9 ms·

The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free

327 points by icey 17y ago

gaius 17y ago
Absolutely. Another symptom is machine naming. When people who will never themselves log into them tell you to dump whatever whimsical themes you had and call your boxes according to an official convention, you gotta wonder what value they're adding to the organization.
- ramanujan 17y ago
  Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained. Your own personal laptop is a different matter. Moreover, if you want personality, just set up your ~/.ssh/config to retain the legacy name for yourself, e.g. "ssh middleearthname" to connect to server001.foo.com
  - dagw 17y ago
    The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random. There is often structure and information embedded in the naming scheme, even when it might not be obvious to an outsider. Having someone come in and replace all of that with server001-server999 will often remove information.
    - blhack 17y ago
      The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random. Exactly. For instance, my firewall is called "charon". Personification is a good thing and should be encouraged. It's easier to visualize things that way. From an inside-out perspective (people such as accountants who see everything but, for the most part, do not understand it), naming servers like $function_$row_$rack_$slot or whatever else makes sense...it will simplify things. The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective. Think about it like this: you have things in your kitchen, right? Say you have a toaster, a refrigerator, a mixer, and a microwave. You would NEVER call them things like "appliance_counter1_left", "appliance_floor_right" etc. This would be confusing. It is for this reason that humans give things names; toaster, refrigerator, and mixer are all names, they're just very common ones.
      - jodrellblank 17y ago
        If you worked managing a supermarket you would call them City17_shop5_aisle4_refridgerator2. > The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective. That depends - I'd much rather a firewall rule that told me that Glasgow Database Server 2 can talk to London Mail Server 3 for SMTP traffic than one that told me MissPiggy can talk to Kermit for χάρτης traffic. Especially when it's not a system I deal with every day and I haven't cached the name/function mappings in my head. On the other hand, the UK postal system works well with a mixture of numeric sequences (house and flat numbers), cutesy names (road names, city names) and arbitrary government assigned gibberish (Post Codes).
  - gaius 17y ago
    The names aren't random, tho'. The people using the machines every day know that (for example) all the database servers are named after planets, all the web servers are elements of the periodic table, all the development boxes are Muppets characters, etc. It costs nothing and makes your engineers happy. Plus it is intuitive, mistakes of the kind of being logged into the wrong box never happen. I personally have very nearly experienced a disaster because the official naming convention had only one character difference between production and UAT... Anyway, you've missed my point a bit. It doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things what the boxes are called. It DOES matter than your company is employing people to impose pointless, trivial changes and policies on people with real work to do.
    - Poiesis 17y ago
      I much rather prefer managing names rather than codes/numbers. One major reason is that often in a standardized system, the least significant bits are on the right, and at least in Windows often a longer name will be truncated in a display. I don't need many characters to tell one dwarf from another, but to tell names of the type XXYYYNNNNN0-12 from XXYYYNNNNN0-13 is a huge pain sometimes. The big win, though, for a more clinical naming is that shared context/training can be easier, and in a larger org the standardization of course makes things a lot easier to deal with. But of course, standardization can be done with the more whimsical names. And a lot of the time the naming scheme that is drawn up by committee takes just as long to learn as the more fun ones (mostly because they need to be abbreviated a bunch). I suppose the one thing you can say for formal naming systems that is fairly inarguable is that once you understand the rules, you can look at an unfamiliar machine name and know instantly what it does. For machines named after fictional characters that's only true if you read/watch the same books/shows as the people doing the naming.
    - misterbwong 17y ago
      Honestly, the muppets/elements/planets works really well...until there's some turnover. Then the new sysadmin thinks the three stooges should be the db servers and capital cities should be the web servers. Then you end up having conversations like: "Hey, can you move some data up to larry, moe, and saturn? We're building on hydrogen, oxygen, and sacramento." The confusion this causes for new hires and non-natives is real, albeit somewhat comical. edit: ServerXX is no better-the names should give a clue to what function they perform (i.e. IRV-FNP01 = located in irvine, file and print server, 01 [oldest server])
  - bcl 17y ago
    It depends on the number of machines. When I have 3 or 4 they get names (currently using Firefly characters), but when I have say 20 or more they get numbers. Or they get both so that my scripts are easier to write. For me it also depends on function. If its just another app server cloned from the master, it gets a number -- it has no personality. But if it is a backup server, mail server, dev or test system it gets a name.
