those people and be done with it? I'm sure they take liberties with more than just sodas.
This is a variation on "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", a disappointingly common point of view within the tech and startup communities.
As long as you're not being a dick, forgiveness beats permission any day.
Its one thing when its "Tony is out of town, I will borrow his lawn mower and ask for permission later." Its completely different when you don't understand the implications of the thing you are doing.
I have been the "permission granter" thousands of times where permission couldn't be granted due to everything from in feasibility of the request [There are not that many widgets to give], prioritization [its not worth taking from the main product to feet your pet project], compliance [doing what you want will get us fined], to flat out legality.
Developers with this attitude RARELY understand the implications, even in a company of 20 people. They assume that they are getting things done but really they are just moving the problem to a team further down the stack.
Within a company, going around a permission giver is almost always a good way to be labeled a "dick" by the people cleaning up after you.
A person who always follows the "ask permission" strategy ends up with an ingrained unconscious belief that most things they could do are ultimately bad ideas. They end up limiting themselves and only taking actions that are safe, uncontroversial, and unlikely to result in a "no".
A person who always follows the "ask forgiveness" strategy will end up getting slapped down a few times and occasionally get a reputation as a dick and have to find new people to work with. But over time, he'll learn a good intuitive sense of both what the limits are (because he's broken them so many times) and why the limits are there (because he's seen the consequences of breaking them).
All this means that eventually, the person who asked forgiveness a whole lot eventually ends up being the "permission granter". Eventually he ends up taking an opportunity that the "ask permission" folks deemed was too risky and it works out, and people remember the one huge success more than the dozens of minor messes.
So while you may be justified in labeling the "ask forgiveness" guy a dick, that won't stop him from replacing you. Life is sometimes unfair, and assholes sometimes win.
Perhaps I'm an optimist.
Asking permission is a way of hedging against your own judgment. In other words, it's a great thing to do when you're genuinely not sure. But if you are right, you don't get results as efficiently, since you have to let everyone bikeshed first. Maybe you don't even get results at all.
It's really simple. Don't open with what you want to do, open with what you'd like to get, and make sure that you're mentioning 2 or 3 things you're willing to give up. Don't say "I want to write a complex mobile app for the delivery department", say "I need a $200k to hire 2 programmers, buy 30 different phones, and 6 months of nothing on my plate, you got 15 minutes ?".
Obviously, you do this once every 6 months or so at most, preferably less, and follow through.
It's amazing, especially in America, how mentioning dollar amounts focuses people on solving problems and looking at opportunities instead of looking for excuses. Finding excuses is universal in organizations, especially big ones, and the higher ups have as much trouble with it at the cleaning lady. Plus, the fact that you even know how much to ask and have a plan for the negotiation means you have built a business case (don't go in without one).
If your employees don't have the judgment to know when to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, fire them and hire people who do have good judgment. Don't use process to protect yourself from hiring bozos. Just don't hire bozos.
Much of the time you should ask forgiveness rather than permission, you're not really required to ask permission in the first place and you just end up creating useless bikeshedding discussions. If there's a process that requires you to ask permission, and the process is genuinely important, it's a different matter.
It's worth noting that the first person to say "it's easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission" was Grace Hopper, who not only wrote the first compiler, but served for four decades in the Navy. So you can accomplish a lot of things and still somehow not get fired from even stodgy bureaucratic institutions with this mentality.
I'm sorry you've had to work with a lot of dicks and bozos. I had a coworker like that once too. Had. I've used, and seen used, "forgiveness before permission" many times in my career and aside from that guy it always worked out.
Maybe. I have certainly had moments where this seemed appropriate. But everyone has flaws and blind spots. It's far too easy to be blind to your own mistakes and to rationalize unsavory behavior.
Whats worrying is that people are using that as an excuse to "get things done" that shouldn't ever have been started in the first place. The permission givers are more often than not there for a reason, and more often then not they are saying no for a reason.
Compliance is amazingly important because getting it wrong can virtually end your company, yet developers get annoyed when the project they are on is delayed as PCI compliance is checked.. etc. The moment they take the "ask forgiveness" approach they put the company at risk of a serious fine, or worse, company limiting restrictions. [Check Path out for an example].
To everybody that has used this mantra: If you don't understand exactly why you are being blocked by the "permission givers" then don't assume that they will freely give forgiveness when you royally screw something up.
I use this statement somewhat regularly, though the simplicity of the statement makes it confusing.
Acceptable: My son and I were at a grocery store. He started complaining about his stomach and had thrown up several hours prior. I knew the bathroom at this store was located in an employees-only area. I also knew that one of the managers was a jerk. I could take him to the toilet to discretely regurgitate or ask the manager, risk getting turned down (or just in the time it would take, risk not making it in time) or just walk right past the sign and prevent him from projectile vomiting in the aisle. That was the first phrase I thought of, and I bolted.
On the flip side, if I'm on a White House tour and am told that I must stay with the tour group at all times, I'll be sticking with the tour group at all times, thanks.
In the context of tech companies, I recall a talk Scott Hanselman gave (very paraphrased) where he said he decided one night to just setup a site for Visual Studio fan art (I think he used Tumblr) which he later shared with his boss and was received very positively. He knew if he had proposed the idea that fifteen departments, thousands of dollars and several weeks would be involved (should we really use Tumblr? would corporate branding be upset? Don't forget to run it by legal! What if someone makes porn of it!). Corporate policy (asking permission) wasn't followed, but the result was infinitely better than if the process was followed and I, personally, loved the site.
I'll admit, though, that the line between overstepping with this thinking and doing something very wrong can be very, very, hazy and can land you in serious trouble (often legally).
As all things, it depends on the type of position. In a hospital, it's probably not common for surgeons to be hauling Pepsi out to their car every day. In a call center, you'll probably get close to 80% of people that would abuse such a privilege based on my first-hand experience.
>Is the best solution to the "soda problem" just to fire those people and be done with it? I'm sure they take liberties with more than just sodas.
I think this is an excellent point. I think that personality defects like abusing privileges is one of many variables to consider in hiring, promoting and firing. As you said, if someone is spending their time scheming on saving a few dollars per week then they have serious moral as well as priorities issues.
