[HN Gopher] The Elves Leave Middle Earth - Sodas Are No Longer F... ___________________________________________________________________ The Elves Leave Middle Earth - Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009) Author : tosh Score : 105 points Date : 2022-05-31 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (steveblank.com) (TXT) w3m dump (steveblank.com) | falcolas wrote: | A small, mildly entertaining, anecdote about soda: | | 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. | cptnapalm wrote: | Self-service "I Quit" page... that's... wow... | mberning wrote: | It's not that rare. Many large companies have an HR portal | and one of the many options is usually to "end your | employment". | throwaway284534 wrote: | I assume the form has some dissuading text along the lines | of, "Upon submitting, a goon squad will be sent for your | immediate removal from the premises." Or maybe they just | send spiders through the ethernet. It's a big company. | [deleted] | wolverine876 wrote: | I had a client that stocked kitchen fridges with free basic | foods - drinks, meats, breads, etc. - and quality, healthy | stuff too. That always impressed me, sending a simple, strong | message that they cared about their employees and people like | me, and it had a positive impact on me when I ate my share (and | didn't have to worry about taking time to get lunch). | | 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. | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | > At one point they brought in a relatively large team of | contractors to work day and night on a critical, time- | sensitive project. | | 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. | wolverine876 wrote: | It wasn't an IT company. | mlyle wrote: | Not everything is permanent code that has to be maintained | forever. Sometimes you have a migration, or a bunch of data | to suck in one time from a vendor or acquisition, or | whatever. You can run appropriate quality checks to bound | the error rate. | tomrod wrote: | Accounting/PeopleOps meets the Real World! Great anecdote. | | 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. | ls15 wrote: | "Be my guest, but don't touch the food!" | philwelch wrote: | There's a lot of talk on Twitter the last couple of days | about how this is apparently a cultural norm for house | guests in Nordic countries! | cgriswald wrote: | For the curious, here is the reddit thread and comment | that seems to have started it: | | https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uxz68j/what_i | s_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. | klipt wrote: | So what do Swedish guests do - bring their own food to | others' houses, or just always leave before mealtime? | na85 wrote: | I mean if an electrician or whatever came into my house | to do a job, and ate my food without being offered it, | I'd consider that extremely rude. | Nextgrid wrote: | Scale and context matters. | | 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. | voidfunc wrote: | Is Oracle all that bad of a place to work? Everyone _hates_ | Oracle for product reasons but I've never met any engineers | that said it was a terrible place to work or particularly worse | than any other big tech b2b companies (e.g. ibm, microsoft, | etc). | scrumbledober wrote: | Super anecdotal, but I once interviewed an engineer who was | currently working for Oracle. During the interview he told me | that every six months he would go apply to jobs at startups, | get an offer or two, and bring them back to his manager and | ask for a raise. He had been at Oracle for 15 years doing | this apparently the entire time. So it seems some people very | much like working there. Needless to say I recommended we | pass on him... | arebop wrote: | Every ex-Oracle engineer I've met says it was a terrible | place to work compared to the big tech company where I work | now. I also don't know anyone who went to work for Oracle | after leaving my current company, fwiw. | volkadav wrote: | it strongly depends on which org you're in, with an average | of "boring, with a big steaming pile of bureaucracy" based on | my observations spending five years at the seattle-based | cloud org. if you had a good manager and skip-level stuff | could be pretty alright, if you didn't god help you. | falcolas wrote: | This. | | 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. | thebean11 wrote: | I don't think that's out of the ordinary. With most big | tech health plans you'd probably pay little or nothing if | you stayed in network. | rst wrote: | Immediately after the Oracle/Sun acquisition, there was a | huge exodus of senior engineering talent (e.g., most of the | core Solaris kernel development team). This writeup of why | James Gosling left has some of the obvious reasons (e.g., he | was asked to take a significant pay cut), but also this | anecdote, showing Oracle managements' general attitude toward | the talent: | | 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." | tqi wrote: | Couldn't that just be about "fairness" to the other (non- | Sun) employees? | HollywoodZero wrote: | You do bring up a valid point. | | 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. | rst wrote: | Not sure it's really a defense of Oracle to say that | they'd been treating their own technical staff badly, and | couldn't treat Sun's any different. | cwp wrote: | bcantrill had a pretty good take on this: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 | aidenn0 wrote: | While the whole rant is great[1], "Don't make the mistake | of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison" is a particularly | great quote. | | 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m | hinkley wrote: | Does Brian still routinely call Larry a Nazi? | | 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. | teraflop wrote: | Don't really know about Oracle-the-company, but everything | I've heard about Oracle-the-database-product suggests that | working on it is a nightmare. | | e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 | RajT88 wrote: | I worked for a post-startup company early in my career. | | 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. | rootusrootus wrote: | We had something akin to this happen at my company. For context, | this is a well established mid-sized company with around 5000 | employees. Some beancounter decided that they could no longer | afford to subsidize the plastic spoons in the break rooms. So | they announced that when the current stock ran out, they would | not be replacing it. | | 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. | jmharvey wrote: | This reminds me of a startup CFO I worked with, who _could_ see | the big picture. In the early days of the company, they worked | in an office that shared a bathroom with a half dozen other | companies. And the toilet paper in said bathroom was terrible. | Like, not just standard-office-building terrible. Really, | really bad. So CFO takes it upon himself to rectify the | situation. He orders a couple dozen rolls of standard-issue | "premium" office toilet paper (still not that great relative to | home-use TP, but good by office standards) and leaves it in the | bathroom. Two days later, it's gone: someone (not clear whether | it was someone at the startup or one of the neighboring | companies) decided to take it home with them. Everyone in the | office starts grumbling about the state of the TP situation | again. | | 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. | conradfr wrote: | They should have said it was to save the planet. | [deleted] | dang wrote: | Related: | | _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) | raccer wrote: | Holy moly, first thread summary I've seen, very cool! Is this | an automatic thing now? (assuming url match I suppose) | ColinWright wrote: | I used to do this a lot, but I've given up. I used to run a | 'bot to do it, but I got a lot of pushback and discontinued. | | 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. | dang wrote: | Yes - I wrote software that makes it fast to do by hand. | | You'd certainly be welcome to resume! I think including the | 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, of course, 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. | pvg wrote: | _Then we can all build up sets of related things | collaboratively._ | | 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. | drivers99 wrote: | This comment is one I still remember from 9 years ago (from the | top of the May 2013 thread). | | > 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. | HollywoodZero wrote: | I used to be in a management role a number of years back and | faced this same issue. | | 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. | wolverine876 wrote: | Yes, it's a cheap employee morale device. How much do the | alternatives cost? | | > 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! | incanus77 wrote: | > All these engineers were still heads-down, working their tails | off, just as they had been doing since the first few months of | the company. Too busy working, most were oblivious to the changes | that success and growth had brought to the company. | | 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? | ftlio wrote: | Based on how I've seen it mismanaged, the only way I see it | working is hiring "provisional VPs". In the same way that you | might have hired slow and fired fast in the beginning for | competent ICs, you need to do the same with the now executive | management skillset that's required to break off and scale | whole divisions of the working organization. The other side of | that is you need to equip them with the actual subset of the | talent they need, and not hold back some employees who were | there in the beginning for special considerations. | | 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. | devchix wrote: | To present an alternate point of view, I never grokked this idea | of free soda, free food, catered lunches, sleeping pods, dry- | cleaning, massages, ping-pong table as a way to attract talents. | If I took a risk to work for a startup, I want a lean machine | that pays me in ridiculous cash or ridiculous options, and | obscene milestone bonuses. The only thing I think I'd really care | about is "bring your dog to work" and "onsite/nearby child-care", | there's no substitute or purchasing-equiv to that. A startup is | an intense high-stress environment where focused work and time is | invaluable; none of those "perks" directly drive the goals, if | anything they seem hedonistic distractions from the goal. | probably_wrong wrote: | I like the explanation from this article [1] titled "Why perks | matter": because perks like that avoid context switches and | remove "distractions and other things which could disrupt [my] | flow". | | 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... | | [1] https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/11/16/context/ | rootusrootus wrote: | I thought I remembered reading somewhere that Google (or some | company in a similar position) had worked out the math and | figured that the free meals more than paid for themselves in | increased productivity (or at least seat time) because | employees weren't getting up to go off-site to find lunch. As | often as not they'd be quickly back at their desk coding away. | a4isms wrote: | Never mind startups, I once had a client who was in the | printing business, a numbers-driven blue-collar culture at | the time. They worked out the loss of productivity from | workers going out to the coffee truck and decided it was a | win to spend a little money on coffee if it kept workers from | going outside when they heard the truck's horn. | JoeAltmaier wrote: | I think the point of supplying food and drink on-premises is | exactly that, to foster "focused work and time " | | 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). | freetime2 wrote: | I tend to agree with this viewpoint. I actually found that my | happiness decreased when a company I was working for started | providing free lunch every day. The lunch break - along with a | change of scenery, a short walk, and the freedom to choose | whatever I wanted for lunch - was important for my well being. | Also, employees would often complain about the free lunch | options on certain days, which is kind of sad. | | 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. And the food the food looks amazing. | dzdt wrote: | I wonder about the "unintended consequences" takeaway here. | Correlation is not causation. It seems to me that the talented | startup engineers leaving and the decision to discontinue free | soda don't likely have a causal relationship between them. Just | both are things that happened along the growth path from startup | to established company. More of a common cause explanation. If | they had kept giving free soda would it have really kept the | engineers from leaving? I have doubts. | rossdavidh wrote: | My thoughts as well, but it _is_ plausible that if the sodas | had remained free, it would have taken a few more months for | the "elves" to notice that this was no longer the kind of place | they wanted to work. The "uproar" basically sent the message of | "this place is run by accountants now, not engineers", and that | was what sent the engineers to the exits. | wolverine876 wrote: | Hmmm ... anything is possible. You don't offer any evidence for | your hypothesis and by that standard, anything is possible. The | OP was there, at the company, saw what happened, and has | observed several other similar circumstances. | thayne wrote: | > The sodas were just the wake-up call. | | 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. | ajuc wrote: | It's a combination of things - if company takes away benefits | and provides no new benefits - you as an engineer lose money. | Meanwhile in current market just changing the company means a | rise. Why settle for an effective salary cut when you can | trivially get a rise instead? The difference between no rise | and cut is huge mentally. | | Additionally if the company saves money on such a small scale | it sends the signal things are BAD. | freetime2 wrote: | I could see myself being really upset by this change. It's not | just about the cost of the soda - it's also about convenience. | Now if I want to have a soda at work I need to remember to keep | change or small value bills in my wallet. And if one day I | forget then I need to leave the building in search of a treat, | or else just go without - in either case I'm annoyed. | | 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. | HollywoodZero wrote: | The interesting thing is that in MANY of these situations, | you can guarantee that executives are getting free drinks, | lunches, etc. as part of the perks. | | 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. | givemeethekeys wrote: | You get what you pay for. Hire an accountant? They'll ask | questions, refer to the team etc. Hire a CFO? They've been hired | to make an impact. | | Few companies are good at promoting from within. | CWuestefeld wrote: | I wonder how we got a cultural thing where coffee is usually | expected to be provided free, but other beverages fall into a | different class. | | I assume that if it was provided from dispensers like at McD's, | it would be similar in expense to coffee. | gwbas1c wrote: | When I worked for Intel, the coffee was absolutely _not_ free. | The only freebies were filtered water and toilet paper. | | It never bothered me that much, but when I joined a company | with freebies, it was like a breath of fresh air. | NtGuy25 wrote: | Recently joined a company with legit soda machines(the fancy | ones with exotic stuff like cream sodas), slim jims, ice | cream, cookies, cakes and which buys lunch for the engineers | every weekend. It's amazing. I came from a place where you | had to pay 2 $ for a soda! | | 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. | rootusrootus wrote: | Years ago (like, 1993 or so), our college CS class visited | Jones Farm. One of the stops on the tour was a break room. | All of the drinks were free at the time, whether it was | coffee or coca cola. One of the engineers there remarked that | at Microsoft only the _caffeinated_ drinks were free. LOL. I | just about believe it. | ajross wrote: | Coffee is free at Intel. Or was, back