The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)
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The CEO announces we have to "put our heads down." Pretty much the main change enacted was no more ping pong. The problem is that were really only two guys constantly in the ping pong room. Those two guys just happened to be the two most senior sales guys, and the only two that were meeting quota.
They both left about a month after this and not-so-slyly told the CEO he was an idiot.
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30173379 - Feb 2022 (1 comment)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27445943 - June 2021 (3 comments)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19690250 - April 2019 (2 comments)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16801710 - April 2018 (2 comments)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13134712 - Dec 2016 (69 comments)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5751329 - May 2013 (390 comments)
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750 - Dec 2009 (226 comments)
Dang is a moderator, and he does it when he thinks it's useful. I suspect he does it "by hand" but, like me, has written scripts to help.
Given that your account was created 12 years ago I'm a little surprised that this is the first thread summary you've seen.
You'd certainly be welcome to resume! I think including the date + number of comments is the important bit, plus not pointing to threads with zero comments - but IIRC you had both of those features.
Edit: one fun fact – it's surprisingly difficult to post links to past threads without coming off as somehow reproaching the latest submitter for posting a duplicate. In reality, HN allows reposts after about a year (and this is in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), but many people don't know that and interpret the list of past threads as an implicit criticism, which is a shame.
I've tried out a bunch of different wordings trying to minimize that misunderstanding. The simplest one seems to be the most effective - I just say "Related". Somehow the word "related" sounds less like a criticism. It also has the nice property of being inclusive, so for example it's fine to include other articles on the same topic.
One of these years, I still want to build software support for collecting related URLs and related past threads into HN's official UI. Then we can all build up sets of related things collaboratively. That will hopefully make HN more interesting.
You could also take all the posts and related links, toss them in a big adjacency matrix and, oh I dunno, rank the relatedness of pages.
Dumb jokes aside, these do add a lot of extra structure to the dataset and people might think up something interesting to do with that.
> 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.
> [...]
> 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.
> I'm still working on removing the virus, seems to be using drivers to mask its presence from the virus checkers I am using. I've got some ideas based on using a scanner on a live-cd.
I regularly practice just switching to a whole new system and restoring from backups. I think asking an infected system to scan itself is sketchy. Just blow it up, mkfs, and rebuild it. Binaries are disposable.
Maybe it's a Windows system...
I guess the ranking would have to be proportional rather than absolute, since I'm assuming more recent comments would have gotten more votes due to a growing audience.
If you work day and night to get a product out, and then a CFO slides in above everyone on the team, and on top of that they're a cheapskate, that sends a signal.
> The engineers focused on building product never noticed when the company had grown into something different than what they first joined.
> The sodas were just the wake-up call.
There is a large sign next to the cage.
There is a stick on the ground.
> read sign
The sign says, DO NOT POKE THE BEAR
> get stick
You pick up the stick.
> poke bear with stick
Despite your better judgement, you poke the bear with the stick. The bear rouses from its sleep.
> poke bear with stick
With a terrible roar, the bear turns on you. Reaching through the bars, it tears your arm off.
There is an arm laying here, holding a stick.
Ontopic: I wouldn't give a shit about soda or free soda, but coffee and tea is always free here for employees in my country (quality may differ!). I simply would not work for a company which wouldn't feat this. So the social norm defines it and keeps its own behavior status quo. That's also a reason why its difficult to get rid of smoking/smokers tobacco in society
Same with “HR types ruining the culture” and “middle managers running amok.” Those people all get hired to transform the company, because leadership has decided some thing very fundamental: What got us here, won’t get us there.
PG once wrote that startups should frame their reason for existence as “trying to answer a question.”
Famous questions of the past: Will microcomputers sell? Will people pay a premium for bit-mapped graphics and a mouse? Can advertising sustain a search engine? Will the world use a social media web site built for college students?
But at some point, you know the answer is “yes,” you know that a sustainable business is possible, and you are no longer a startup. The difference between “answering a question” and “running a sustainable business”is vast.
Maybe killing free soda is not the best way to start the transition, but one way or another, all the people who want to explore the unknown, test their visions, and answer questions are going to leave, to be replaced by people who enjoy playing the world’s most cut-throat, high-stakes engine game, business.