There's always an idiot who will do something that ruins things for others. In one case I was exposed to, it was an attorney making north of $150k stealing change from people's desks, and trying to frame the cleaning crew. In another, it was a person taking advantage of time & attendance rules. In another, it was a guy pilfering silverware from the lunchroom.
That sounds more like kleptomania, which is a mental disorder. It doesn't have anything to do with "being an asshole."
It could be racism, in the case that the cleaners are of an ethnicity the attorney despises.
It could be bullying, in the case that the people whose change he is stealing deliberately leave cash in their desks for paying vending machines, or because they know they are prone to leaving their wallets at home.
It could be that he was so well off that he couldn't see the problem with taking a few dollars from a desk to pay a parking meter or whatever; then became embarrassed when confronted.
Feelings of wealth vs poverty are not absolute. If the attorney has an expensive plastic surgery habit, all his friends are on $500K, and he can only afford two trips to Klosters this year because his yacht needs servicing; the money may have utility to him in an "every little helps" kind of way. He might feel that everyone else is better off than he is.
If this is a big office, you could probably make $100-$200 in a session of theft (I know there is normally at least £15 in desks in my office of 8 people). If his salary is paid into a joint account, and he wants to pay for something without the knowledge of his partner (e.g. charlie and hookers), then stealing cash might be the easiest way he can see to conceal this spending.
I would guess it's got more to do with size than anything else.
When you're in a startup with 50 people and you know the guy who orders the office groceries by name, very few people would start taking home crates of soda. Such an act would have observable consequences (no soda for your team-mates, or office grocery bill goes up very noticeably and you feel like you're ripping off everyone else).
If you work in an office building of 5,000 people, taking home crates of soda doesn't have observable consequences in the same way. Perhaps the office grocery bill goes up 0.5% or one of your teammates has to walk 20 yards to the next fridge over to grab a soda, but from your perspective the effects are marginally indistinguishable from 0. It becomes "wrong" in abstract principle rather than "wrong" in observable effects.
That is much better than punishing everyone for the crimes of one (or some).
The right thing to do is either to have a quiet, informal chat with the employee in question (if you know who they are) or to send a broader message with the appropriate chagrin ("We wish we didn't have to send this email, but...").
Playing devil's advocate, I know. Statistically, the guy carting cases of Coke out the back door is probably doing more than just that.
Maybe the company is afraid of a lawsuit?
Or, to put it another way, every bizarre rule or sign usually has a story behind it.
-That- was the problem. Not people like me who might grab a can of Talking Rain as we left the office for the commute home.
So when the smuggling ""problem"" amounted to thousands of dollars a week of goods going missing from one building/floor alone, then yes, they drew attention to it.
As for his other points:
- Microsoft has its own inhouse printing departments. It was hardly a project in itself to arrange for a small plastic sign to be made and glued.
- Yes, Catering has people whose salaried, 40 hour a week job is to handle the logistics of food ordering, and predict supply and demand. People like this are needed when you have upwards of 50,000 people working in your facility.
- a $100,000/year theft problem is worthy of most people's attention. If you're stealing multiple commercial fridges-worth of soda a week, it's not even that you're taking it home - you're almost certainly reselling it. So it's not even a perk, it's a commercial gain. Maybe I should have been raiding the Office Supplies and selling them, a la Dilbert.
2. Sack perpetrators.
3. Put a notice on the drinks machine that, through use of polite informality, makes it clear what was going on and that it would be appreciated if people didn't take the mickey. ("Inform, don't instruct" should be a rule of management.)
Identify the perpetrators but don't sack them immediately. Investigate them thoroughly. Assuming they're well paid, resorting to carting off a fridge full of soda every week is a disturbing way to behave and I'd want to understand their motivation and identify if they behaved this way in other areas of their work-life. They likely thought (1) they'd not get caught or(/and) (2) the value of the theft was so low that they'd likely not get in trouble. I'd be concerned most about the "I won't get caught" people at any company that a large part of their profits are from selling closed-source software. Sharing loads of source code might also be seen as something they'd think they wouldn't get caught doing. I'd still be concerned about anyone with the moral flexibility to brazenly steal large quantities of even inexpensive items and expect, if caught, to get away with it. At a minimum, that's not the kind of culture you want to spreading and it probably speaks to their intelligence slightly.
Generally, people hate "passive-aggressive notes". At a previous someone placed a note on the sink asking everyone to clean up the microwave after using it. Someone had heated up pasta and left the tomato sauce all over the interior. I took the note down and kindly asked the person responsible to be more careful in the future. It was equally effective, but without pointing the finger at every person on the floor. In the case of the soda, skip any note and let the word spread through informal lateral communication ("gossip" channels are rarely used effectively by management).
Funny, no one has ever put up a sign to tell me not to tear down the signs.
I've learned that passive aggressive can work both ways. ;-)
Identifying them for further investigation will generally turn up more ethical and performance issues, safely justifying reassignment or outplacement.
No, it wasn't. The problem was that you had people working at RedWest who would steal suitcases full of sodas.
I remember taking the campus bus there not long after it opened and it was a much different world. It was a very clear sign that MSFT had become a "big" company. Passing dozens of "Herbalife" signs on the way just reinforced that.
The biggest "cost" issue we had was a) don't print if you don't have to, and b) if you have to, use the back side of previously printed paper. That was more environmental-green vs financial-green, though.
Then I went to Amazon, and it was a whole new world of getting no perks whatsoever. Non-adjustable "desks", the slowest development machines possible, and a bunch of false economies around operations and infrastructure.
Dedicated CFOs and accounting types are simply doing their job. Their singular focus is often the bottom line and the company's financial health. It's not their job to maintain, foster, or enhance company culture. That is the job of the CEO.
In situations like this, it's the CEO's responsibility to make statements like "there are intangible benefits to free snacks and sodas. Small things like that help people that make money for the company stay focused longer and help them get through their day."
Help the accountants understand where the cost cutting boundaries are early, so you don't have to micromanage every decision they make later on. Over time they'll start to "get it" with your culture and they'll focus their attention on real problems like getting financing, making sure invoices are paid, setting up M&A deals, etc that they were hired to do.
Ironically BT a huge company started to go towards free tea and coffee but this was stopped by HMRC (the taxman) who wanted to charge tax on this benefit in kind - and you think the IRS is bad.
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/payerti/employee/changes/new-benefit....
