Ask HN: When the fruit bowl is no longer filled | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When the fruit bowl is no longer filled

16 pointsscottmcdot15 comments

I've now worked for two companies that have stopped filling the fruit bowl. The first company started to let go of staff around the same time when they stopped filling the fruit bowl.

The second company, which I now currently work for, is still employing staff and seems to be in positive territory. Last week, the daily fruit bowl stopped being filled without reason.

For an office space of approximately 30 staff, what possible cost-benefit analysis could justify canning the fruit?

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http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...

I absolutely love this article and I think this could be OPs problem. CFO's (or controllers, or COO's with spreadsheets) seem to have only one hammer, and everything begins to look like a nail. Costs, of any type, start to look bad. These can start with little things like niceties ("That fruit bowl costs us $20 a day, that's $5200 a year"). It can move into other areas ("Why do engineers need a new MBP and Thunderbolt display when they start here. We could save $1000 per employee by giving them a 21 inch monitor"). It's a slippery slope when you have a finance person who only looks at ways to reduce costs. Suddenly you might even get into some really uncomfortable conversations like: "I noticed engineers take a 1 hour lunch and leave after 8 hours of working... you know if we could get them to work during lunch and stay just a bit longer we could reduce our highest cost center, the engineers, by 20%!"

This is where you hope your company has a good set of founders or management that push against the proposed changes and collaborates with the finance people. But that doesn't always happen.

I am working in Vienna (Austria) and I am not sure whether the company's time-keeping scheme represents the majority of companies in Vienna or it is a manifestation of an ultra-lean mid-size company.

I've worked in consulting and, sure, you need to track project time, but I am now working in an R&D role and it seems so unnatural to clock-on and clock-off. We receive a 30min lunch break, during which we need to clock off. We need to have an average of 40 hours logged per week during the course of a calendar month. By Austrian law, an employee must take a 30min break after six hours’ work.

IT and software receive dual 24" but R&D (also programming-intensive), along with project managers, HR, etc. receive one 24". So I and the rest of the R&D team are constantly thrashing the Ubuntu Ctrl+Alt+Numpad 4/8/6/2 command to sprawl four windows onto one screen. I think it was a poor decision not to group R&D with software in terms of monitor requirements.

Companies sometimes forget that they're not in the business of saving money.

They're in the business of generating profit.

Management need to show year upon year growth no matter how little sense it makes. One way of doing that over the short term is to slash costs, with costs lower profits are higher, and thus the manager can receive a nice fat bonus and maybe get promoted. Only problem is these short term cost savings result in medium to long term damage, which can ultimately destroy a company's profit making potential (e.g. HP).

You see this all the time. A successful business brings in a CEO or CFO, they slash costs all over the place, the board loves them for 2-4 years and they leverage their success to get a better job at another business. A few years after they left, profits at the old business start to fall, because the slashing had unintended side effects (e.g. like making the business less competitive), but it took time for those negative effects to start to be apparent (particularly to higher tier staff and the board). However now everyone blames the CEO/CFO who took over after the "successful" one because nobody realised the delay between the cause and effect.

A lot of MBA-types have a trail of fire behind them. They've built a career on it. Your first warning should be slashing R&D departments.

Thanks!

"The [fruit] were just the wake-up call"

You probably have better insight in to that than anyone here.

There could be a couple of reasons that have nothing to do with financials. Perhaps there was a high level of waste and therefore one person simply made a decision to just stop. Could also be that one person always took care of it and they are out on holiday or otherwise away. It could be they're waiting for someone to comment on it.

Then it could be the beginning of tightening down on incidental spending. If this is the case you should also begin to see this in other areas such as less paid for lunches or paid for after work outings etc....

This is the correct answer.

You are not a fruit-in-code-out machine. You are part of a company now and, hopefully, getting deep into your career.

Your career involves keeping your ear to the ground and understanding the state of your company. Not just the outward stuff that goes into press releases and product launches, but the internal success and failures.

You don't have to just walk up to the fruit person and ask "WTF?". Be a little more subtle than that. Was there some major project that was cancelled? Sales not meet the forecast? Hiring was frozen by management?

All these little pieces need to be gathered over months and years, but you should always know where your job stands before the decision is made for you.

Sometimes, yeah, it was just the fruit person going on holiday. But sometimes it's the canary in a coal mine.

"...canary in a coal mine" - well said.

Why not ask the person who had been filling the fruit bowl what's going on?

I am relatively new and don't want to appear too uppity without a few months' under my belt. I think I will ask eventually.

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Uppity in that I am an important employee and deserve fruit when fruit has been provided. I am Australian and this term came to mind, but after just reading about it's racial connotations I may be using it in the wrong context.

You're using it in proper context. I've seen the racial slurs you're referring to but I think the word itself is fine.

Thanks! I do not know why brudgers decided to delete his/her comments. I'm pretty new to commenting on HN.

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