If you truly enjoy what a startup is and how it works, you need to pack your parachute long before the free sodas go away. You need to pack your parachute when everyone realizes that you are no longer wondering if your company can become a real business, the only questions are how, when, and who.
On the other hand, maybe you want to build a real business once you know it can be done. Gates did. Jobs did. Long before them, Ken Olsen did at DEC. If so, accept that the sodas will eventually go and the controls will be imposed.
There is of course the third category like Google whose solution was to stratify into a caste system where your core employees maintain some of that original culture while most of your employees are contractors you treat like shit.
There are companies that make a lot of money and grow both organically and via acquisitions where people have a well-defined culture that attracts top talent... But it's a different kind of talent, it's the talent that enjoys building a lean, mean, money-making machine.
Historically, ITT was one of those companies during the Age of Conglomerates. Later on, IBM and Xerox come to mind. I recall that during the 80s and 90s having worked in management or sales for Xerox was a golden ticket to almost any job you wanted. Same with working in finance for GE.
What about working in management at Disney today? What about working in leadership with Apple or Amazon today? These are very well run companies with a strong management culture, growth, and profits. And investors love them.
That's a distinction without a difference.
it's the talent that enjoys building a lean, mean, money-making machine.
Precisely. You start a company as a problem-solving customer-pleasing machine and it becomes a money-making customer-exploiting machine. The ideal world for the MBA is one in which your customers hate you just not enough to stop paying you.
Curious, are there good examples of companies that were able to delay the "pick 2" problem for a long time?
Im assuming such company would need to be a dividend-paying machine bc otherwise the profits would go into retained earnings (vs staff growth or R&D expense, etc) and that would make investors really unhappy.
My informal model of startups is that they're business that are bad at any one specific thing they do (or at least, not-necessarily-good), but are good at quickly iterating between different business models. Edge cases (all IMHO):
Uber is still a startup because they have huge unresolved inefficiencies in their core ride-service model and are looking for ways to best make use of the network they've established.
Amazon is not a startup because they have a steady business model that enables long-term production at scale. They certainly enter new markets and offer new services all the time, but do it much slower than a startup would (and often do it just by buying a startup). Same logic for Apple (not that anyone was saying otherwise).
Quibi was not a startup because, from the beginning, they locked into a specific model and were slow to iterate.
"A startup is an organization in search of a scaleable business model." When the company moves from exploration to execution, it is no longer a startup.
Much like a single cockroach at the entrance of a fancy hotel isn't by itself a problem if it's limited to exactly that cockroach...
You can’t even say that it doesn’t work, because it’s how every major company operates. On the flip-side, it’s not like Coca Cola has really invented anything of worth for like a 100 years. So while bean counters are financially good for investors, they are probably pretty terrible at running our society, because it’s the engineers that actually build things and the founders who come up with the saleable ideas.
Anyway, if my career has taught me anything it’s to do your thing. Being part of the transition from startup to enterprise can be a lot of fun as well, so long as you know that you can’t really fight the MBA types and win.
I don't think the soda cost per person would be different for 20 people though, so it seems a weird thing to raise the eyes about.
Basically: who cares, the company will live or die based on products and funding rounds, and you're just trying to make the company not die at this stage.
But to an established company trying to make money, 0.7% of revenue is a huge (seriously, huge) line item in a CFO's accomplishment list. Consistent profitability is built on a long, grueling ladder of tiny incremental bean-countings. And to an established company trying to make money, that's where the focus turns. And those are the employees who get rewarded.
It's not that either side is "right", it's that they have opposing priorities and that growing companies need to manage that tension and not just give in to the temptation to lock the soda machine.
Ok, that seems pretty weird right there, 0.7% overhead of an early stage startup is now 0.7% of revenue even though we agree it is just increasing as the same rate of hires?
In other words while each new programmer hired will drink the same amount of soda as the others it should be evident that the percentage of revenue would be decreasing, otherwise they have some serious problems that getting rid of free soda will not fix.