It's always been non-taxable as far as I can remember and a quick google is not bringing anything up.
That said the online guidance on what counts as a trivial benefit, http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/eimanual/EIM21863.htm, says:
>"Tea and coffee
>An employer may provide its employees with access in the workplace to tea, coffee or water from a cooling dispenser. If this refreshment is available generally to all employees, the benefit is exempt from charge (EIM21670). If the exemption does not apply, you should accept that these refreshments represent a trivial benefit." //
But it very much depends on how the benefit is provided, voucher schemes work differently and there is an assessment of the value of the benefit involved.
Other references:
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/paye/exb/a-z/a/ http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/paye/exb/a-z/m/meals.htm
Read the parent I replied to. He was claiming HMRC was trying to get BT to charge income tax for a benefit of tea and coffee.
I challenged it because I was interested if this was ever true and also it's never good to let rumours like this to exist, the UK is a great place to start a business and misinformation like this shouldn't go unchallenged.
The page I linked says that it's not normally the case. But it's clear in the guidance that a not unusual construction of such a scheme, eg using vouchers and an external provider, would make it that tax/NICs were due on the hot-drinks a a benefit-in-kind.
It's not provably misinformation but it is deficient and doesn't demonstrate the verity of the claim.
That sounds like a cover story some accountant made up to justify penny pinching. I've never heard of stuff like that being taxed.
Yes, the company has to pay tax over the free food we give our employees because it's considered part of their pay. In the grand scheme of things: big fucking deal.
It's cool in a larger company where you have a well-stocked cafeteria where you can buy good food at heavily subsidized prices.
But in small companies this micro bean counter attitude in order to avoid taxes is actually more demotivating and divisive than not providing free food at all. Especially if you're in the middle of the city and people have dozens of options to go out for lunch.
Still much less hassle-free if you ask me.
And HMRC have form in this area when the company had a high level query about some thing they wanted to implement HMRC said no - So the CFO implemented profit related pay which reduced the tax take as a fuck you to the taxman.
The IRS has a guideline that says (not exact words) "if it's too petty to keep track of, like someone using the Xerox machine for personal use, don't worry about it." Free cans of soda probably fall in that petty category.
It's a good CFO's job to make sure that resources are invested strategically. Indeed, it's every executive's job to work together towards a shared vision and goal. If someone is working towards a different goal, you're inviting unnecessary conflict. No one should need to be micromanaged - at any point - if they share the goal and the culture along with the rest of the employees.
Cost cutting is just one tool in their toolbelt to work towards it. But it's the sharpest and most easily understood tool they have so that's why they will reach for it so often.
In an ideal world, you'll get a CFO that totally jives with you culturally, accepts a lower salary (or limited equity stake), and just handles all the paperwork. But such people will rarely carry the title of CFO.
Again, I have to disagree. Ideally you get a proactive CFO who understands the value of the company culture, and works to encourage it. Yes, even if that costs more money. A paper pusher who stays out of your way does not approach the value of a good CFO who gets what the company is about and what they're trying to do.
Anyone who hires a paper-pushing-bean-counting CFO should not be surprised when that CFO tries to sacrifice long-term success for short-term balance sheet exhibition.
This is the point. You are not to be surprised, but as CEO be ready that your CFO will require guidance while doing otherwise useful things.
Should a CFO be singularly focused on bean counting to the detriment of company culture? No.
Is that often the reality when you bring in an outsider as CFO well after your company culture is established? Yes.
CEOs just need to be aware of this fact and work closely with any outsider who gets hired into a CFO position in their first 6 months on the job to make sure that all interests are aligned. It would be great to find someone up front that totally gets it and is willing to be a dedicated CFO, but I think such individuals are extremely hard to find.
The sad fact is, many CEOs only bring in a CFO when they're trying to find a way to cash out. Company culture usually takes a back seat at that point.
The case I heard about, the CFO was was fixated on hassling people over business lunch costs (meeting with industry contacts etc.), and not creating value or the company or preparing the company for larger investors etc.
But different jobs require different sets of cognitive biases. The ability to handle the regulatory compliance is very unlikely to reside in the same brain as the ability to understand that cutting small perks costs more in morale than it saves on the budget, so if the CEO isn't keeping the CFO on a leash, the CEO is not doing his job.
I disagree that anyone in a corporation should have a "singular focus". As an IT person at an investment bank I've seen numerous times IT people just "do what they're told to do" rather than offer a true consultative relationship to the business. A truly successful person realizes their limitations but offers reasonable suggestions on things that other people may have missed.
I used to work at publicly traded insurance companies and there was often a marketing vs. underwriting struggle but nobody on either side ever had a "singular focus" because it's the lazy way to bankruptcy for the corporation.
I think the problem with CFOs in general is they are just ledger monkeys - there's red ink and black ink. Development is always in the red even though it's the place where the real value is derived. So bonuses are an extraneous cost, food is an extraneous cost, healthcare is an extraneous cost. If you don't have a CFO who realizes that simple cuts to development, and all employees in general, will affect the black ink down the line, then you are in trouble.
Even if they don't leave, there's a morale penalty applied every day when someone walks past where there used to be refreshments, and has to keep walking another 30 feet to the water fountain or vending machine.
If there's one thing every company should understand about software, it's that top-notch people operating at high levels of morale are great for your bottom line. Being cheap about things like refreshments and office equipment ("you have to buy your own second monitor") is a morale killer.
It seems to work. I try to sit with new people then, rather than with my immediate cow-orkers, and I usually learn interesting things.
True, but there's a measurable labor cost. My dept bathroom is at least 300 feet away. (You'd think that would be a building code violation or something). Anyway its a good extra 2 or 3 minutes of walking per visit. Lets say I stretch my legs 4 times per day. Thats perhaps 6 minutes per day for me, but in a 20 person department that's 2 developer hours per day.
Lets say 2 hrs/day * $50/hr * 5 days/week * 52 weeks/yr = 26 grand per year. Remodeling to put a door in the wall to cut 2 minutes off the walk via a direct route might cost $5K, only 10 weeks till pure profit for the company.
From a health standpoint I get up and walk every couple hours (no interest in experiencing leg embolisms or whatever, plus plain ole health reasons) so this wouldn't actually work, I'd just find another way to walk for about 1 minute every hour. But it shows the math is pretty fuzzy.
