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Comment by scotty79 | Hacker News Reader

My office had a lot of ceramic cups that were taken by employees from the cabinet, used and left wherever in the kitchenette.

There was one dedicated employee whose main job was to gather the cups and put them in the dishwasher and after they are cleaned, put them back in the cabinet. Dishwasher ran constantly and that employee kept kitchenette neat in between of cup handling. I think there were even two dishwashers so one can be loaded while the other is working.

The system was pretty much perfect. If people forgot to bring their cups back to kitchenette they were gathered by the cleaners at the end of the day from employees desks.

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Funnily enough, we just hit a similar issue.

I'm part of an environmental group at my workplace, and one of our recent pilots was to get rid of single-use paper cups. It was crazy: despite ample clean ceramic cups being available --and indeed stacked on top of the coffee machine!-- many people defaulted to paper cups, sometimes to the tune of having 5-10 used paper cups on their desk at the end of a day.

Anyway, one of the issues that the pilot uncovered was that no-one was loading or unloading the dishwasher: it transpired that everyone thought it was someone else's job. This led to piles of dirty cups and a shortage of clean cups, despite each kitchen area having a dedicated commercial-grade dishwasher.

The long-term solution is education - so that people understand that we must all take responsibility for the cleaning together, and to train people how to use the dishwashers. The short-term solution is for each kitchen area to have a couple of colleagues who keep an eye on things.

I'm one of them for my floor, and I unexpectedly find it strangely therapeutic to do the dish-washing :)

> I unexpectedly find it strangely therapeutic to do the dish-washing :)

You're not the only one!

Why not have everyone put their mugs/cups in the dishwasher last thing at night and have the cleaner run the machine as part of their tasks.

I'm not sure where you are but there are a number of schemes in the UK now for recycling these cups. The main one is, I think, Simply Cups so possibly worth contacting them.

At my office there are signs around the coffee pot reminding everyone to bring their own reusable cup from home, the paper cups are for guest use. When they rolled this out everyone was given a nice cup (with the company logo of course). You are responsible for washing your own cup - dish soap is at the sink in the break room, or take it home.

Some people still use the provided cups instead of their own, but it helps.

> train people how to use the dishwashers

If any workplace ever implements this - leave.

I'm not paying my engineers $200k a year to load a dishwasher for even a minute. We have cleaners who do it as part of their rotation, anything else and you're running a clown show.

So do you use LOC as the primary metric for productivity? I've definitely had insights into a current project while performing a mindless task like washing dishes, in fact there are certain times where I will seek out a task like that.

To me, the bigger WTF is having to train people to use a dishwasher--hopefully that is something most adults can be expected to know how to do already.

Having the dishwasher as a choice is one thing, forcing it? That’s crossing a line. And you know you’ll get that all seeing eye watching who isn’t washing their cups and scheming to make their life hell.

Serenity is priceless for coders.

Serenity is priceless for coders.

This is pricelessly succint. If there is one guiding principal for creating office space, this should be it.

> To me, the bigger WTF is having to train people to use a dishwasher--hopefully that is something most adults can be expected to know how to do already.

You'd think, but in this case it is surprisingly unintuitive. The machine is a small high-throughput commercial grade item (takes just a few minutes per wash) which has little in common with home dishwashers. Further, its touchscreen interface is honestly really confusing. It took me a few goes and several wrong turns before I got it right, and this was with motivation.

> If any workplace ever implements this - leave.

> I'm not paying my engineers $200k a year to load a dishwasher for even a minute. We have cleaners who do it as part of their rotation, anything else and you're running a clown show.

I see your point, but it's means to an end. Our immediate goal, as a group of motivated employees, is to remove the paper cups. This is being done with the grudging acceptance of the team who actually run the building, who would probably be much happier if we stopped trying to change things, making their lives more complicated. Thus, while we can make the change we desire quickly and relatively easily, we must also handle the downsides of the change, to be successful - otherwise, it would be reversed. Long-term, having a dedicated cleaner do this would be optimal... but that's a change that would take far longer to enact.

> unexpectedly find it strangely therapeutic to do the dish-washing

I'm always delighted when I'm doing non-development things at work:

"Hey, I'm a part time dishwasher with developer salary!"

That's what we have at our workplace too; the main thing though (from an employer's point of view) is that ceramic cups will take a bit more employee time, either for dedicated staff to handle dishes and rebalancing cups in the kitchens, or for the consumers who have to make sure they put their cups in the dishwashers.

I don't think the environmental impact is that big if they use paper / cardboard cups instead. Those are properly reusable at least.

these kind of jobs are cut first when troubles come to the company... and so everybody literally feels we're in trouble

There’s always a first to cut job in every business.

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