Getting rid of free office snacks doesn't come cheap

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-09/why-getting-rid-of-free-office-snacks-doesn-t-come-cheap

by surement • 11 years ago

191 190 11 years ago

btilly• 11 years ago

A more humorous take on the same topic is http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/junk-food-fi....

Every startup company I've visited has in-house snacks and drinks. Works wonders for them keeping people in the office more hours of the day. Sprint is a beast. I doubt many people work a single minute over their schedule.

Now, you don't see the higher-ups partake often, they know better. Much better for the soul to walk around the block, get some sun and air, and grab a coffee or snack. I get to know my neighbors as well. Builds community outside the office...

jwcacces• 11 years ago

Getting rid of snacks if the earliest and easiest to recognize sign of time find a better job

mynegation4• 11 years ago

OK, I'll play the devil's advocate here. I am against free snacks in the office. First of all, it tends to be utter garbage: muffins, chips, cheese sticks, soda, sugary drinks, cookies etc. Has anyone tried to calculate lost productivity from health issues arising from eating that highly processed junk full of salt, sugar, and trans fats?

Second, snacks in the office might make more sense in the suburban offices in the places with extreme climate swings (think Schaumburg or Kanata) where getting out of office for a snack is an ordeal. In large downtown cores like Toronto or New York I would say a stroll for a snack is more refreshing for productivity than mindlessly eating chips in front of the computer after a short run to the cafeteria.

Third, there is this "useless perk" consideration. I'd rather get the share of money spent on the junk food and do whatever I want with them.

bpodgursky• 11 years ago

I'd rather get the share of money spent on the junk food and do whatever I want with them.

That would be true if not for taxes. A meal at the office is effectively 40-50% cheaper than the corresponding paycheck increase.

mynegation4• 11 years ago

That is a fair point. I am a contractor though and from taxation point of view my remuneration and cookies are the same for the company - they just pay me whatever and I take care of my taxes. In Canada, they may even get some R&D credit on my pay, which you do not get for cookies.

I am all for power of wholesale bargains for good things, like cheaper gym membership with the corporate account.

such_a_casual• 11 years ago

This is a really good point. I would have never thought of that.

kspaans2• 11 years ago

Aren't perks for employees a taxable benefit? (Maybe the employer pays the taxes rather than the employee...)

Johnny5553• 11 years ago

Have you seen the snacks that most people get when they go out? Muffins, chips, cheese sticks, sugary drinks, cookies, etc. There's a reason why those same snacks are provided in the office. My office has plenty of healthy choices, fresh fruits, vegetable trays, etc, but the unhealthy snacks are by far more popular.

"In large downtown cores like Toronto or New York I would say a stroll for a snack is more refreshing for productivity than mindlessly eating chips in front of the computer after a short run to the cafeteria."

Well yeah, but you're not really making the case for no snacks -- that's why the company provides them, so you don't have to take that stroll. Though even if snacks are provided, you don't have to eat them, you can still take your snack scroll if you want to.

When I worked in a suburban office park, leaving the office for a coffee was easier than it was now that I work in a high rise - I just went out the front door, walked across the court yard and had a nice coffee shop with a good selection of snacks. Now that I'm in a city high-rise, waiting for and riding the elevator takes almost as much time as it used to take to get coffee.

The company could pay you a dollar or two extra a day (snacks are cheap in bulk), but would you really notice that in your paycheck after taxes?

mynegation4• 11 years ago

Very good counterpoints, especially about tangibility of actual yummy things vs. unnoticeable increase. And kudos to your company for providing healthy options!

My case for the longer stroll was that sometimes it helps to detach from a problem and find a new angle with a fresh look. There is a reason why "walking meditation" is a thing. This may not work for all occupations but definitely works for me.

jakejake2• 11 years ago

Chicago is not exactly rural. And don't try to tell me you're in Chicago if you work in the burbs. You're in Oak Brook, man, that's not Chicago!

mynegation4• 11 years ago

Sorry, I did not mean to offend. s/Chicago/Schaumburg/g in my GP

Adlai• 11 years ago

Seems like a good opportunity for a company that genuinely cares about employee health to make it easier for them to eat well by stocking the kitchen with healthy snacks.

tbrake2• 11 years ago

I've always liked the explanation given by __--__ [0] in a HN thread long ago on a Steve Blank post "The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free"[1] about the same subject :

"I'm not management, but I've had it described to me like this: cutting soda, while it may be insignificant and certainly isn't going to change a damned thing money-wise for the company, makes the management feel better about the situation. It makes them feel like they're doing something and something is better than nothing. It's also a CYA tactic. If the CEO wants to hold somebody personally accountable, the CFO can say "look, we did everything, we even cut back the soda!"

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5757467

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

crimsoneer• 11 years ago

I mean...they're saving $600,000. That's not nothing.

pif• 11 years ago

Indeed, it's not nothing compared to the aimed cut of $2,500,000,000: they've already got at nearly 1/4,000 of their target!

lifeformed3• 11 years ago

Out of $2.5B? That's $0.0006B. I mean, it basically is nothing...

For 36,000 employees, that's less than $17 per person. Meanwhile, the CEO gets paid $21,800,000 per year.

tajen2• 11 years ago

Let's ask some building manager: How much costs a seat in a nice building? I'd say 300-800€ a month. 3 sodas/coffee a day incl. service to fill up the machine = 45€, which would only have converted to 30€ after tax if paid to the employee.

InclinedPlane2• 11 years ago

It's important to look at this change in its true form. This is not a savings. It's not as though employees are filling up backpacks with cans of soda, going to the overpass, and chucking cans at cars. It's not as though $600k in soda is rotting away somehow because it's being improperly stored. No, this is a benefit provided to employees as a condition of their employment. Cutting that benefit is equivalent to a salary cut.