In your situation the cooler situation was "several" and 500K/yr. Either you were getting overcharged or we're talking about more like 50, not "several". I live in an area where we have more fresh water than we know what to do with, I know its not like that out west, so I could see costs being a little higher, but not like Frank Herbert "Dune" level. Anyway from a purely financial standpoint I'm not sure in your example that they're actually saving even one penny of money.
I don't know the number of buildings, but I suppose "many" is more accurate than "several". The company had over 80,000 employees in the region, and worldwide revenue measured in the tens of billions.
Not surprisingly, there were some layoffs shortly after the water cooler cost-cutting debacle.
You can buy a bottle-less cooler for about $400 but then you pay for filters and repair, or pay about $10/mo per cooler but they take care of everything.
So about right for bottles, a big high for bottle-less.
You write "in software" and I thought about whether that applies to other areas as well and I do think there is a universal truth concerning creative work. But then it reminded me of the discussion about manager bonuses in banking around 2008 (and there has been one, occasionally, ever since).
Now, in their case, we were talking about a constant stream of million dollar bonuses with the occasional hookers and blow. I guess the bottom line is: There are limits to what is sensible.
The bigger issue, to me, is that management decided to stop using a cleaning service. The 30-employee workforce is now part of a cleaning rotation. So, once a week, we are all expected to stop what we're doing and spend 30 minutes to 2 hours cleaning something, depending on our assigned area.
How can that possibly be cost efficient? You derail the thought processes of all 30 of your employees for at least a half hour every week. 15+ man hours that your highly skilled employees could be using elsewhere. In the case of the half-dozen programmers here, it's even less efficient. It takes a lot of concentration for me to get into a mental state conducive to good programming. 30+ minutes of cleaning is enough to get me out of that programming "mode", and it is very difficult to regain that state of mind once lost.
I think that's at least part of the reason why these progammers were so up in arms about the soda machine: Because now they have to think about it. The company has introduced an annoyance and distraction (I'll admit, a trivial one) into their work day, for very little apparent effect on the company's bottom line.
Wow. You only clean (aside from desk clutter and kitchen spills) at work if:
(A) Your job is literally to be a full-time cleaner.
(B) You are a partner in the company (0.05% stock options don't count.)
But it's what it says about the company that concerns me. It seems like they're saving pennies at the risk of employee happiness.
Having someone who can turn off your income and damage your professional reputation tell you that you have to drop everything at 4:00 and clean a toilet is a different thing altogether. That's ridiculous.
Again, if you're a real partner/owner (0.05% equity does not count) you do a bunch of undesirable work (including cleaning toilets, if it makes sense) because the buck stops with you. If you're an employee, you simply should not stand for this.
Oh, thanks, now I know what I would do in that situation: pay some professional cleaner to come to the office when it's my turn.
It's not an unreasonable request to you, in that the company buys your time and this is what they want you to do. It's a fantastically unreasonable request if they're actually in business to make money and you should take a good look around at the company; this could be an early warning to jump ship. Be assured that other people are already thinking this, and that in such situations the people leaving first are the smarter, better employees; as each one leaves, the company will struggle a little bit more.
Edit: As I read your post, I heard this low blaring horn kind of noise, getting louder and louder, much as during Heath Ledger's scenes in Dark Knight. :p
I reckon you could probably have a go at estimating the new cost of cleaning by estimating how much time everyone spends cleaning and what their hourly rate is - this might give you a better idea of how badly things are really going. It might be really scary :)
I disagree here. His company almost certainly hired him for a stated purpose, and that stated purpose almost certainly didn't mention a part-time stint as a janitor. The company doesn't (IMO) get to change the bounds of the employment agreement on a whim.
You're tricking yourself into a false comparison here. It's your responsibility to clean up after yourself. You spill coffee in the break room, go get a paper towel and clean it up.
It's not your responsibility to clean for your company. Unless you applied to an unusual job posting, it never was. Vacuuming the hallways and scrubbing the office toilets is not cleaning up after yourself. It is cleaning up for your company.
> my job is to write code, not to spray cleaner on a toilet bowl.
There's nothing snooty about this. How do you think a janitor would react if their first day on the job they were sat down in a call center and told to answer phones?
Your company doesn't care about you and your job description has changed. Time to head for the exit.
EDIT: obviously if you're a partner in the company as Michael mentions things are different, but it certainly doesn't sound like you are.
I'm not, and I have no equity in the company.
Personally, as for having to clean a bathroom shared with 30 people at work? No way. Not unless I own the place, and can fire the bad ones who mess it up.
I'll clean my own desk, but make me clean the office and I'm out of there, unless it's a scrappy start-up in which case it's OK. I hope your company has many other redeeming qualities, cause they sure sound cheap!
The only issue is that if you have a valuable workforce that has the option to leave instead of desperately needing the job, you need everyone's buy-in, or at least full understanding of the circumstances.
Apparently that hasn't been done, which is incredibly stupid, especially in such a relatively small company, but not uncommon.
A simple alternative would be to let one programmer go, and start hiring again when business picks up. However, once you go down that road, it's a lot harder to rebuild the team again. With that as the alternative, it shouldn't be too hard to sell, at least not in the short term.
You rise a very important point here. The benefit of free soda or food at work is not that employees can save money; it's that they don't have to think about food. It is abstracted away.
One of the reason those problems appear is probably the wrong mindset of management layer. They think of themselves as the bosses, while they should be thinking they're doing service jobs. Software companies sell software to make money. Software is made by developers (and designers), and sold by sales people. Anything else is support structure. Developer abstraction layer [0] to help translate software to money. But often the structure is inverted, and managers become "shit funnels" instead of "shit umbrellas" [1] - forcing developers to be concerned with things not related to developing. And then productivity declines and good devs leave.
[0] - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstractio...
There are good reasons for you to leave that situation. For one, the fact that your employer can't afford a cleaning service is a very bad omen. Secondly, programmers don't usually like being deprived of their programming like that, so even if your employer isn't about to go under, it's likely that some of your colleagues are planning their own exits. It's also almost certainly a departure from the job description you signed up for.
I have to admit, I am wondering why you're still working there. There must be some good mitigating circumstances, right?