  - xiaoma 17y ago
    "Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained." That's true. However, humans do better with names than numbers. Otherwise, DNS wouldn't exist. The real question is who do you want to optimize for?
    - msluyter 17y ago
      I think it's dependent on the situation. I enjoy the charm of machines named "frodo" and whatnot, but when I first arrived at my current company, the totally arbitrary naming conventions was highly confusing because we had three environments (dev/stage/prod) and several databases and other classes of server per environment. Now we have a standardized naming convention with names like "dev-foo01", "stage-bar02", "prod-baz01" etc.. (were foo/bar/baz denote the purpose of the machine) and it's much easier to deal with.
      - garnet7 17y ago
        dev servers: gnomes staging: dwarves prod: elves
        whatusername 17y ago
        Sure. But with a DEV_SYD_DB03, UAT_MEL_APP07, PROD_BNE_DB01 kind of scheme, I've got much more information at a glance than you do.
      - BerislavLopac 17y ago
        @garnet7, there are no gnomes in LoTR. ;) Or, actually, there are, but they are actually Elves...
        garnet7 17y ago
        Aw, son of a ... And I can't go back and fix it either! s/gnomes/hobbits/ Well, let's hope no hobbits read this website.
  - raganwald 17y ago
    Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained. I bet you could save $10,000 a year by eliminating the arbitrary names and calling them ServerXXX. Sorry for the attempt at a witty reply. Let's start again. Agreed, there are efficiencies. The point of the article is that when you institute changes like this, you may create unintended consequences like a mass exodus of people who liked working for a company where the servers were named after Muppet characters and associate "Server042" with a company where professional managers demand cover sheets for their TPS reports. Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company?
    - jodrellblank 17y ago
      > Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company? If you knew what the consequences were going to be then they wouldn't be unanticipated, but if you didn't know then you couldn't accurately answer the question. Aren't you just asking people to 'know the unknown unknowns' and never make poor decisions? Wouldn't it be a more realistic suggestion to ask them to ask "Was this good for the company and if not, should we revert to how it was before?"
      - gridspy 17y ago
        It is very rare for any individual to completely reverse their previous decision, especially when the results of that decision are subjective, delayed and hard to measure. By the time management realises that soda should have been free, the opinions of the top engineers have irreversibly changed.
      - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
        It's an Office Space reference. In the movie, the PHBs hold a meeting in which they solemnly instruct all their employees to ask "Is what I'm doing good for the company?" before they do anything. The audience rolls its eyes in sympathy, for the reasons you've pointed out here.
        17y ago
  - jimbokun 17y ago
    How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "server001" vs. "server002" or "server003", etc.? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that?
    - jodrellblank 17y ago
      How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "Feynman" vs. "Fermi" or "Farnsworth"? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that? And what do you call the next server? By contrast, "hq-web-001" is an early webserver at head quarters, while "br1-sql-020" is a later database server at branch office 1, and the next server name is the next in the appropriate sequence.
      - aplusbi 17y ago
        "Feynmann", "Fermi" and "Farnsworth" are much better than "server001", "server002" and "server003" but are arguably a step behind "hq-web-001" and "br1-sql-020". I work for a company where most of the servers are just numbered and it's can be rather confusing.
  - billybob 17y ago
    "It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained." I'm not a systems admin, but I presume this is because you can write a for loop that counts through your machines and does something to each, right? In that case, couldn't you just have nested arrays? machines = ['mailservers'=>['Earth'=>'some IP', 'Mars'=>'some IP'],'devservers'=>['Dopey'=>'some IP', 'Sneezy'=>'some IP']] ...etc. Now everyone can connect to a machine with a memorable name, AND you can loop through all the dbservers if you need to, AND anyone who doesn't understand the system can look in one place to grok it. What's the problem?