Management is taking money away from its employees and giving it to themselves and the shareholders.

patmcc• 11 years ago

Cutting snacks is a great signal to employees that they aren't worth the $2/day of Dr. Pepper they consume.

Instead of cutting snacks just cut the job of whoever proposes that as a cost cutting measure. Probably save more money and nip a lot of other problems in the bud.

rgbrenner2• 11 years ago

Sprint saved less than $0.05/day per employee by cutting snacks.

Johnny5553• 11 years ago

I think you're counting all sprint employees, even field workers and store employees, but the free snacks were only available in the corporate office. Also, I think you're assume 365 days/year, but the snacks were likely only available for ~ 253 workdays/year.

According to Wikipedia, the corporate office has around 7,000 full time employees (not including 4,000 contract workers), so the company could have saved as much as much as 35 cents per employee per day.

blt• 11 years ago

Taking away snacks might cause grumbling... Take away coffee and you might as well put the company up for sale.

AnimalMuppet• 11 years ago

My theory is that the person most responsible for the company's success is whoever makes the coffee, because without the coffee, everything stops.

spinlock2• 11 years ago

no coffee no workee

Avernar• 11 years ago

"A programmer is an organism that converts caffeine into code."

PhantomGremlin• 11 years ago

As Dave Barry would say: "I am not making this up!".

I once visited this company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Technology and they had a room with vending machines where you had to buy your own coffee.

Not somewhere I'd ever consider working.

kawera• 11 years ago

Yes! I did some work for then in the 80s and remember having to pay for really very bad coffee!

vonmoltke• 11 years ago

As Dave Barry would say: "I am not making this up!".

I have only had personal contact with one company outside of SV that offered free coffee (my current company doesn't count, because the machine is provided by the management company we rent our offices from). To me, free coffee is the exception, not the rule.

rdl2• 11 years ago

Unless I'm at Google (or Facebook, or a few other places of that quality), I seem to end up mainly bringing my own snacks. Companies usually provide crappy shelf stable junk food.

I'd love an office which had great drinks even if it had no food.

santaclaus• 11 years ago

Companies usually provide crappy shelf stable junk food.

I worked at a company that provided freshly sourced produce in lieu of chips/candy/etc, which was pretty badass. Hungry? Go cook up an omelette and make an espresso in the kitchen.

spinlock2• 11 years ago

Right. I hate the snacks in our office because it's all chips and junk (no free drinks here :( ) But, I bet Sprint could really cut down on snack costs by providing celery sticks and water instead of chips and soda (no one would eat anything).

rdl2• 11 years ago

My definition of "healthy" is different -- I'd want low-carb. But really, just listening to employees and customizing from there.

TeMPOraL• 11 years ago

OTOH I'd die if all the snacks provided by the company were fruits and salads. Please give something salty or some pizza every now and then for those of us who prefer processed food :).

imgabe• 11 years ago

Watch Next: Four Ways to Nap at Your Desk

I found this a highly amusing follow up to this article.

swang• 11 years ago

http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article11...

Marcelo Claure, current CEO was paid $1 million, with a $500k signing bonus, on top of $24 million in stock

Previous CEO Dan Hesse was paid $1.2 million as part of $49 million worth of compensation.

Axing the free food will shave $600,000 from the budget

... Let them eat cake! (okay obviously not that extreme, but you know: bread is to office snacks as cake is to... millions in bonuses).

moron4hire• 11 years ago

I'll run your company into the ground for you for half what the other guy is charging. Hiring me as CEO will save you just as much as cutting the food budget. You can't afford to not hire me.

Evgeny• 11 years ago

Hire him, username checks out. :)

austenallred2• 11 years ago

It's funny: For a lot of the employees we've hired offering to buy a $500 monitor or a $600 chair moved the needle on how excited they were more than a $5,000 or $10,000 change in salary would.

I think there are a few things that play into that: If you made an extra $10,000 you'd want to do something responsible with it, but you wouldn't really notice an instantaneous change in your day-to-day life.

But I think more importantly than that it signals that you're supposed to have a good experience and be taken care of. Saying, "Look, if you want/need a monitor or computer to work consider it done" says something about the company. Your success means something to them.

What can office snacks possibly cost a company? Say it's a 10-person company, snacks would cost maybe $1,000/month on the high end? And at that point you're probably burning >$120,000/month in salaries. It's barely even a drop in the bucket, assuming we're not talking about infinite catered meals.

fishtoaster2• 11 years ago

My take on it is that my life is divided into two realms: work and home. I spend maybe 40-45% of my waking hours at work, and the rest at home on nights and weekends.

I can use extra salary to improve my home life (renting a bigger apartment, going to nicer restaurants, traveling to exotic places, etc), but there's not much I can do with it to improve my work life. If my boss suddenly gave me a 10-million-dolllar bonus tomorrow, my home life would change a lot, but my work life would be nearly the same.

On the other hand, a $5 improvement to my work environment affect the nearly half of my life I can't otherwise improve on my own. This is why perks like free food, nice monitors, a cool office, etc have a value to employees that is decoupled from the financial impact of them to the company.

rpearl• 11 years ago

If you got $10M you'd keep working?

JoshTriplett5• 11 years ago

I can use extra salary to improve my home life (renting a bigger apartment, going to nicer restaurants, traveling to exotic places, etc), but there's not much I can do with it to improve my work life.

You can use extra money to improve your work environment, but you shouldn't have to. That's a difference between working as a contractor and working as a salaried employee. As a contract employee, you get paid far more, but some of that goes to buying your own equipment (as well as benefits and myriad other things). As a salaried employee, you have the reasonable expectation of your employer supplying everything you need to do your job.

Nursie• 11 years ago

And I look upon some of that as quite foolish.