Several reasons. These cost cutting measures are new, and I've been trying to decide whether they are a big enough reg flag for me to start getting serious about finding a new job (I've decided they are). Also, I have some personal life changes coming up in the next 6 months as well, and I'm hesitant to add a job change to those big personal life changes unless I have no choice.
> There must be some good mitigating circumstances, right?
Definitely. I like the team I'm working with, and other than the slightly ridiculous cost cutting, the work environment is remarkably low stress and friendly.
And what other evidence are you waiting for untill you decide that you have no choice?
Is that how it's supposed to be written, or did you just tell me you get coffee for half a cent?
(Serious question. English isn't my first language.)
Verizon Wireless had an issue with charging for wireless data like this a few years ago that made for a funny story.
Essentially in a company meeting that reviews were being delayed for 3 months because of how crazy things were but there was an across the board raise of 10% to make us competitive. The catch, the raises took effect immediately but would not be paid until reviews were done, then everybody would get a lump sum catch up payment along with any increases from the raise.
The meeting dissolved into a huge mess where engineers kept asking "Why not give us the 10% raise now" and the VP Engineering got increasingly irate at the ingratitude without ever adequately explaining the delay.
I went after the meeting and asked the CFO what the hell was going on. Basically, changing all of payroll was a pain in the ass, had a fee of $25 per headcount, and it was going to take a week for our overworked accounting department to accomplish. So they didn't want to take the hit in accounting twice in such a short period of time. I went back and explained it to my team and things were all better.
Reasonable, and if the VP had just said that, all the engineers would have nodded and said "Good thinking!" but the damage had been done. 2 key developers resigned that same day and one two days later.
There are people in this industry who can send emails to their network and get a new, good job in the space of an afternoon. Don't do stupid crap to them.
Machevelli,the Prince (From obtaining a state by Wickedness!).. Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily; and thus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits. He who does otherwise, either from timidity or evil advice, is always compelled to keep the knife in his hand; neither can he rely on his subjects, nor can they attach themselves to him, owing to their continued and repeated wrongs. For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer.
1) Both software and hardware teams like using the best components possible, without necessarily putting enough thought into the target market, which the product is serving. I'm not saying that the product should be as cheap as possible, compromising on quality, but there needs to be a ceiling, depending on the market requirements.
2) Not enough thought was put into the most efficient structuring of the supply chain, resulting in unnecessarily high shipment and tax expenses.
So, the first exercise was very much similar to what you're describing - go through the bill of materials and one by one try to identify any cost savings. This is causing some loss of happiness (treading on people's toes, having to push for different solutions, in their eyes compromising on quality) but is necessary in making a better product.
Consultants often get into this mindset that they need to find a way to show their value in the most immediate way to their clients, in order to justify their high fees. Basically showing how quickly they "pay for themselves".
Coming in as a brand new CFO, you have to prove yourself quickly and justify the high salary you just took. The easiest way is to do that, is to find cost savings within the company and implement them expediently.
Right. I bet the CFO in the story had a two- to five-year time horizon for this job before he/she was planning to move out and up. As such, the CFO needed to make an impact in the first year or two in order to get noticed by bigger players in years two through five.
The short term positive impact of cutting out snacks is immediate and obvious. The costs are less obvious and longer term. Do enough long-term planning in a place like that and people start getting tired of long-term answers to short-term numbers not moving.
Further complicating this stuff: say a 'good' CFO saw the value in a snack budget and implemented one where it didn't exist before. How do you even measure the impact of the improved work that goes along with improved morale? How do you credit a manager for nixing a 'cut the snack budget' suggestion? How do you measure the negatives that were never incurred?
It's very easy to see 'cut snacks, saved 10k; 3 engineers got the wake-up call, grumbled about 'stuff like this' and left, 4 projects now behind".
It's pretty tricky to ever say "this project is now on track because we added a food budget and put in a foosball table". [1]
[1] Which is why those items tend to be focused on as recruitment expenses. It's simply easier to measure/justify in that context.
Which is also why they tend to go away when the company reaches that size where further staffing is composed primarily of employees coming from jobs that also do not have snacks and games, so their necessity for recruitment is basically gone.
It reminds me of a story posted a while ago about the City of Boston moving from Microsoft products to Google Cloud products. One of the prime motivators of this move was claimed to be cost. Boston would save $280,000 in the move. $280,000 seems like a lot of money, a quarter million dollars. However, the story also quoted that there were 20,000 employees using the software. This means that the city would actually be saving $14 per year per employee, or a little more than a dollar per month.
If the employee spent more than a minute or two of paid time learning to use the new system, a year's worth of savings would be eliminated. Now, it's possible that the city would see efficiency improvements by using google apps, but that wasn't the reason claimed for the move. The reason claimed was that the switch would cost only $800,000 but save $280,000 per year. Within 3 years they would recover those costs and realize some savings.
When a new CFO comes in and sees that your 100 employees consume $50,000 worth of soda in a year, it looks like an easy place to recover a nice chunk of change. However, in reality the difference is a couple of dollars a day per employee. If those employees now end up going across the street to the coffee shop instead of getting free soda in the office you've just wiped out any gains.
The larger the organization gets, the bigger this feels. 1 employee spending $500/year on soda is not worth considering. 10 employees spending $5,000 per year on soda isn't really a big deal. 100 employees spending $50,000 on soda raises some eyebrows. 2,000 employees spending $1,000,000 on soda means it's going to get cut and someone's going to get a sweet bonus for cutting it.
My point wasn't that they didn't do their calculations, nor do I mean to show bias towards MS or Google. My point was that the amount of savings they would realize ($280,000 per year) was so marginal when the number of affected employees were taken into account.
If I came up to you and said "I can give you a piece of software that will save you $1.17 per month, but I will have to sell it to you for $40", would that be a good deal?
Why is it that when you multiply those numbers by 20,000 that it all of a sudden becomes a good deal? Especially when you can't be 100% certain that your cost projections are perfectly accurate, being a bit too optimistic can wipe out any hope of any savings.
My point was just that because the numbers are big they look really important. But when you look at them spread across the workforce it looks different. Saving $280,000/year after 3 years is just fine. Saving $14/year after 3 years is fine too. One looks far more important than the other.
If the news story said that it would save them $1.17 per user per month after 34 months, would it have the same impact?