    - blueben 17y ago
      The problem is that you're not a sysadmin. I'm going to assume that you are a programmer since you are assuming this is simply a programming problem. I am a sysadmin, and I can tell you that I outgrew cute server names many years ago because they hurt more than they could ever help. Reading this thread, it is painfully obvious to me that most people here have not been meaningfully exposed to large server installations. The last time I had servers with cute names, there were 12 machines total. Since then, I've worked in environments with hundreds and thousands of hosts. Even past a couple dozen servers, cute names become a liability and a significant distraction. Divining purpose, location, and other meaning by looking at a cute name when you have 30 servers is difficult and unnecessary. Applying the 3am standard (can a sleep deprived sysadmin do this task with minimal error at 3am?) cute names actually become rather cruel. The answer is to build an inventory system that lets the sysadmin map cute names to functional information. Or simply build that functional information in to the naming scheme. So sorry guys. As a professional sysadmin and fellow engineer I appreciate that you are looking out for what you perceive to be our sysadmin needs, but cute names are one thing we don't want or need. Unless perhaps you can come up with a justification for renaming the functions and classes in your code with cute names...
  - theBobMcCormick 17y ago
    How is managing boxes named server001 easier than giving the servers, oh, I don't know.... actual NAMES! Are you seriously gonna tell me you manage the boxes with scripts that iterate through the numeric portion of the server names?!? Because if that's the case, your problems are WAAAYYY bigger than just naming convention problems. Names like server001 are great and fine for a cluster of more or less identical, interchangable machines (Beowolf cluster, cluster of VMware hosts, etc.). But it sucks ass for most other circumstances. Seriously. Try having discussions about a project involving a dozen servers (out of hundreds in the company mind you), each with names like server3056, server3087, server3109. It sucks, because 5 minutes after talking about it you find yourself wondering: Hmmm... was I supposed to reboot 3087? or 3078? :-)
- pavel_lishin 17y ago
  Having only ever worked for one small company, it's really hard for me to imagine this actually happening. Hell, from most of the stories I've heard from people working for bigger places, people who don't log into the machines frequently don't even know that the machines have names.
  - allenbrunson 17y ago
    you might be surprised, then! i used to work for a company where i wrote critical pieces of their software infrastructure. it's a series of interconnected apps which i named after marsupials. i have now left, and they are in the process of giving the apps boring names that more directly indicate what they do.
    - BerislavLopac 17y ago
      This sounds like a good candidate for a The Daily WTF story. ;)
    - pavel_lishin 17y ago
      Well, to be fair, that sounds fairly logical. If I get hired in your place, I don't want to have to figure out that I have to run Possum before I can run Koala, and if I'm going to be running Kangaroo I have to explicitly specify the target port or whatever.
- DannoHung 17y ago
  I understand the appeal, but I disagree. Even at my most whimsical, I'd rather have the name a of a machine really be tied to some actual information about the machine. You don't have to use muppet names to indicate that something is a development database server, for example.
  - gaius 17y ago
    At one job, the convention imposed on us was <manufacturer><number>. So dell001, dell002, sun67, etc etc. You can see why I have issues with this ;-)
    - raganwald 17y ago
      That optimizes for ordering replacement parts :-)
      - wingo 17y ago
        Replacement engineers as well :)
      - mosburger 17y ago
        One company I worked for named every machine for its service tag for that very reason. gag They're no longer in business.
- iamwil 17y ago
  This reminds me being told the column names in a table of the admin panel that customers would never see would have to be changed. Furious but didn't contest it.