Give me an extra few thousand to take home over a "nice monitor" any day. I can make do with whatever the company decides is best in terms of resources like that, that's up to them and has no value to me at all.

ashark• 11 years ago

Hesitation to provide quality tools/equipment falls under the "run—run far away" category, IMO.

Consultant32452• 11 years ago

I once got a contract with $household_name_restaurant's corporate headquarters. The first day they didn't have a PC for me. Meh, that happens. Around the 3rd day they gave me a 5 year old Celeron laptop with 2GB of RAM. This was about 2 years ago and it was a Java gig. It was an impossible task and that set my mood for the entire time I was there. I helped them out as best I could but didn't extend the contract when it was over. I was unhappy pretty much every day.

bluedino2• 11 years ago

The biggest (non-tech) companies seem to have the worst systems for developers. Writing code for a $500m ERP system for a $4b company? Here's a 19" LCD and a Pentium 4 2.4GHz and 3GB of RAM. You can only open one project at a time, blah blah.

Work at a 20-person company? Picked out the loaded MacBook Pro, monitor, and keyboard I wanted to use after my interview.

fleitz3• 11 years ago

I spend more 'money' aka. Time getting coffee 2-3 times a day than I could ever consume in snacks/coffee.

tetraodonpuffer2• 11 years ago

that is a huge pet peeve of mine, the whole nickel and diming and paying developers $xxx,xxx a year and expecting them to make do with a single $200 1080p crappy monitor and the cheapest possible pc one can get.

This seems to happen sometimes because of budgeting issues and silos and so on, but it is still penny wise and pound foolish to expect "passionate" folks and not give them the tools to excel, and creates ongoing friction which will definitely not help with attrition/retention.

If I owned my company I would honestly nowadays give every developer an 8-core 128gig workstation or two with 2-3 21:9 35" 1440p screens and 1TB+ of nvme ssd and a $1k+ allowance to get whatever best-of-the-best chair they want to get (say, a steelcase leap or similar)

Even if you spent $10k on each engineer for this (and the above would be less than that) it would be worth it just from the perspective of you want your employees' workspace to get out of the way as much as possible to enable them to be productive and write good quality code.

The output and code quality gains from having a top-of-the-line machine/monitor pay for themselves in spades, but for some reason this never seems to be noticed in any company I have worked for, it can go from "we are a startup, we have no money to waste" all the way to "we are a large company and beholden to our shareholders, we have no money to waste" but the end result is the same, the people who could do with better tools don't get them and gripe (justifiably) about it.

rhinoceraptor• 11 years ago

My company gave me a Windows laptop with spinning rust inside. It's 2015, you can get big SSDs for $200 now.

Even without the productivity gains, it's just infuriating to try and do work when I have to wait for the computer.

dasil0033• 11 years ago

It only pays for itself a priori if you are profitable. If you are not profitable then burn-rate is an existential threat which no one will take seriously if the founders don't.

I definitely agree that you should give developers everything they need to maximize their productivity, including spending an extra few thousands on their workstation, but it should really be what they need. For the typical startup I'd really question the need for 1TB SSDs, or the fastest CPUs. Focus on big displays, good ergonomics, ample RAM and good software tools, but that's just me.

avn2109• 11 years ago

I recently persuaded my company to let me write job postings loudly bragging about the fact that we will buy you whatever fancy hardware you want. Our best hire explicitly mentioned in his cover letter that this caused him to apply.

beagle32• 11 years ago

On the other hand, getting your team spoiled like that can easily make a product that only works for people who have top-of-the-line conditions.

e.g: (2nd hand info - might be wrong) There's a recent Batman game that fails to work properly, and in fact, was essentially pulled from the market and re-released almost unchanged once common-enough gamer machines (still not "very common") caught up with the specs needed for the game.

another e.g: Facebook now does 2G Tuesdays[0] in which network speed is (optionally) purposely degraded to 2G speeds, to make sure that the technologically spoiled Facebook engineers and designers get an idea of the service their lesser-equipped users get.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-2g-tuesdays-to-slow-...

austenallred2• 11 years ago

When we hire people we just say, "What hardware and software do you want/need?" and take care of it.

Things like a computer, monitor and mouse are such a commodity it's just best to get it out of the way. And the most it's ever cost us is about $3,000 for a top of the line, maxed out MacBook Pro and Thunderbolt Display. But that's a Haskell developer making $150k, so that's a no-brainer, and gets you off on the right foot.

georgerobinson• 11 years ago

I don't even know what I'd do with that sort of hardware. Heck, I can barely use 2GB of RAM on a good day, of which the sole significant offenders are Gnome 3 and Firefox (approx. 300MB each).

kriro• 11 years ago

Seems like a very good plan. The equipment isn't lost if the employee suddenly leaves and if he/she stays it's really not that big of an investment. Whatever makes them happy and efficient. On top of that it's a pretty decent "lock in" move in an age where good developers are somewhat hard to find.

From anecdotal evidence there are a lot of developers who satisfice when it comes to salary/benefits. There's a certain base level (that they consider "fair pay") and once they get that it's not as simple as adding another 20k/year. Additionally, other factors are way more important (no unnecessary hoops, being happy at work, meaningful/interesting work to do). I've had very heated debates over this but I firmly believe that in "brain activities" specifically, just tossing more money at someone is not exactly the optimal HR strategy.

x0x0• 11 years ago

Feeling like work is a good experience is important. I left a job in part because they nickel and dimed me on airline seats. I gave up my Sunday to fly across the country for a work conference (as if it were a reward to go pull booth duty for 3 days), and they were pissy about reimbursing the $30 or $39 each way for extra legroom for someone who's 6ft 2in and 225 pounds from lifting. iow flying is awful, and that nyc/sf flight is 6 hours of hell. I just couldn't get over $80 being more important than me not being absolutely miserable, and that after I had my SO drop me off at the airport, saving them $50 in cab fees.

jvvw• 11 years ago

Also, from a practical perspective, most large organisations don't have a system where you can go to your manager and say 'please can I spend $X of my own money on my monitor/chair etc' and then have them buy them for you. It might work in a start-up but the infrastructure for that isn't in place in most organisations - you could bring stuff in yourself I guess but it wouldn't be insured.