Think of it from the management perspective. It’s not about the soda, it’s about the “we’re giving this middle manager $1million a year to pay for his/her employees now, and we sort of don’t know what we get in return”. In startups nobody has time to think about that sort of thing, you simply do what’s necessary to get stuff done, and, the amounts are smaller. As size grows, so does the perceived need for bean counters.
I say perceived because I’ve never personally experienced a company who didn’t go that road, so I can’t say what would happen if you continued to trust all your employees and middle managers rather than start monitoring and structuring them, but I do know that a lot of the business intelligence and documentation systems that I have seen showed little actual value once they got disrupted by covid and everyone working from home.
Not a good sign for any company.
Many business decisions are heavily influenced by this dichotomy in accounting.
The company is either broke, and can't afford soda (so it probably won't afford any raises and bonuses), or it's trying to save money on meaningless, cheap stuff (and will try to save money elsewhere... like on staff and wages). To me, this is a signal to slowly leave.
The no free sods is just a rules for thee but not for me situation. Do you think the exec floor with the said CFO no longer has free soda? Of course not. The execs have free soda, coffee, donuts, meals, open bar, beer, private jet reservations, wine and all kinds of other extravagances.
Maybe the insight here is "keep your engineers happy, it's important". But I believe there is more to it on this story. The engineers heard "we could give you soda when we were small, now we're big, we cannot give you soda" and, to the rational mind, that makes no sense.
Maybe they left because they were sitting on a precarious equilibrium and the free sodas tilted the balances. But I think it was also that the engineers saw the sign on the wall, and thought "this guys have lost their collective corporate mind, let's bail before they have any more bright ideas".
All of it.
Free soda for 10 people is hard. They have different tastes. There are too many things to keep enough refrigerated at the same time to make sure you hit soda rush times of the day. And you're probably running to a local grocery store, at least sometimes, to make sure you don't run out.
With 100 people, you've probably settled into something more standardized, no more special Puerto Rican pineapple soda for that one person with the interesting tastes. Everything can be delivered by the same one or two vendors. You know roughly how much you need and when - much more predictable. And you have more fridges now, constantly stocked with more soda. Moreover, the free soda now costs less per person.
Etc.
There's no such thing.
There's a fairly low natural limit to how much soda one human can drink. Yes if they're dragging pallets out to resell on the street that might be an issue - an issue of the company not paying enough such that hocking loose cans is worth it for their employees.
A company cutting employee perks without further explaining what employees will get in exchange is irrational and being stupid. I mean even drastic lines like “you get to keep your job that otherwise we would cut” are usually explicitly stated to try to convince the employees there’s something in for them.
We decided to be hostile to you, soda-drinker, personally, we are some combination of tremendously greedy and out of money, and the trend is towards more bright ideas of this sort.
I like the hats.
Once, a (junior) coworker asked what I expect from the job.
I figured it was 6 things:
- Money, of course
- Interesting work
- Learning, or at least putting good stuff on my resume
- Ego, wanting to say "_I_ built that"
- Control, wanting to say "I built that _with my tools_" or getting to work on "_my_" projects
- Socialization
I ranked them in order of how concretely the company offered them to employees.
Money is the most concrete, it's in every contract. Socialization is the most abstract, the company can't make any promises about that.
The middle ones were fuzzy. The company's product is somewhat interesting, and won't change often, but learning, ego, and control were not in any contract. These were things I quietly extracted under the table because I just really wanted them.
I would like to reify them. I'd like to say to my manager "I'm going to work on some pointless internal tool nobody needs, just so I can play with this new language. Then when I realize we could never deploy it, I'll feel better about using an older language on our real product. I can't control my inner child, and letting me play with blocks and Play-Doh is cheaper for us than hiring a company therapist or firing me."
A couple times my boss' boss teased us about "10% time, like Google does", and it never manifested. I've just been taking it anyway. Probably less than 10%. My last performance review was great and every month they give me money, so I haven't been caught. Maybe it works because, unlike Google, I'm not trying to write a new chat app every time I need a promotion. I'm just occasionally doing things nobody told me to do, based on my intuition, to satisfy some sub-conscious wannabe hacker drive.
So I wonder, maybe if I ever stop liking my company, it doesn't mean the company's bad, it means I just need to find another startup and ride it for 4 or 5 years until it gets too big again.