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    Some care required. Four years ago we coined some names for internal use that we knew no one would ever see. Now they've leaked out into places where some customers can see them and the entire code-base really ought to be cleaned for consistency. Currently we have visible names and hidden names, and remembering the dichotomy is proving difficult. We're cleaning as we go, but we are all wishing we'd been a bit less whimsical.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
- shpxnvz 17y ago
  I've seen this happen once, and I can almost understand why it did. In this case there was a rather severe production problem that had potential long term revenue effects for the company. In the course of the after-action report some screen dumps were shown to the executives in which the "whimsical" server names appeared.They were (understandably) in a rather agitated and non-whimsical mood, and incorrectly (in my opinion) correlated the seriousness of the problem which the perceived lack of seriousness of the naming scheme. They could not see that the naming scheme was not whimsical - it was in fact quite methodical and conveyed more meaning to the engineers who lived with the machines everyday than the strict, sanitized names we eventually ended up with.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    ... and this is why I absolutely oppose letting non-engineering-background people run a company. You really have to have been in the trenches yourself to be qualified to manage those who are.
    - qjz 17y ago
      This was a failure on the part of the executives in doing their jobs. It doesn't take an engineer to recognize that they needn't be concerned with machine names (unless the names were so bad that public disclosure would result in a PR nightmare).
    - dasil003 17y ago
      Nice in theory, but it's just not possible for every single person to be an engineer, and yet every single company has IT.
      - rdtsc 17y ago
        The danger is when managers think of themselves as engineers.
        Teulon 17y ago
        Or when engineers think they are the best qualified managers...only because they are engineers.
- Scott_MacGregor 17y ago
  I like having my servers named things like HQDC01 instead of something like MrSpock or Samantha, but I do know others who prescribe to the Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (Full Metal Jacket) style of server naming--"Tonight, you p*kes will sleep with your servers. You will give your server a girl's name. Because this is the only...etc...". The HQ is for Headquarters, DC for Domain Controller, 01. HQDS01 for Headquarters Development Server 01, etc... It's an MCSE best practices naming convention to locate and indentify servers.
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    Yup. And then you are forced to move the physical location of the server to some remote data center. But because your infrastructure is tightly coupled to the specific machine name you can't change it, so now the name is misleading.
    - count 17y ago
      If your infrastructure cannot handle the move of a machine, you're doing it wrong.
      - InclinedPlane 17y ago
        Of course. But "doing it wrong" is state of the industry in IT/software dev.
ax0n 17y ago
I've worked at two startups while they slowly took away the free stuff. It sucks, but it's a phase that successful (okay, and not-so-successful, in their death throes) companies eventually need to go through. Also, thank you for removing the apostrophe, icey. gnashes teeth at stray apostrophes
- algorias 17y ago
  Why do they need to go through it? free soda will always be a tiny expense in relation to everything else. Sure 10K sounds like a lot of cash for soda, but a company with 50 employees is spending millions on salaries.
  - mechanical_fish 17y ago
    10K sounds like a lot of cash for soda This, by the way, is the very definition of bikeshedding. Everyone knows about soda; everyone has bought it before. So cutting out soda is something that the entire executive team feels competent to discuss -- unlike, say, the efficiency of the QA department's staffing schedule, or climate control zones, or the use of electricity for lighting offices at 3am, or the difficult politics of downsizing particular business units. Soda is a simple theatrical stunt for making the CFO look good. It's a good show. Of course, as Steve points out, it sends a very clear message to the people who've been drinking those sodas: Your work is no longer considered an investment in the future. Now you're a cost center.
    - pwnstigator 17y ago
      Soda is a simple theatrical stunt for making the CFO look good. It's a good show. Nailed it.
    - noonespecial 17y ago
      Unfortunately, shows are just that. Pure signaling. If you cut $10k for snacks but the executive keeps his $30k company car lease, what have you just told the engineers who made the company possible in the first place? To them its about respect. Its worth more than money to most of these types, and when it dries up, they're gone. Most "I will work harder" types at startups just kind of know when the pigs are trading them to the glue factory for a case of whiskey.
bmj 17y ago
Maybe I'm just weird, but this wouldn't bother me. My employer does offer free sodas and snacks, but I don't take advantage of them (I don't drink soda, and tend not to snack on junk food). I do drink the free coffee, but in the past, I've survived this by bringing a thermos from home. I can understand why some people might not like the free stuff to be taken away, but I'd prefer to work for an employer that compensated fairly for my work, and one that does not expect that I work more than 40-45 hours on a regular basis.