Likewise, my (carefully adjusted!) chair regularly finds itself in some other part of the office when I'm not in, and if I'd paid for it myself, that would be mighty annoying.

drblast2• 11 years ago

One of the best comments I've ever read on Hacker News was about this topic. I wish I'd saved the link.

The point was that this engineer took the removal of any perk as a sign to leave, and soda/snacks was a huge one.

Why? During the early stages of the company, the "free" soda and food was something everyone chipped in for to save money. And why shouldn't they all save money by buying things like this in bulk? The "free" things were more valuable to each employee than the total bulk cost of those things.

The "taking away" of this "perk" represented a shift from a company that one was a valued member of to one that had a management vs. employees mentality. The idea became that the free soda/snacks was something that management gifted to employees to keep them happy.

And that shift in culture was the signal to leave.

gonehome• 11 years ago

I think I remember that too, though not sure if it was a comment or a submission.

Is this what you're remembering? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750

drblast2• 11 years ago

Here it is, it's a comment on the Elves post that I was thinking of:

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

joshu• 11 years ago

The Elves leave Middle Earth: http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...

harryjo• 11 years ago

The bulk cost-effectiveness argument makes sense, but how does the theory survive in the presence of modern hot-company behaviors that spend money on absurdly gourmet snacks and niche perks, that seem to be more about appearing cooler than the next company, instead of cost-effectively deploying comforts that make employees happier and more committed to their work?

gadders• 11 years ago

I worked at Lotus in the mid-90's when they had a bad quarter due to "channel stuffing". All the free Coca Cola etc in the fridges was swapped for off-brand rubbish (Panda Pop for those in the UK).

KineticLensman• 11 years ago

I worked somewhere where management decided to reduce the amount of coffee delivered by the vending machines. They realised that they would also need to reduce the size of the cups so no one would notice. Stupidly they made the cups smaller a day or so before reducing the coffee. The overflow was the giveaway

InclinedPlane2• 11 years ago

Yup. The relationship between employee and employer is a 2 way street, and it may not seem like it some times but both of them have tremendous power. When the employer starts doing dumb shit and increasingly makes it obvious they don't truly value the employee they pick up on that. And then they start leaving. Who leaves first? Oh, just the people who are the most intrinsically motivated, who care about the work the most, who have the most talent/experience and can easily find a job elsewhere (and know it). And when those people start to leave it starts a cascade. Because when the best, most talented, most experienced people leave it makes the working environment worse. A big aspect of job satisfaction for devs is working around other talented and capable folks, when that diminishes it creates a bigger incentive to leave. So more and more people leave, generally the people who have the easiest time finding jobs.

So talent and experience just start evaporating out of the company. And before you know it there's an enormous brain drain happening.

The thing is, this isn't obvious to people higher up until much, much later. And then it tends to manifest itself as a reduced capability to execute on projects, especially difficult ones. But almost always there's a zillion other things that one can readily blame for such things because no project is the same from cycle to cycle. And, of course, management is generally resistant to the notion that they fucked up and screwed the company over with short-sighted policies. Who would imagine that something as simple as getting rid of free soda could translate into not being able to ship on time years later? That's preposterous? But these are just the rocks in the river that the currents and eddies swirl around, they're the visible aspects of sentiment and changes that run deep and are invisible unless you're in the trenches and paying close attention.

Devs aren't a "cost center", they're the value that the entire company is built around. Treat them well and you'll be able to keep the best ones around for a long time, which is an enormous competitive advantage.

blisterpeanuts3• 11 years ago

I've often heard this "the best ones leave first because they're in demand" meme presented as fact. It sounds logical enough, but is there any evidence that this is really what happens?

Sometimes, the best and brightest are also the most invested into the organization's success, hence the least likely to leave. They may be earning a top salary, they may have the ear of the CEO, or they may just love their job too much to pack up and leave on a whim.

It's been my experience that the biggest complainers when it comes to belt tightening policies are in fact the lesser contributors. The little dog yaps the loudest. I don't know exactly why, but it often seems this way.

chrisbennet3• 11 years ago

"But these are just the rocks in the river that the currents and eddies swirl around, they're the visible aspects of sentiment and changes that run deep and are invisible unless you're in the trenches and paying close attention."

You can really turn a phrase. (This is a complement.)

anon42• 11 years ago

I think the only thing that works is to never start off with free snacks. At all places I've worked, what we have is an open self-serve bar with an open money box. You take what you want and pay as much as it says. Some people leave IOU notes when they can't make change. It works on the honour system and I've never seen a problem, not in companies with 20 employees and not with 200.

Edit: coffee and water are free, of course.

chrisbennet3• 11 years ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/magazine/what-the-bagel-ma...

"He is leery of disparaging individual companies or even most industries, for fear it will hurt his business. But he will say that telecom companies have robbed him blind, and another bagel-delivery man found that law firms aren't worth the trouble. He also says he believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He reached this conclusion in part after delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors -- an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service and administrative employees. Maybe, he says, the executives stole bagels out of a sense of entitlement. (Or maybe cheating is how they got to be executives.) His biggest surprise? ''I had idly assumed that in places where security clearance was required for an individual to have a job, the employees would be more honest than elsewhere. That hasn't turned out to be true."

jdietrich• 11 years ago

There's a similarity to the death spiral of failing restaurants.

A struggling restaurateur will often decide to cut costs somewhere to improve margins - cheap out on ingredients, cut back on staffing etc. As soon as they do this, it's game over for the business. You can't make a bad restaurant better by spending less money, so you end up in an irrevocable spiral of decline. Cost cutting -> worse food and service -> fewer customers -> lower revenues -> cost cutting.