As soon as we hit a recession there were cries to cut back on the free food and sodas.
It sent a very wrong message to me, as many of the people I interacted with on a daily basis were horrible in their jobs.
It seemed that pausing hiring recs and a few well-targeted severance packages would have saved more money than cutting back a few freebies.
This led to a number of people routinely using their breaks to take the elevator up to the "partners' floor" and cooling off / airing their sweaty BO for the bosses' benefit.
I worked for a bank where they had terrible coffee on our floor. We used to joke about how bad it was until one day these fancy automatic machines showed up that ground the coffee for each cup, they even had milk! Times were good, we'd walk over to somebody's desk--"I'm running a build, do you want to grab a coffee?"--and we'd chat in the break room about how great these new machines were.
Then we had a couple of quarters in a row with bad numbers, cutbacks were being made, if we do this then we don't have to have layoffs, etc. We lost our fancy machines.
The impact to morale was huge, we only had had them for a couple of months, taking them away once we got used to them was a huge deal. But more importantly, most people on our floor were now used to drinking partly-decent coffee. A couple times a day we'd go to the nearest coffee shop and buy our own, which involved walking to the elevator, waiting, going 23 floors to the lobby, badging out, walking across the street, getting coffee, walking back, badging in, waiting for the elevator, going up 23 floors, then finally back to your desk. This had to waste at least 20 minutes, more if the elevators were busy.
Sometimes that's called, "Leading from the front."
The managers all knew who these people were, so they could have given them severance without calling it a layoff. I'm mostly referring to a situation where everyone else would have been relieved instead of spooked.
I think leadership-oriented types tend to esteem headcount the way nerds esteem CPU core count and frequency - up is fine, down is not acceptable unless you're absolutely forced. Neither is a really rational position, but they overall tend not to be too detrimental so there's no widespread change.
It's not the only factor, but it's by far the most important.
Managers fight over headcount because it directly affects their personal ... everything. Career, money, power, ... all are dependent on headcount ("number of reports").
This is how it works at various big, powerful tech companies (although the severance offer often comes with a "performance improvement plan" as the alternative, a bit of a carrot/stick situation which usually gets people out the door pretty quick).
Cutting perks signals a permanent change in how they approach things like that, and is really hard to justify since in every single case I've seen it, perk cutoff is highly targeted at the rank and file and execs still get catered lunches during meetings, etc.
The backlash was pretty strong. Not because engineers can't afford plastic spoons of their own, or some other alternative, but because it was such a petty thing. These spoons come in cases of 1000 for under 10 bucks, so nobody can argue with a straight face that it was about the cost.
I don't know that anyone actually quit over it, but it leaves a sour taste in your mouth.
Not to be outdone, CFO places another order; several cases this time. And it takes a few more days, but sure enough, it all disappears.
At this point, CFO is fed up. He orders two full pallets of TP. After lunch one day, several volunteers unload the toilet paper. Multiple stacks, floor to ceiling, in the bathroom. More stacks in the supply closet. Stacks in the hallway. Stacks in the lobby. Everywhere you look, there's toilet paper. And if people were stealing TP after that, it wasn't at a rate that anyone could notice.
Including the ongoing costs for the subsequent 18 months until they moved out of that building, the "unlimited TP" policy might have cost the company $10k. But it bought a lot more than that in terms of employee goodwill. Knowing that the bean counters are focusing on "our employees are producing a product worth $x; let's figure out how to have them do more of that" makes a big difference.
This gets at the vague steps that the author mentions at the end about supporting transitions of _people_, but I was waiting for them to get concrete about how the engineers should have _positively_ been made aware of the success and growth. Pay raises to market rate? A bonus? I’m guessing that in actuality, it was little more than verbal pats on the back.
I guess it’s different for each company culture, but this makes it sound like the engineers worked hard, the company got solid, things were taken away, and then the superstars started to leave. I’ve seen similar patterns a few times. What are some positive ways that people have seen these patterns fought?