- dagw 17y ago
  The point, as mentioned in the article, is not so much the (lack of) free soda, but what it is a leading indicator of. Once a company starts pinching pennies and ignoring the effect it has on moral then there is a good chance that worse is to come.
  - gaius 17y ago
    See this for why it doesn't make sense: http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/11/why-companies-fire-people-not-fancy-snacks http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/11/why-companies-fire-pe...
- algorias 17y ago
  It's not about your compensation at all. The impact of free snacks is so tiny for the employers cost structure that the decision to offer them or not is completely unrelated to their ability (or willingness) to pay a fair salary. Would you really prefer an extra $200 or so per year over free soda? I think you wouldn't even notice the difference in your bank balance.
  - qjz 17y ago
    The company has to succeed, my stock has to go up in value, and as the company grows in size it can get much better deals on things like health insurance than I can alone. $200/yr spent on soda doesn't benefit me in any way at all. I'll drink tapwater at work if I'm thirsty. Is startup culture really so averse to frugality and so blind to its benefits?
scj 17y ago
I'm kind of confused on the timeline: "Last week as a favor to a friend..." "The best engineers quietly put the word out that they were available, and in less than month..." While both statements can be true together, it would seem to me that "in less than a week..." would be more appropriate, and devastating. I realize I'm just fussing over unimportant details though.
- gvb 17y ago
  The second statement is referring to the four times Steve saw this happen in the past, in other companies. If his prediction is correct, the company whose board he sat in on last week will start seeing an exodus soon.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- barrkel 17y ago
  You left out the bit in the middle: "I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences."
  - scj 17y ago
    I would agree completely with you, if the next sentence was "In a similar situation at a different company, no one on the board..." But without such a line, I read that as commentary based on previous experiences, followed by a continuation of the main story. (I assumed that "the board" in the next sentence referred to the board in the first part, which lead to the continuation. This is re-enforced by using "This company" and "the company" which would imply that the author was referring to the only company introduced)
briancooley 17y ago
If the accoutants looked at free sodas and snacks as leveraged salary/retention bonuses, they wouldn't suggest eliminating them.
- eli 17y ago
  My employment contract lists free sodas as one of the benefits, right next to health and dental. Probably one of the main reasons we still have them.
  - numair 17y ago
    That's pretty amusing. You get health and dental benefits, along with one of the leading causes of health and dental problems... I know soda is considered holy water among many HNers, but for those of us who are highly health-conscious, that sounds a bit like the Detroit assembly lines with the cigarette vending machines.
    - dasil003 17y ago
      I was never a huge soda drinker, but I did have it regularly with lunch, or sometimes energy drinks at night, etc. Once I stopped drinking it regularly, I discovered how absolutely shitty it made me feel. If I go to the theater and eat a bag of popcorn with a soda, for instance. I'm not really a health nut, but when you look at the way soda and highly processed carbs are metabolized it's pretty scary. Given the rates of obesity and diabetes in the US, I rank soda and snack foods right up there with cigarettes in terms of long-term healthcare costs.
    - skorgu 17y ago
      There's a vast overlap. We have free soda, I know how horrible soda is for my body, my teeth, etc and so I quit drinking it. The problem is I quit long enough to prove to myself that I could (about three months) and since then I've quit once a week or so.
      - aplusbi 17y ago
noonespecial 17y ago
Outstanding. Using "jumped the shark" just never felt right for this situation. "The elves have left middle earth". A spot on perfect description of this sad and awkward phase all startups encounter as they grow to successful bigcorps. I love it.
- jcl 17y ago
  A minor flaw in the metaphor: Middle Earth doesn't have to compete with whatever the elves create in Valinor. Talented employees leaving is both a loss for the company and a gain for competitors.