The cost of free soda is absolutely trivial compared to the fully-loaded cost of an engineer. It's a complete no-brainer with massive RoI. Cutting back on snacks is an act of desperation, perpetrated by businesses that have either run out of opportunities to grow or completely lost sight of the importance of growth. When a company stops caring about per-worker productivity, layoffs are imminent.

vermontdevil• 11 years ago

My old boss once said "You can't cut your way to success" when she was trying to get money from an university to revive a flagging business. It worked as the business is now thriving and is a profit center for the University.

I do get there are exceptions to that statement but the general sentiment stuck with me ever since.

zachrose• 11 years ago

I might be the only person on this thread who thinks that cutting snacks might be a good move sometimes.

I once joined a division of a large corporation that wasn't doing so well. This division was new and well funded, but for a variety of reasons had not been able to ship anything of note.

The corporation was tanking in the market. A round of layoffs came, and the division got a new leader. One of the first things this leader did was to cut snacks. (In addition to coming up with an actual plan for making a product.)

At that point in time, cutting snacks signaled a culture change that was actually positive. Like, more doing and less sitting around in the kitchen eating pretzels and lamenting corporate dysfunction beyond our control.

A few thing might make this example different than others in this thread. The division was fairly new and there wasn't much in the way of existing culture. The organization really did seem slow and fat, with an obvious lack of success. Also, the office snacks weren't that good and we were in a neighborhood with better options.

wdr1• 11 years ago

The point was that this engineer took the removal of any perk as a sign to leave, and soda/snacks was a huge one.

True.

In the Yahoo! Burbank office, we originally had a candy bowl in front office. Simple things, like Jolly Ranchers & pieces of gum, that employees would occasionally grab on the way in or out.

After a time, it disappeared.

I happened to be walking down the flight of stairs with a VP one evening and we passed where the bowl so used it be. It jogged my memory, so I asked what happened? I'd heard it cost $50k/year, facilities didn't want to pay for it, and each executive with a cost center refused. I don't remember his exact words -- it was something that changed the subject but saying it was "complicated" and gave the distinct impression it was true.

I remember thinking "Who really cares about the candy, but if our executives can't figure out something so trivial, what the fuck is going on?"

This was around 2007 and I left a short bit later. It's historical revisionism to say that was the reason I left, as I had gotten a great offer elsewhere. But it still stuck with me as a sign of executive disfunction & an increasing sense that the rank & file weren't really appreciated by senior leadership.

Gravityloss• 11 years ago

A thousand dollars per week for candy? Thats 200 dollars per day. Assuming it costs 10 dollars per kg, thats 20 kg per day. You must have had quite a lot of traffic at the bowl. If everybody took 40 grams, thats 500 people per day.

Or then your financial people are using wrong candy suppliers or, worse, dodgy math...

thinkingkong• 11 years ago

What a weird decision.

600,000 for sprint is such a drop in the bucket, but at scale these line items like "snacks" look like big numbers.

As a side note: lots of people are commenting on the quality of snacks as being the reason to not bother with them. Obviously if you're just supplying people with Dr Pepper and Mars bars you won't get much of a benefit. The snacks you bring into the office should satisfy a few things

1) You dont go hungry

2) You eat something healthy

3) You continue to harness the "serendipity of the office"

analog31• 11 years ago

I wonder if the snacks become a necessary medication for boredom, and taking them away places the level of boredom in sharp relief.

ceratopisan• 11 years ago

The same goes for better keyboards or chairs for employees. I'll have a coworker say "this keyboard is uncomfortable" or "I'm squinting a lot at this monitor", and when I offer to order something different, they reflexively say "Oh, don't get anything too fancy!"

If the company's going to ask someone to work years of their life away, the least a company can do is make sure the damage to vision, posture and wrists is minimized. Note minimized - it gets a little more clear when you realize that nobody really comes out of a career with better health - even if it's just age.

(someone will probably pop up and say "But I'm more healthy working now that I've lost weight at 50 years of age than I was at 30!" Fine. But you'll never get to be 30 again, fat or thin.)

mrbill5• 11 years ago

I showed up at my first day at the new gig with my own keyboard (tenkeyless Cherry MX brown keyswitches) and mouse. Multiple people said "Hey, you don't have to bring your own stuff, just tell us what you want and we'll order it."

Having spent a decade at a much larger company (Halliburton) I feel absolutely spoiled at this place. The system they gave me on Monday? Brand new 2015 Macbook Pro Retina 15" with 512G SSD and 16G RAM (and external USB3 hub and USB3 SATA HD for Time Machine backups). Two 23" monitors were already on my desk waiting with DVI-to-Mini-Displayport adapters.

Today I sent a request for a desk lamp, and someone walked in 30 minutes later with two and asked which one I preferred. This afternoon I requested a license key for VMWare Fusion 8, and had it in email about an hour later. This stuff would have taken weeks, or never been approved, at my previous gig - where half the stuff on my desk was brought in from home because purchase requests would have been rejected with "You have a keyboard already, why do you need an expensive one?"

praseodym• 11 years ago

This reminds me of how the guys at Panic Inc ordered new Apple stuff for their employees through a simple Slack post: https://twitter.com/panic/status/653998672707915778

jagtesh2• 11 years ago

Do you mind telling us the name of your new workplace?

joshstrange• 11 years ago

Personally snacks aren't huge for me. They are normally junk food or something "healthy" like baked chips which I also don't eat. Now fruit is something I would be interested in but the short shelf life of things like that normally makes it unattractive to businesses. Also drinks don't interest me much as I drink water all day. All of that said I've worked at places that had snacks and worked with coworkers who took advantage of those snacks all the time and they seemed to really enjoy that perk. So I don't hate when a place has snacks/drinks it's just not a value-add for me 99% of the time.