The ICs have been there for years, knife fighting with the market and the competition, and then someone comes in from some adjacent market or some other vertical entirely, and the expectation is that all the work done to go from zero to one needs to be fit to their agenda, and not the other way around. Everyone who has lived it knows its backwards, and yet I've seen the trigger get pulled on this so slow that it had a measurable effect on the exit.
When Oracle acquired the company I was working for, they made the soda free. That is, Oracle made the soda dispensing machines simply dispense soda when you pressed a button.
The same company that had a self-service "I Quit" page.
Free soda is an indicator about how a company treats its employees, but perhaps not the best.
At one point they brought in a relatively large team of contractors to work day and night on a critical, time-sensitive project. A week after the team started I was there, talking casually to the manager. They told me that there were complaints that they were running low on food in the fridge because the contractors were eating it too. What would they do? Ban the contractors, with only arms-length loyalty to the business, working day and night, and on whom the business's fortunes depended, from the kitchens.
To me that is a huge red sign that something is seriously wrong with the company. Bringing in a bunch of new people and having them work long hours does not seem conducive to good code.
The loss of a single food item in your own house has a much larger impact than the loss of a single food item in a kitchen stocked to feed dozens of employees - in the former case, your lunch disappeared but in the latter case there's just one less pack of crisps in a box of 100 that nobody will even notice and the positive impact of that (in terms of morale, especially for regular contractors) outweighs the 50c the pack of crisps costs.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uxz68j/what_is_t...
> @Wowimatard
> I remember going to my swedish friends house.
> And while we were playing in his room, his mom yelled that dinner was ready. And check this. He told me to WAIT in his room while they ate.
> That shit was fucking wild.
The free meals are a perk paid for by the people creating the revenue. I suspect that perk probably wasn't budgeted for addition to the Contractor work. An oversight, perhaps? Hopefully folks working got fed.
If you have a good manager, and your project doesn't span across orgs, you have a ton of freedom. Crossing orgs creates red tape you wouldn't believe, since such requests "must go through Larry's office".
They also have an absolutely stellar health plan - I know of one (US) employee whose spouse got cancer, and they didn't pay one penny out of pocket for the entire treatment.
https://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling...
[quoted]:
Making his point about the “creepiness,” not only with Ellison but with Oracle’s power structure, Gosling said he sparked a notion to try to improve morale amongst the Sun faithful who endured the Oracle acquisition. He said the company decided to rent out the Great America amusement park in Santa Clara, Calif., and allow the Sun folks to have a day of fun. Scott McNealy and Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz signed off on the project that came in well under budget and all systems were go, Gosling said. Except a few days before the event was to occur, Oracle Co-President Safra Catz got wind of it and put the kibosh on the thing.
“Safra found out and had a fit,” Gosling said. “The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn’t save any money because the money had been spent – so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up because it wasn’t the -Oracle Way.’ On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million.”
2. The fact that you segment technical staff from other staff is exactly the kind of tiered treatment a blanket policy would seek to avoid.
One of the tricky issues is when you have other office locations based outside of the US.
There's TONS of hoops you have to follow to offer comparable benefits for employees in other locations around the world.
I've always found it somewhat amusing that Ellison's facial hair is virtually identical to the episode of Star Trek where they cross into another dimension where they are all evil. Like somewhere there's a clean-shaven Larry who is the life of the party and getting recognized by the City Council for his humanitarian work.
Their products are total shit, but it was sweet where I was!
Realistically, if you weren't on the Oracle DB development team and didn't draw too much attention to yourself (for example, via daily reimbursed meals at elite restaurants accompanied by the best wines for years on end), you didn't really matter.
There were legends of folks who failed to press the button, and were being paid for years thereafter. While I imagine a kernel of truth is here, I can only shake my head at the thought of Oracle's lawyers getting ahold of the ex-employee in question.
The Christmas parties were awesome, my first few years there included parties at the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum. There were subsidized vending machines as well. I knew engineers who would spend a dollar on the vending machine and get a few bags of chips for lunch.
Subsidized vending machines were the first to go. Then the Christmas parties. Then a bunch of other changes which showed derision for customers and employees both.
The objection isn't so much the price then put on the food and drink. It's the conversion of 'valued employee' to 'hourly crank-turner'. No longer a valued critical member of a team, now the corporation regards you as a 'resource'.