If a company says they spend 2 million dollars a year on free soda for staff, that sounds excessive. If they spend 2 million dollars per year on soda but they say that they spend 45 cents per day on average on soda per employee, does that have the same impact?
In the former, you don't have any point of reference 2 million dollars is a lot of money. In the latter you immediately consider things like how much the employee's wage is, how much electricity they use, how much water they use washing their hands after using the toilet. If you have someone using a Xerox copier that charges a few cents per copied page, now their copier usage is majorly competing with the cost of soda.
In the grand scheme of things though, a couple of dollars per day per employee, for professionals, can be pretty much ignored. But if you think of it instead of $1,000,000 per year, it's harder to ignore, even though it's the same thing.
The original article was about taking some thing away from employees and saving a small amount of money and doing that having negative impacts morale way beyond the savings.
In this case the city is GIVING the employees something and saving a small amount of money.
Oates said: "This decision represents an important step forward for the City. We want to equip all city employees with easy-to-use tools that allow them be more productive and innovative in their jobs, as well as a system that can scale to keep up with the city's demands."[1]
[1]http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2267773/city-of-boston-dumps-...
In the story you cite, for example, the city didn't come in and say, "How can we be most effective," they were saying, "what costs can we cut" or perhaps "Oh goodness we sure spend a lot on that."
Keeping perspective is extremely difficult to do.
I mean, sure, the sodas were the wake up call that made engineers realise they wanted to leave. But the article seems to suggest that leaving the sodas free would solve the problem. Surely the core problem is that the company has changed, not that the engineers noticed it?
And then we were purchased by a company run by insecure petty tyrants who alternated between neglect and micro-management, so none of it mattered. Sigh.
The lesson is you will loose waves of talent at certain transition points. This can't be helped (other than by not growing). Leaders need to be aware and plan for this.
When I hear "free soda" I hear "free diabetes and heart disease". Free soda is the worst kind of encouragement to have your employees living a healthy lifestyle. I'd love to hear about a company who seeks to provide fresh local fruits and vegetables at its snack table.
I really don't mean to come off as a Debbie Downer, but soda is such a terrible scourge on society as a whole.
The point is that these stupid small things make (or not make) you feel appreciated.
Although I don't hardly drink soda, having free soda available would allow me to believe that the company is willing to spend a few K/yr to say "We appreciate your hard work, have something small as a token of our appreciation"
I'm with you about the sodas. They are free at my work (with a loose rule of one per employee per day) and I always say to my fellow colleagues that it's terrible, sugar sugar sugar.
Heck, I got at least one place to get caffeine free with sugar Coke, since I don't like the effects of the former and (at least back then) didn't have to worry at all about calories at that level. I was probably the only one who drank it, but it was a really minor effort for them to include it along with everyone else's preferences, and obviously that sends a message as well.
First the soda orders went from a variety to a few brands and the pantry which was always open, started getting locked. Then it was cut to just cold cuts in the fridge and you had to run once the pizza guy got there or you were hungry.
Attrition started soon after. It was apparent to all that our European parent corporation didn't quite understand how Silicon Valley worked. After about a year of everyone who could leaving (CEO, Dir of Eng, most of pre-acqu and post-acqui employees who weren't H1-Bs), the office ceased to exist.
Like the OP, I saw the cutting sodas as a sign. If they are going to nickel and dime on something that keeps people from having to take a 20 min break to quench their thirst, where will they stop?
Top banks and law firms have everything either free or heavily subsidised under one roof, from multiple restaurants to gyms, so that you don't waste any time looking for those things and carry on working like a dog (but feel privileged doing so). Just don't calculate your hourly rate...
I find that I am far more inclined to actually stay a little later and get stuff done when I'm not ridiculously hungry. Additionally, I can stay later after dinner and still have the same amount of free time when I get back home, which is nice for me, and for the company.
edit: soda wouldn't do anything for me, though. Substantial snacks or "real" food would be much better.
There's more going on though. If soda/snacks are free (and always in stock), there is less mental effort involved for the employees. They feel reassured that the snacks are always there when they want them. They don't have to make decisions about whether or not to buy them... actually this is a whole 'nother discussion about micro-transactions, which haven't worked well for the Web.
If you give your employees a raise, that disappears into the general fund, and is no longer a separate benefit.
Is your goal wealth maximization? If so, you might understand that you're now getting an extra $50/mo for food purposes, but now you feel like you should hold it and not spend it.
Is your goal to suck down some minor pleasure to keep your brain mollified as you ponder some unsolved task? Well maybe the distraction posed by thinking of soda; thinking of buying a soda; thinking of buying a soda and wondering if you have the right change for it; thinking of buying a soda and wondering if you should really save that money to spend on a larger purchase later; etc... Anyway, maybe that distraction is greater than the distraction posed by grabbing a free soda.
People's different reaction to free vs non-free things, especially in the context of engineering work, does not strike me as irrational in general—only if you think that people maximize for present dollars does it seem particularly irrational.
-I don't have to carry change/cash.
-I don't have to deal with a vending machine that will fail to give me what I want 2% of the time.
-If something that I want is not there, I can ask the boss to get it next time rather than hoping for a machine to be restocked (probably by a vendor that may or may not carry what I want).
-The price of soda/snacks never changes.
-If I ask my neighbor to grab a soda for me, there's no need for her or me to keep a mental account of gifts.
EDIT: Typing too fast; missed a word
The best coders, in my experience, are very sensitive. They understand what great quality is. One little thing is off, and it will bug them. That's what makes them great.
Rather like the "fixed monthly cost eat as much as you want 24/7" cafeterias in many US universities. I know, it's your own responsibility etc etc, but surely an abundance of free stuff will encourage over-consumption. Especially if you factor the psychological "if I don't eat it I'm getting stiffed" factor.
Speaking from experience: yes, yes it does.
Yeah, Noogler weight gain is a known phenomenon: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-10/17/google-employ...
Since starting at Google I've managed to lose a good amount of weight due to increased availability of healthy(ish) snacks (free bananas and mandarins in the MK!) and the buffet style lunches.
<rambling>
How do the buffet style lunches help? Glad you asked.
When I have a plate of food in front of me, I eat everything that's on the plate. I may set out to do otherwise, and I'll even manage to avoid it in my first pass, but in the ensuing conversation over lunch I'll gradually nibble at the remains until everything is gone. However, if I simply take less food, there's nothing to nibble.