Now free lunch every once in awhile? That's a very attractive perk. I once worked for a company that took all the employees (max of ~15) out to lunch once a week which was a lot of fun. We rotated between everyone to choose where to go so everyone got a choice and just about anywhere you would go there would be at least something you liked. Now I get that snacks/drinks probably cost way less but we wouldn't have had to go out to eat. I've got friends at jobs that regularly cater in food which is pretty awesome as well.

Right now the company I work at has a cafeteria (with subsidised prices, lunch is max of $5 more or less) so cost of food and need to leave campus really isn't an issue and every once in awhile we have a free lunch event like for Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Christmas, etc... This ticks so many more boxes for me than free snacks/drinks ever would.

tracker1• 11 years ago

Where I work now, I had requested fresh fruit be added to the snack bins... unfortunately it goes so quickly that there's rarely any there when I get around to a snack in the later afternoon...

mrbill5• 11 years ago

I just started (two days ago) at a company that not only provides free drinks (soda, coffee, tea) and snacks ($10 credit per week for the vending machines), but they cater lunch from a local restaurant every day. If you don't want what is being served that day, you have a $10 daily credit that can be used at a local deli sandwich shop (and have it delivered).

I accepted the job without hesitation even though it's a tiny pay cut over what I was making previously. "little things" like this can make a huge difference in employee morale.

Shank• 11 years ago

When I worked in an office position doing very demanding work on intelligence software, the only thing that acted as a good reprieve from the day to day grind was being able to get up, go to the break room, and get something to eat and snack on to keep everything going. It was an excellent thing to have -- cutting it could easily kill off that kind of "brain refresh" that's needed in highly technical jobs. Sprint certainly employs IT and development, and if these cuts affect them, they're almost certainly signing a death warrant for their company if their most skilled employees start leaving.

daemin2• 11 years ago

Having a common place with free snacks also allows people from different groups to come together and mingle, exchanging ideas and knowledge through the company.

At my first job the new good coffee machine was a place we'd all congregate at twice a day for a coffee and a chat between teams and other random people in the company.

oxplot• 11 years ago

I can understand the convenience of having snacks a dozen steps away, but where is the evidence that correlates the length of time present in the office with productivity? I can certainly tell from my own experience that stepping outside for even 5 minutes boosted my mental state after I returned.

skybrian• 11 years ago

Cutting snacks altogether shows lack of creativity. A more subtle move is to switch to healthier (and less popular) snacks.

chrisbennet3• 11 years ago

Sometimes people do counterproductive things (to the company) because of poor incentives.

If someone gets rewarded for cuttings costs, but not for increasing company revenue, guess what they do?

If HR gets rewarded for hiring a low risk, average employee but doesn't get any credit for hiring a brilliant college drop out, guess what they do?

justjico• 11 years ago

Not long ago I was running a small office of 4-6 devs and at least once a month I would make a trip to Costo or Sams and buy some good stock of soda's and snacks for everyone. This was easy to do, and cost negligible. Then at some point I hired an admin assistant and she correctly pointed out that, long term, this was likely a very bad thing for everyone's health. Drinking 1 or 2 soda's a day is not healthy for anyone. I know we were all adults in the office but at least I felt responsible for providing more healthy alternatives. Easier said than done as I was never really able to figure a good alternative at that scale. Most beverages in a can seemed as bad or worse than soda. I wonder if the office density in cities like SF or big startup hubs offer an alternative for this. I mean logistics of fresh fruit vs once a month trip are very different.

jayess• 11 years ago

Unsweetened ice tea?

cableshaft• 11 years ago

If unsweetened iced tea were already prepared and in pitchers in my office, I'd drink that all day instead of soda. It's me having to spend time preparing it that insures I don't end up drinking it that often compared to soda.

cloverich• 11 years ago

Sparkling water. Our office runs on TopoChico. Prior office stocked "LaCroix" flavored sparkling waters; same deal. Or just diet soda.

rev_bird• 11 years ago

At a previous job, I was in a decidedly un-hip city, and even then our employer found a local farm co-op thing (not sure of the details) that just showed up every Wednesday and left oranges and bananas and kiwis on a bunch of the centrally located filing cabinets. Such a simple service, but it ran like clockwork.

ElijahLynn• 11 years ago

Yeah, I fear that as someone who will likely run a tech company or manage etc.

I don't really want to buy shit food for people that I know they really want. It just doesn't feel right. Buy a bunch of organic fruits and veggies and bean dips or whatever and I feel like they would still want the crap food anyways.

Suck a pickle.

honestcoyote• 11 years ago

It's not as bad a dilemma as you think. Buy the doritos and buy the fresh food too. You show respect for your employees by respecting their wishes and you show you care about them by offering healthier options.

xeni• 11 years ago

Costco has 0-calorie flavored sparkling waters that I love

http://reviews.costco.com/2070/100115780/niagara-bottling-ll...

Lots of people absolutely hate the taste, so don't buy in bulk to start. I've never had a problem with artificial sweeteners, but apparently they taste bad to some people?

lifeformed3• 11 years ago

I interned at a place that had a cafeteria, and free fountain drinks for anyone. "Freshman 15" was a common phenomenon - new employees would gain about 15 lbs in their first year of working there.

roel_v• 11 years ago

Coke Zero.

gaius• 11 years ago

One company I worked years ago for got a Scottish CTO and he insisted the free drinks fridge be filled with Diet Irn Bru. It probably remains full to this day...

patrickmcmanus• 11 years ago

seltzer and upgrade your coffee.. and while it isn't exactly health food: nuts, yogurt, apples, and cheese are much better than chips, cookies, and 'bars'.. yogurt apples and cheese will keep for weeks in the fridge.

bra-ket• 11 years ago

actually snacks are very unhealthy

mikekchar• 11 years ago

What I am about to say will probably anger a lot of people, but I think it is worth thinking about, so I'll just go ahead and say it.