E.g. did the executive perks disappear too? No? Now you know what pigeonhole you've been placed in (demoted to).
As a human being who regularly needs to eat, not having to worry about having the right amount of snacks and/or change at hand can make or break my day. Trying to code while hungry is a waste of everybody's time and money, which is how free food pays for itself. And don't get me started on trying to code when all you really want is a nap...
Instead I serve myself the exact proportions that I want, go find friends to sit with, eat, chat, then drop off my dishes and leave. The rituals of eating out and having food prepared to order are expensive and don't provide a lot of value to me over self-serve, generally speaking.
I suppose it would have been different if it were a big campus at a FAANG, though, where they have lots of different restaurants to choose from spread out through multiple buildings. There you still get most of the benefits of the lunch break that I felt I was missing out on. And I assume there are certain efficiency benefits to be had at that scale vs. having thousands of employees all having to fend for themselves.
Maybe you're organized enough to have the stuff you want stocked for yourself and ready.
Many people aren't.
And as the article points out - this stuff doesn't cost much.
You're not going to get a significant raise if they don't have a pingpong table and Le Croix.
It's also a little bit of an accounting trick IIUC. Those things are expenses for the company and tax deductible. If you buy them yourself - you're probably paying >40% income tax on it.
My project was late, I was coding desperately, sometimes skipping lunch to have enough time, I had to leave using a bus on a specific time so I couldn't just stay late.
I realized then, that whenever I wanted to drink a coffee or a tea, there was one, hot, on my table, and I didn't fetch it!
Snacks too sometimes!
And whenever I left to go to the bathroom or some random reason, when I got back, my place was clean too!
This meant I could focus on my work, just coding, I didn't had to think about fetching coffee or tea, all I had to do was work, and whenever I needed coffee or tea or food, it would be there, ready, on a clean desk.
It made me realize the service staff worked as a sort of "force multiplier" for the company, you hire a few of them, and a lot of programmers can squeeze more work hours, and what you spend on the service staff wages, you save on programmers wages that you would be wasting if they were wandering around looking for food or caffeine.
Personally I don't mind getting up and walking one or two minutes to fetch those things, I think it helps keep me sane.
The Elves leaving is unintended consequences of the company getting larger, and not finding a way to manage it in a way that retained top talent. The soda exposed it, but it was going to get exposed one way or another.
It's like how there's a lot of turnover after bonus season. The bonuses aren't the reason they're coming/going (though they're often shaped significantly by the real underlying reasons they're coming/going), but they do effect the timing of their coming and going... because that's the point where it becomes impossible to ignore the underlying reasons for the turnover.
Some bod in accounts can show an obvious change in the bottom line by cutting a cheap perk. The problems in retention, hiring, delivery are all someone else's problem and much harder to quantify.
I'm quibbling with the characterization of it being an "unintended consequence" that "launched an exodus". The changes had already happened. The exodus had already been launched. It's just no one had actually left yet. If anything, I'd argue the sodas were the unintended consequence, but the exodus, or at least the impetus for it, was very much intended.
As others have already mentioned, this only holds true for a specific kind of store and market. Many businesses don’t care to fix their sign. The Safeway near me had a broken sign for almost two years.
I saw Sears stores start to have broken signs about 3 years before they went bust.
I assume that if it was provided from dispensers like at McD's, it would be similar in expense to coffee.
I think you've just defined sugarfree energy drinks.
https://www.caffeineinformer.com/caffeine-content/aha-sparkl...
Talking Rain was a popular caffeine-free soda there.
Bad idea.
Once, when I was less than a year out of school, I was in a design meeting with two of the most senior engineers on the project. They were WIRED, difficult to reason with, and sent me on an obviously wrong direction. I thought they drank 4-5 cups of coffee.
A few hours later I realized that the nonsense email that I got 10 minutes before the meeting, from the department head, titled "Lines in the conference room" meant that they probably snorted cocaine right before the meeting.
About a week later I had to redo all of my work using the exact design I pushed for. 2-3 weeks later I was relieved when I was laid off.