when people worked in | offices. | selimthegrim wrote: | Not if you're a green badge it isn't. | ajross wrote: | Contractors don't get perks like that anywhere, thanks to | Vizcaino v. Microsoft. Withholding resources afforded to | permanent employees is weird and counterintuitive, but | it's how employers demonstrate compliance. | gowld wrote: | Coffee is extremely popular, and too easy and cheap to meter | when produced on site. Soda costs more and more hassle to buy | (in cans/bottles), is extra work to make cheaply (install and | maintain a tap), and mostly is grossly unhealthy and most | people (outside of coder stereotype) don't want it at work. | | SodaStream-style device fits the coffee mold, but it's less | popular and not traditional. | CWuestefeld wrote: | I don't have numbers, but my expectation is that cost is of | the same order of magnitude. I don't think coffee is all that | cheap. I'm thinking of all the problems I've seen with the | plumbing leaking, the machine being left on and burning | requiring extensive cleaning, broken pots, and so forth, all | on top of the material expense. Soda doesn't have to deal | with the heat, but it does have pressure, so that probably | kinda balances out. | rhino369 wrote: | Coffee is a productivity increaser. | erwinkle wrote: | as is caffeinated soda | rootusrootus wrote: | I once heard that Microsoft subsidized caffeinated soda, | but you had to pay for the caffeine-free options. That may | just be an old wives' tale. | philwelch wrote: | Not as much as you'd think; for me, at least, the sugar | crash counteracts the caffeine. | gnulinux wrote: | There are a lot of caffinated seltzers now that don't | have any sugar but do have flavoring and CO2 | gwbas1c wrote: | And it turns some people into jerks. (It has similar effects | to cocaine.) | SketchySeaBeast wrote: | While the effects may be on the same spectrum, I don't know | how comparable the two actually are. Maybe I should start | my day with a line instead? | acchow wrote: | You want to feed your employee healthy foods because healthy | bodies are more productive. | | Also health insurance costs. | samatman wrote: | Two thirds of Americans (European numbers are similar, higher | if anything) drink coffee every day, which is, not to put too | fine a point on it, an addiction. I'm one of them for sure. | | 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. | lol_what wrote: | people really don't understand what a blessing it is to not | have sodas be free. that kind of culture with an expectation of | it (and 'snacks') being free will create a lot of fatness in | the industry | cbsmith wrote: | I don't see it as unintended consequences of Soda Not Being Free. | It's an attribution mistake, not entirely different from how SEM | tends to get attribution for conversions it didn't really earn. | | 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. | the_af wrote: | But that's exactly what the article states. It doesn't say they | left because of the soda; it says it was a wake up call that | made them realize it was no longer the company they liked and | which they helped build. | marcosdumay wrote: | It's not attribution mistake, it's a proxy variable. Nobody | ever though people left because of the soda. | dsr_ wrote: | Or, if you prefer, it's one piece of evidence that is easy to | measure. | cbsmith wrote: | Right... and so consequently what is gained by hiding the | evidence? | rodgerd wrote: | It's a general problem of being, as the Brits put it, "penny | wise, pound foolish". | | 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. | cbsmith wrote: | See, I think that's not getting it. Cutting the drinks isn't | what cost them the people. It's just what caused the loss of | people to be _evident_. Particularly since the organization | _had_ changed, it would have been unwise NOT to bring the | perk policy in line with the rest of it. | gwbas1c wrote: | I remembered once working at a large corporation with deep | pockets, and lots of people with (cough) questionable value to | the company. | | 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. | gowld wrote: | Well-targeting severance is hard to do. | mwigdahl wrote: | Similar story -- back when I worked at a physical engineering | company, one of their cost-cutting methods when things got | tight was to cut down the amount of time they ran the A/C | during the day. This applied to all floors of the building | except the one where the partners' offices were. | | 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. | gav wrote: | I think that these cost-cutting schemes never really work | out, they either cause the best people to leave or trade | money for work-done. | | 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. | greedo wrote: | People have a high level of loss aversion. | philwelch wrote: | The implication being that targeted layoffs are less damaging | to morale than getting rid of free soda? | gwbas1c wrote: | When someone impacts morale, forcing a team to work with that | person is _highly damaging._ | | 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. | t-3 wrote: | Severance may come with it's own difficulties: state | unemployment payments, contractual obligations, | bureaucratic overhead, manager pushback. | | 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. | the_af wrote: | Targeted layoffs of people everyone complains about because | they are bad at their jobs and also terrible as team mates | sends a way better signal than keeping them and removing | perks from employees who do work. | Animats wrote: | It's worth watching the little stuff. When you see a retail | establishment with a partly burned out sign, and it doesn't get | fixed quickly, you know they're in trouble. | moate wrote: | I'll mention that to the bodega owner in town who's been in | business longer than I've lived here. I'm sure it will get a | chuckle. | justin66 wrote: | It's the deviation from the norm that's a potential warning | sign. You'd know the cool bodega might be in trouble, with a | lame new owner or something, if the sign got fixed or a bunch | of painting was done... | SyzygistSix wrote: | There are plenty of shitbox stores making tons of money though. | rootusrootus wrote: | Maybe it pays to have an image of not wasting money looking | pretty. | sammalloy wrote: | > When you see a retail establishment with a partly burned out | sign, and it doesn't get fixed quickly, you know they're in | trouble. | | 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. | Animats wrote: | Uh oh. | | I saw Sears stores start to have broken signs about 3 years | before they went bust. | vkou wrote: | That's an interesting data point, but I don't think I'm | going to make a lot of money by shorting Safeway's proxies. | thehappypm wrote: | It's classic elastic vs inelastic demand. Grocery stores | don't need to worry so much about their brand image. Not | zero, but less than a store selling luxuries. | lordnacho wrote: | My reading of it is that it isn't the soda, it's having the bean | counter become an authority that can make decisions. | | 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. | klelatti wrote: | Indeed, but also it's a sign that senior management | collectively - inc the CEO - now see trivial cost cutting as a | worthwhile use of their focus and a good way to generate value | for shareholders. | | Not a good sign for any company. | the_af wrote: | Well, the article spells out that it wasn't really about the | sodas: | | > _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._ | a4isms wrote: | Having been through this transition multiple times, I agree | that it's not about the sodas or the CFO. Why do you think | they hire CFOs? To do things like this. To impose cost | discipline. To be the person everyone is mad at instead of | wondering why the company hired a CFO in the first place. | | 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. | the_af wrote: | I don't disagree. I wonder if it's possible to work at a | stable company (not a startup) that doesn't treat its | employees as an annoyance to be constrained and mistreated. | hinkley wrote: | There is a large cage here. The weathering suggests that it | may have been here for a long time. | | 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. | Fnoord wrote: | Although Luke did not lose his arm in wampa cave on Hoth | (he lost it at Cloud City) he could've gotten a new one at | the Redemption which was stationed at Hoth at that time. | | 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 | metacritic12 wrote: | Right, I think that's exactly the point of the article. In no | world should free sodas make a substantial difference, but it's | rather the signal it sends. | | 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... | thedailymail wrote: | As famed beancounter Warren Buffett says, "There's never only | one cockroach." | stevievee wrote: | Unfortunately, this anecdote re-enforces a stereotype. The CFO | in this story is bad and so is senior leadership and the board | for allowing the new CFO to run amok. Not all new CFOs are bad | and not all CFOs with leadership will destroy a company. | airstrike wrote: | You're fighting an uphill battle on HN... | stevievee wrote: | "Engineer good, MBA bad" ...there I fixed it. | EnKopVand wrote: | It's sort of the natural evolution of companies as they grow in | size. When they are small, things are just done, but as they | grow and as they bring in more people, the cost of those | resources also grow. The free sodas are a fun example (and here | outlined as the wake-up call) but where it really starts is | when someone higher up notices the cost of a department that | has grown from 5 to 20 people, or something similarly eye | raising, and then bring in the E&Y type consultants to help | transition into a scalable business. Which simply involves | reporting, cost-trimming and looking into efficiency. The sodas | are where the rebellion break out, but the seed are sown long | before that as the "bean counters" and "process people" slowly | begin making business intelligence part of everything because | it lets everyone report on everything. | | 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. | bryanrasmussen wrote: | >someone higher up notices the cost of a department that has | grown from 5 to 20 people, or something similarly eye raising | | 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. | ajross wrote: | Of course it's not any different. But the focus has | changed. When you're an early stage startup, a 0.7% | overhead for junk food (made up number, but that's probably | not too far off) is a fundamentally negligible thing. It's | like 3 days of runway, if that. | | 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. | bryanrasmussen wrote: | >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. | | 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-31 23:00 UTC)