Now, I was also making an active effort to lose weight before this, and it requires a conscious choice to eat the healthier options made available to us (as there are plenty of unhealthy options). Compared to my previous gig, though, I've found it much easier to make good choices, diet wise, at Google.
</rambling>
Really, I think part of the affront here is that the absence of such a minor thing--perhaps especially because it's so cheap--is a really bad sign about how much the company values its people.
~
An anecdote:
About the best thing that my previous employer did was offer free coffee, if you could be bothered to make a pot from the existing supplies.
So, a coworker and I took to taking coffee breaks to buy some from a local coffee shop. Usually done after lunch, but still, it got us out of the office for maybe a half-hour or so. We really enjoyed this, because it gave us a chance to talk about other things and get some fresh air.
Said coworker also took to making runs to a convenience store to buy sodas--offering, of course, to do the same for other folks.
All told, these little expeditions probably amounted to a few hours every week in not-working time. Had the business been particularly ruthless, they would've noted that perhaps $10-12 every week in drinks could have kept some of their $50K/yr engineers from being useless for a few hours in search of nourishment. I'm not claiming that this was right, and we're more experienced now, but the fact remains.
A similar story was us getting kicked out of a conference room during a major refactor--we needed to pair program and use a lot of whiteboard space, and after a day or two (this was a really, really hairy unfucking of some core code that had no test suite), and got thrown out mid-project.
That code and project went down in true viking fashion a week or two later, and I left shortly thereafter.
Are you sure you were less productive overall? When I'm stuck on a tricky problem getting out of the office can do wonders.
It's the difference between a company acting like you should feel lucky to have a job there, and a company acting like they are trying to keep you in your job there.
If the company used to given free snack but is now so short on cash that they can't, then perhaps people's positions aren't as safe as they thought they were previously. Whether or not there is a real problem, that is likely to be the perception.
Also we have an informal arrangement here: if I'm working late and get hungry I'll have food delivered and expense it. If I couldn't do that I'd have to go home instead, so if people are using the free snacks to stave off hunger at busy times this could be a detriment to the company.
It's feels like your employer saying 'numbers are now more important than getting things done'. It's basically signalling the beginning of bureaucracy.
And that's exactly what happened in Derek's example. So they were not irrational at all, it's a very powerful social cue that the company didn't even know it was giving.
Of course, then they gain 20 pounds over 3 years and resent their employers (and commutes) for all those extra hours and such... or, if the employer switches over to healthy food, they get angry about the paternalistic aspect... this is hard one to win.
However, you're talking about going from no free snacks to free snacks. The other direction--free snacks to non-free snacks--is a bizarre change that sends a negative message to employees. In fact, as you say, it's equivalent to a small loss in pay, as now you have to cover those snacks yourself. Not a big deal... but why is the company effectively docking the pay of every employee?
"People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge."
There is something in "small details" that make us just to feel humiliated. The kind of thing that is not serious enough to understand is needed "well, I get the company is in bad shape", but it feels like a personal offense "What?? I just got a word from my manager because I left yesterday 10 minutes earlier, when we have 'flexible hours'? F*ck you!" When I think about the times I've been most upset with my workplace, it's always for those stupid details. They fell like personal humiliations. And personal problems are way worse than profesional ones...
The food was still "free" [1] but things had definitely changed at high levels. This was just a small part of it. It's taken some time for the change to become evident on the outside world.
I wonder if this post is related to the things I was seeing at the time.
[1] As seen on HN: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/21/notfree/
I guess that is where academia collides with corporate politicking, as an MBA hired in a tech start-up it is easy to justify a 6 figure salary and stock options when you can show you are directly responsible for cost cutting of $x, rather than an MBA explaining they are responsible for $x increase in cost, but that company moral is up.
It allows them to start a patient on a drug without friction, or to give a patient who's going through hard times a full course of treatment without him having to pay anything.
But if a company had been providing them and stops for petty reasons, that's a red light, not because of the drinks, but because of the petty reasons. It can very well be an early warning of incompetent and irresponsible management.
At that company I coined a rule that once companies start to focus heavily on "branding", it's time to bail.
If you want to name servers after fairy tale characters and you will have a tantrum if management won't let you, then you are not mature enough to work for a company. It's called growing-up and being responsible.
And good engineers understand the value of memorable names, as well as the less tangible value of good corporate culture.
At the end of day these are tiny costs when compared to the overall productivity of engineers. Yes, there are folks who will misuse it but those are a tiny fraction and cannot outweigh the positive effects. It shows that a company cares for it employees and is willing to go the extra mile.
But, I was wondering, how much soda did these guys drink? He says the cost was about $10k. Correcting for inflation (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) that's $10,838. Assuming 11.45 for a 24-pack (http://www2.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?ec=BD_563-EC27726...), gives us 22,704 cans of coke. Assuming this was an annual expense and all 50 people in the company drank about the same, that's 37 cans of coke per person per month! That's a lot of coke.
You drink a can in the morning, because if you're a soda drinker you're probably not a coffee drinker, so this is your morning caffeine hit. Then you'll have one at lunch, because you're eating. Sooner or later you'll get thirsty again, so you'll have one in the afternoon. Maybe two (since the afternoon is about twice as long as the morning). So, 3-4 cans of soda per day, multiplied by 20 working days in a month gives you 70 cans per month. Assume this is near the high end of a spectrum of soda-drinking behavior, and you'll get an average of around 37 per month.
According to this CDC study (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db71.htm) done in 2011, the group that drinks the most soda is males between 12-19, with 273kCal from soda a day. Assuming they don't consume diet products, that's almost 2 cans a day, but many other groups drink much less. If you drink 4 cans of non-diet stuff, you (will) have a serious problem.
Now, you might say "Mindcrime, you're in a 2 person startup with no revenue yet, if you spend 2 seconds a year thinking about this stuff you're wasting time". But I think it's important for the founders to think hard about culture and work to start embedding that culture into the very DNA of the company, from the early days, and actively look for ways to resist the "culture decay" that @sgblank talks about in this post.
Assuming you have a founding team who retain a substantial degree of control over the firm as it grows (ala, say, Sergey and Larry, or Zuck) you wonder "is it possible to preserve the best part of what makes the company great, even if grows in size 10x, 100x, or more"?