I have to say that I don't think that snacks are really the issue. I've worked in offices with snacks and offices without snacks and I don't think it makes any difference at all. Snacks (and monitors and new computers and expensive chairs and company purchased gadgets) are a proxy for appreciation. It is quite easy to set up a delivery of drinks. Everyone can chip in, and as programmers get paid multiples of the minimum wage everywhere in the world, every programmer can afford it. However, when I have worked on teams that attempted to do this, it has been shut down by those that feel that "We should not have to do this. The company should provide for us!"

There is a rock star mentality amongst programmers. To be honest, I don't think it's unique to programmers. Sales people and management traditionally have their junkets that say to them, "You are special". Just like a salesperson would ideally like an open bar, programmers would ideally like an open budget for snacks/toys.

But why do programmers and managers and salespeople value this extra (and really inconsequential) thing? Shouldn't actual appreciation trump the purchase of drinks, or gadgets or copious quantities of alcohol? In my experience, it does not. We have all seen and heard horror stories of bad management and we have all had the feeling of "Well, if I have to put up with this crap, they are going to have to pay a lot of money." But I have also seen good managers go to unreasonable extremes to help employees and to back them through difficult times. Instead of thinking, "I have an amazing manager. I don't care about soda." normally I see reactions that border on "What have you done for me lately? This cheap crap is unacceptable."

I have never been in a traditional management role ("agile coach" is the closest I've come and I always concentrated on improving the skills of developers rather than working on business processes). What I find frustrating about this situation is that smart managers realize that for an extra 10% of their budget, they can provide a modicum of luxury for the programmers in lieu of actual appreciation. Soda trumps helping a developer make it through a rough patch in their life. A monitor with pixels too small to even see is more important than being able to sit down and talk about how to make work situations better. Programmers will burn down the building if they don't get their name brand chair, but will tolerate never having discussions about how to develop their career.

That sucks.

matwood• 11 years ago

I see snacks and/or sodas as just a proxy. A company who thinks about their employees enough to provider sodas and coffee is often the same company who thinks about career development or helping an employee through a rough patch. Remember, the free soda is not about the free soda as much as it is a signal about how the company acts towards employees.

thoman23• 11 years ago

"Just like a salesperson would ideally like an open bar, programmers would ideally like an open budget for snacks/toys."

I'm a programmer, but according to this my true calling is in sales.

VLM• 11 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Specifically something along the lines of: I'd like to listen to the bosses bosses boss ramble about process improvement initiatives but instead I'm listening to my stomach growl because I couldn't go out for lunch due to the thunderstorm so...

Given that meetings are usually highly ineffective and unproductive, snacks are a management pickle. On one hand there's sunk cost, we're losing $1000 of salary by having a CYA meeting. On the other hand, if we spend $1010 and buy everyone donuts, there's a 1 in 100 chance some otherwise hungry guy might pay attention and make the whole thing worth it. This applies to higher level project wide goals, also. The only thing worse than paying $400K in dev salary to a team to do something we know won't work but had to be done for political reasons, is paying $400050 for the same thing we know won't work but now we bought the team donuts every friday.

misiogames• 11 years ago

I worked for a big company that had this policy: "no free stuff, we just going to pay you top dollar and you can buy whatever you want" good, nobody complain. When they added free snacks I knew it was time to jump ship :P

prawn• 11 years ago

A canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator of cultural change in a growing business.

happywolf3• 11 years ago

I had a really relevant experience in my ex-company. It was a small company doing video analytics and monitoring. It did well in initial stage and the pantry was stocked with real bean coffee maker, beers, sodas, and pastries. Then its business went down hill, and the beer was removed (beers are expensive in Singapore), then cheap beans were used, then no bean coffee but 3-in-1 instant coffees. Guess what was the ultimate items they scrimped on? Toilet paper. You read it right and I am not kidding. They swapped 3-ply to 2-ply and that was when I called it quit. The company went bankrupt after 1.5 years.

The lesson here is not about how much 'gift' it was taken from employees, it is more on the changing wind in the air that employees need to watch out for. If a company is so desperate to cut snacks, usually it means it has much bigger shit at the backyard that employees may or may not be aware of.

tacostakohashi• 11 years ago

Hey, since you mention being in Singapore, and poor employment options - I happen have a small, established, mainly online lifestyle business based in Singapore that I'm looking for a new partner / owner to work with as I've moved onto other things.

If you, or anyone else based in Singapore with some HN-type (web, entrepreneurial, etc) skills and interests wanted to discuss further, drop me an introductory email - kovanroad@gmail.com.

happywolf3• 11 years ago

Thanks. I will send an email to you.

daemin2• 11 years ago

Well when someone is pinching pennies that badly - changing toilet paper of all things - it means that they've run out of other ideas to cut costs or increase revenue.

tbrownaw• 11 years ago

* Guess what was the ultimate items they scrimped on? Toilet paper. You read it right and I am not kidding. They swapped 3-ply to 2-ply and that was when I called it quit.*

...I wasn't aware that 3-ply was even a thing. That said, my lack of attention to brand names means I've discovered quite a range of quality in the local 2-ply offerings here.

happywolf3• 11 years ago

Actually I wasn't aware the difference either until the admin (she was my friend as well) complained about there was nothing left to 'optimize'...

I must clarify i called it quit not because of the lack of 3-ply paper for my backside, but I felt it was really an issue for a company trying to save on such thing. My reasoning was right.

victorhn• 11 years ago

What a shitty situation to be in.

madengr• 11 years ago

Hell, my employer of 2500 people doesn't even offer free rot-gut coffee.

a3n3• 11 years ago

If management feels they need to cut snacks, sodas, whatever, then they've lost confidence in the company's viability. Time to leave.

welly• 11 years ago

As a self confessed sugar addict, I wish my office didn't have free snacks. Or that they'd change them to something healthy.

makecheck• 11 years ago

I worked as an engineer at a place that not only had free soda but one of the multi-flavor fountains like you'd see in a fast food place. It was initially quite cool; you could come in with your cup and just fill up whatever you wanted.

