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Comment by adnam | Hacker News Reader

As long as free fizzy drinks are considered sacred, engineers will never reach the income levels seen in the legal, medical and financial sectors. Employers will treat like adolescents those who behave like adolescents.

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You really don't understand this. Wanting things like this is actually the exact opposite of being an adolescent. It shows that you are, consciously or not, evaluating decisions in terms of the opportunity cost of your time. If my employer provides you small conveniences like food and a gym, it saves the hassle of going out of your way to get them. I happen to work in finance and joined my current company because they had a fully stocked kitchen and were putting in a gym. I get more value out of an additional hour of working and honing the skills my job requires than I get from having to leave the building, think about where to get lunch, go there, order it, wait for it, and then finally go back to the building. Guess who else benefits from that increased productivity? My employer.

Other professions have perks analogous to free soda for engineers. For example, medical sector professionals go bonkers over free samples.

Well, that's a little more directly connected to their jobs.

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.

Then to validate the point, if company X stopped offering free samples, competitor Y would probably benefit by still offering free samples. Or, the medical professional could just buy the samples from company X with their own money because they are no longer free.

I can't upvote this one enough. There is an astounding insistence among engineers that they should be able to dress like bums, swear in presentations, consume endless junk food and soda on the company dime, not be required to complete professional degrees ("judge me on my Github"), etc. etc. while simultaneously bitching that they're not paid like real professionals. Hmmn.

I really don't see how the two are related. And besides, you can get free drinks in quantitative finance too, if you want to be paid well.

Employers will pay their employees what the market bears.

It would indeed be irrational to care that much about the drinks per se. Certainly it wouldn't occur to me to think badly of a company that just never considered providing them in the first place.

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.

Are you implying that the aggregate cost of employer provided soda is equal to the difference in salaries between engineers and doctors?

No I'm implying that engineers often undervalue themselves, while going on and on and on about free snacks.

Thank you for being the adult in this thread. +1

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