Not to mention the whole "developers and loose change" not going together thing so we tend to value them as worth far more than we should.
The Support department set up a cash shop with far more variety of snacks than we had before.
Cutting costs (especially silly ones) is often a sucker's way to profitability. When people cut costs, they like to think they're being analytical. They often end up ignoring some indirect costs. A better model would include the expected cost in efficiency and human resources via departures and low morale.
A couple of weeks ago I ask an owner how much he wanted for an old TV we had in the office, hoping that he would say just take it (the tv was 8 years old and not been used for about 3), he didn't, he wanted its ebay value. We agreed £30. That made me feel sad, less appreciated.
tldr; Small things can affect people in a big way.
> wanted old equipment for free
> had to pay a nominal price for it instead
> felt sad and less appreciated
I've worked in startups that made this mistake, and once you've been down that road a few times, you can tell when people didn't think enough before they started placing those early food and drink orders. There's a line to walk between nice perks unmaintainable/excessive spending.
Of course, if you do decide you've gone too far, the article's scenario can play out, whether it's coincidental or whether the cut actually is because of financial problems (in which case it's unlikely the snacks broke the company, but they certainly don't help in that regard, and they do make it that much harder to effectively manage budget cuts without incurring even more employee ire and attrition than absolutely necessary).
Adding my experience to the data points of anecdote -- from working outside the Valley and in larger, more "traditional" corporations (albeit ones where sodas and at times meals were made free as perks -- either an historical legacy or a management practice gleaned from magazines and consultants).
When the soda stops being free (or meals, if you're so lucky, etc.), it's time to go.
If don't simply want to take this external advice, listen for yourself to the explanations that are given when this is done. After absorbing a bit of that language and convolution and misdirection, if you don't want to go on your on accord and the basis of direct experience... well, some people do do all right. But, from my perspective, they don't tend to be people I enjoy.
1. Charge employees by volume for sodas.
2. Reimburse them for their urine.
(But yes, I LOL'd.)
I have strong aspirations of starting a company, but have seen too many examples of a board's personality being at odds with [what feels like] common sense business interests.
Anyone have any advice on ways to a) properly vet your investors and b) curb these situations down the line?
Personally, I've never forgotten that I'm lucky to have "extra" benefits, and I've never started believing I'm owed them.
If you're a good programmer, there'll be competition for you here.
I would think if it were managed, with lots of communication about new benefits that reflect the changing company behavior (more execution-centric, less skunk works) and new work-hour expectations, then it can seem ok.
To put it another way, it's amusing that the software engineers make a big deal out of free food and drinks, when the people "above" them are getting massive pay checks from the software engineer's work.
It's no wonder we're getting another tech bubble when software engineers will sell themselves out for $5 worth of snacks.
Free soda is a perk that costs the company say $10,000. It makes taxes a bit complex (because do people really declare the free soda?) but it's cheap and easy and people love free stuff.
The goodwill you get from that simple gesture is worth more than just giving people the cash as part of their salary.
You either have PHBs that get it, and leave it alone (while monitoring for abuse) or you get PHBs who don't get it, and who cut it, and who then have to spend a lot more money replacing all the staff who leave.
The fact that I worked more than 14 hour days, weekends, had to pay for my own cab fares home (because trained stopped at 23:45) and occasionally had to spend nights working on features to hit marketing deadlines. At one time they hired a freelancer who wasn't up to par so I had to do all of his + my stuff, four nights in a row. At some point all nighters was more common than non all nighters.
This is what happens when non devs take over and we become machines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1008178
Saying that good companies, even software companies, can only be ran by software developers is a rather odd takeaway.
The real crimes have nothing to do with soda. Some manager is hired from outside and is mandating daily status reports. Complain about that and you get in trouble, or people think you're a slacker upset that he can no longer hide. Or, let's say that you find out that some newly-hired VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) is outearning engineering old hands who took actual risk; it's unjust, but if you complain about it, you endanger not only your career but the careers of the people who gave you that information.
The thing about free soda is that you can complain about the loss of it without showing insecurity or political bias because the change is in the common knowledge.
Companies get away with much worse crimes than free-food reductions (which aren't even crimes at all if (a) they were never part of the promised employment deal and (b) times are legitimately tough) but because there's no way to hide that stuff, those end up being the touch-points for complaints.
You can't complain about the new stack-ranking system without seeming insecure-- so executives can divide-and-conquer along those lines (we're firing 5% each year in a "low performer" witch hunt, but the top 15% get bonuses!)-- but the loss of free food is a more socially acceptable and universal grudge.
I actually like the fact that when Douchetember 11th happens, these trivial perks get phased out as well. If the executive shitfucks knew how to rob a company, they'd keep the free soda while turning the crank slowly on the robberies that actually matter (meaner performance review systems, equity clawbacks and cliffing).
Imagine what would happen if a large company kept its trivial perks but still disempowered engineers, gradually, over time. It might manage to hold a "best company out there" reputation 10 years beyond actually deserving it. Not that I know of any companies like that, but just imagine how effective it might be and how much executive robbery (at the expense of clueless talent) could go on.
"Not that I know of any companies like that"
> I actually like the fact that when Douchetember 11th happens
Those people leave by themselves, then the firings happen... and stock goes up, targets are met... BONUSES ALL ROUND! Woo! (Or merger/new investment/whatever needs a up+right graph).
More insane than cynical, I think. Cynicism is seeing things clearly without any romantic or emphatic filters. Insanity is making sure the most able part of the workforce finds other employment.
A few years later, the company was acquired and a few years after that, the whole thing fell apart.
You're left with people who are duffers, and possibly doing harm to the company. Or with people who have many years with the company and who will be expensive to layoff with redundancy payments.
Firstly, I'm sure the work policy you signed off has tons of rules. Most of them are never enforced. Now, you enforce them stringently.
Awwww.. People you didn't like now have cause for you to fire them.
If you cut people but don't cut workload/complexity, then the survivors just have to work harder. That's not sustainable, and with the underlying problems of the company (complexity overload) unfixed, it only becomes a worse operation. Sure, complexity-reductions need to happen and often those involve cutting jobs-- either through a layoff or attrition dynamics-- but just cutting jobs is a short-term remedy and won't work if the company itself isn't truly streamlined.