Of course, soda syrup costs literally pennies. Food places pay more for cups than soda, and since the engineering group wasn't buying that many cups (people used their own) the cost was essentially wrapped up in the machine itself.

Now comes the true stupidity. To "cut costs" they stopped refilling the soda dispenser but they kept the machine and even left it plugged in. It became a glorified ice dispenser (when the break room already had a different ice dispenser), consuming electricity. It had a bunch of now-useless fountain dispensers on the front of it.

Think about that. The company decided not to pay the pennies it would have cost to make employees happy, and elected to continue operating a machine that didn't have any reason to exist without the soda. The beginning of the end was signaled loud and clear to employees and I saw a marked drop in giving-a-crap-about-things after that point. The company is not around anymore, long since divided into pieces and sold to the lowest bidder.

vacri• 11 years ago

Why wouldn't you sell the pieces to the highest bidder?

lucasnemeth• 11 years ago

They were masochists.

lordfoom• 11 years ago

"There's an old saying where they say the goal is to pluck the feathers from the bird with the least amount of squawking," said Chamberlain. The less visible the cuts, the better—even if it means taking money out of employee pockets. "Changes to contributions to employee retirement plans," he suggested as a less disruptive cut than emptying the snack larder. "These are highly obscure from a worker standpoint."

That's some cold shit right there.

spacecowboy_lon3• 11 years ago

You don't have employe trustees for pensions in the USA? - sounds like the sort of thing that got Robert Maxwell (a nastier version of Rupert Murdoch) in trouble.

Basically Embezzled the employees pension funds.

jib2• 11 years ago

I'm ok with that. Perception matters. I dont think it is cold as much as realistic. I would much rather have my contributions to the pension cut.

Someone decided that providing milk is too much of a pain in my office. We used to have a guy who dumped off a dozen litres fresh milk a day in the break areas. Now I buy my own. That annoys me. Buying milk takes up cognitive space that I could use for other stuff.

No milk annoys me way more than if we were to cut pension contribution cap by 1%.

I save about 500 euro/month or so in the pension (I dont even know exactly how much, I just went with the cap). Lowering the cap by a percent would probably save about 50 euro / month per employee or so. There is no way I spend 50 euro / month on milk.

Cutting the pension contribution cap by 1% would have been a worse deal financially for me, but the milk annoys me way more than a cap cut does.

paganel• 11 years ago

What's wrong with leaving the office in order to get one's "munchie fix"? How else are we going to breath some fresh air during the day? Or to actually walk, on our two legs, not barely moving from one chair to another?

J-dawg• 11 years ago

If we're talking about corporate stinginess, look no further than IBM's London office. They don't even provide a place to make your own tea or coffee, let alone the actual tea or coffee. Bringing in your own kettle is banned. The best you can do is buy a cup of hot water from the canteen for 23p and put your own teabag in.

It's become a bit of a running joke among staff there, but nobody seems to seriously complain about it. I guess they've just got used to it. I do think it says something about IBM's current attitude to its employees.

glenndebacker• 11 years ago

Where I work we have a soda machine and a can of soda costs about 0,80 euro cent, which isn't that really cheap knowing how much a soda can costs.The idea is that we so fund tickets for a local PHP conference. Water and fruit is free.

I don't have particular negative feelings about it (there are more important things) but it is certainly one of the more remarkable differences if I compare it will all the other places that I have worked. My previous employer was even mad if you took soda's from home.

The most choice I ever had was working at Lernout and Hauspie. All the free soda, coffee or even soup that you could possibly think of.

lyschoening• 11 years ago

"They would never have given the snacks to begin with if they didn’t think it was helping boost productivity somehow."

The same logic explains why austerity on the national level does not work.

illumen• 11 years ago

This is a classic way for management to get people to leave. Make the conditions worse, and people leave. Then management don't need to pay them to leave.

mamon• 11 years ago

In Poland no snack is really free: if company provides it then it's obliged to count it as employee's taxable income. That's how ridiculous this country is :)

EDIT: there's also one more ridiculous example of taxation in Poland: if company throws a party for its employees (there are many such parties, usually focused around "Employee of the month" awards, and other corporate bullshit) then attending such party counts as "income" for the employee. But, according to Tax Office, you have to pay tax even if you don't attend a party, because the opportunity to attend is your income by itself :)

simonh• 11 years ago

This subject came up at a previous employer and one of my colleagues argued that she didn't drink soda or eat snacks and it was unfair to offer freebies that she got no benefit from, and if you want snacks and drinks you should pay for them yourself.

At first I thought that was being a bit mean, but when you scale up an organisation you might go from having one or two people of that opinion to having hundreds or thousands. Big organisations have to pay a lot more attention to issues of fairness and discrimination, and being seen to implicitly subsidize a lifestyle or habit clearly detrimental to health such as snacks and soft drink consumption is actually a bit of a can of worms. Subsidizing things like gym membership could be seen as discriminatory as well I suppose, but at least it can be justified to shareholders on the basis that it's a benefit to the company to have healthy employees.

devopsproject• 11 years ago

This country is doomed if we have to start trying to placate everyone's feelings. Don't like soda? Don't drink it.

atom-morgan• 11 years ago

I'm in the same situation as your colleague. But this would be like me asking for extra vacation because I don't plan on having kids.

bluedino2• 11 years ago

What if your employees start abusing it and taking the snacks home?

http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebo...

Getting rid of free office snacks doesn't come cheap

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