---
If you want to legally and safely know what cocaine feels like, take 600mg of caffeine pills (3 No-Doze) as soon as you wake up in the morning, on an empty stomach. Don't do it before you need to do something important, or if you're doing something where you could loose your temper. Also, don't do it if you have heart problems.
https://baristaguild.coffee/blog/leaves-beans-of-history-the...
Also health insurance costs.
It never bothered me that much, but when I joined a company with freebies, it was like a breath of fresh air.
It's definitely one of the things that you don't realize when you don't have it, but when you do it's like heaven. It's really helped me get more work done since I can snack away and it encourages me to get up for walks around the office.
No matter how luxurious and all-encompassing, your free corporate fridges are not the supermarket, your free corporate cafeterias are not an east coast diner. They don't have everything you might want, just a decent selection.
We're deep in first world problems here, but there's a certain frustration to always drinking the drink that doesn't quite hit the spot, to searching the cafeteria menu for the least bad menu option. At least when you are paying the money yourself in the wider world, you can actually pick what you want.
Office vending machines have the same problem. If I want a specific item with me, I bring it.
SodaStream-style device fits the coffee mold, but it's less popular and not traditional.
It's easier to just give people their fix, and there's a long history of this, paid coffee breaks were an early concession unions demanded during industrialization.
Thankfully I was able to convince executive management that for our several hundred employee company, running a Coke soda machine was basically the cost of 1 Tech Support headcount.
That's it.
One of the most popular in-office perks, the Coke freestyle machine was 1 tech support headcount.
That was years ago. And we still have that machine.
> for our several hundred employee company, running a Coke soda machine was basically the cost of 1 Tech Support headcount
It cost you $50-100K/yr to run a Coke machine? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something!
Last time I had this perk I was downing at least four sodas a day - same ballpark.
I once read an article, I think in the Wall Street Journal, about Levi-Strauss sending out promotional materials to HR departments about how to set up "Casual Friday" at the workplace. It was a promotion for their Dockers brand.
Few companies are good at promoting from within.
My analysis: What does "too big for that now" mean? Does it mean that they can't afford it? I doubt it. They were still going to sell the soda "cheap" (presumably 25-50% of the normal soda cost). So what was it? My theory is "big" ISN'T a synonym for "large-scale" here, but instead is a synonym for "professional". Why is free soda a negative indicator of professionalism? And to whom? I think that once you reach a certain level (non-startup or series-Z-startup), investors expect you to be extremely bean-countery. So the ultimate source of this problem is mega-scale investors which want to see a tight ship. The board was likely feeling pressure from them before the CFO was ever hired.
Beginning this year we're no longer allowed to have the company pay for an in-office team lunch without pre-approval of each individual time from a 3-skip manager, who's in a department that might as well be a different company. At the same time they want to mandate 60% return-to-in-office time. The actual leads had all ability to incentivize people to come back cut off, and know reactions are going to range from work-to-rule through quit.
Then again, if it had been the free sodas, it would have been a mutiny. I remember when they got rid of the spicy v8 and a mutiny was considered, but declined.
It probably wasn't just the sodas, it was probably a culmination of a lot of changes, and the sodas were the straw that broke the camel's back.
Additionally if the company saves money on such a small scale it sends the signal things are BAD.
And more than that it’s about feeling valued and respected. It can be really upsetting when something you’ve gotten used to is taken from you. Especially when you know the cost to the company is just a tiny fraction of the overall operating budget, and unlikely to make any significant difference to the bottom line.
Interestingly at my first job that I worked at, sodas weren’t free, and it never really bothered me. But if they had been free, and one day stopped being free, that would annoy me. I think there is an asymmetry between the satisfaction people get when they use a perk, and they dissatisfaction they get if you take it away.
I've seen it happen. No soda, no food. But the executive assistant will do a lunch run every day for executives. And will pick up drinks too. Or there's usually a stocked fridge for executives near their wings of the building.
Additionally, the service has a value in time and money saved. There are bound to be employees for which it tips the decision to leave sooner. When many different conveniences are cut, more employees cross that threshold.
Finally, there’s a meta aspect to this. If you know a decision is harmful to the company and you see your managers making the harmful decision, it can be harder to keep working for them.
A HR manager where there was none previously is a whole other story though.