  - pyre 17y ago
    That assumes that they move to competitors.
    - gridspy 17y ago
      There is a good chance that other employees will follow them to their new, more attractive company. They might not compete for clients but instead for other employees. There is also a potential that they have a great idea related to your company that they pursue once they leave.
    - potatolicious 17y ago
      If I knew my chief competitor just made a bunch of major bungles, and that their morale is at an all-time low... I'd get my recruiters in there fast.
      - pyre 17y ago
        How would you know about the morale within the company? HR dept. spies?
        btilly 17y ago
        Every company has you sign agreements about not recruiting from your old co-workers. But nothing in those agreements says that you can't pass along resumes that people push on you. When morale is bad, people who are left tend to offer you resumes when you quit. In that situation I've been glad to forward resumes of people who are good, and have avoided forwarding resumes of people who aren't. (After all you get judged by the quality of people that you recommend.) To the extent that I'm someone people want to work with again, this results in cherry picking the best people. The effect is even more direct when employees go through recruiters. Recruiters ask about the work environment where you are, and have no problem trying to track people down if they get the sense that good people may be available.
snorkel 17y ago
I never expected employers to provide snacks and beverages but it is demoralizing when executives take away such perks but continue to fly first-class for the same cost as buying a month of snacks for everyone.
- iuytgfghjmk 17y ago
  So for you there is a different breaking point. Like when you have to clock in and out at lunch time, but work unpaid overtime and weekends. Or when you lose admin rights on your own PC Or you have to start wearing a tie. For me it was when we had to start signing in and out with a time. Supposedly this was for fire safety, but never seemed to apply to VPs. We worked on banking systems and often had to work all nighters while the bank was offline. The time tracking system couldn't cope with the concept of being on shift for >24hours - the HR people treated us like it was our fault. Their solution was that we all went out at 23:59 and signed back in at 00:01 and that would solve the problem WE had created.
  - gridspy 17y ago
    For me it was : Generally working unpaid overtime for a long time and then during a quiet patch coming in early and leaving early (5-10 minutes early). I got personally told off by the team lead. Having a virus checker on my machine that I could not remove on pain of huge financial penalties. It scanned every input, intermediate and output of my compiler and turned the computer into a sloth. Didn't help that the final output was 230mb in size (and had a translation step into another 230mb executable). I tried in vain to get exceptions added but to no avail. These little things slowly chip away at you and you later realise that you left for the wrong reasons - but it is too late.
    - iron_ball 17y ago
      Those sound like great reasons to me, as long as you have another job waiting. What was the rest of the story?
      - 17y ago
sethg 17y ago
A certain VP I know once remarked that at one of his previous startup employers, he advised the upper management against providing employees with free coffee in the first place, because savvy employees know that losing the free coffee is a leading indicator for layoffs. He said this at the engineering staff meeting following our day of carnage at which a third of the company was laid off. We also lost the free soda.
- blackguardx 17y ago
  At the last company that I worked for, they didn't remove the free coffee but they took away the free napkins, sugar, creamer, coffee cups, etc. I was laid off two months later. The coffee also got better right before the layoffs. In an effort to save money, they looked for a cheaper coffee source than the crappy business supply company they had been using. They managed to stumble upon a deal at a local coffee roaster to get cheaper coffee. It was pretty good when made correctly. One of the worst things than can happen at a company is for someone who doesn't like "strong coffee" to be the first one into the office in the morning. Not putting enough coffee grounds in the filter basket makes coffee taste bitter and horrible. If you want weak coffee, add water to a strong cup. Someone eventually had to put up signs giving this same advice.
pwnstigator 17y ago
The CFO failed to anticipate that humans are irrational, and that people will read all sorts of things into the loss of free sodas. It's not just an economic transaction. I thought the sales point of "business" types was that they were good at managing the irrationality of humans.
- dkarl 17y ago
  Do you think the CFO who proposed this dismal change regrets it? She raised her standing with her peer group by proposing a popular cost-cutting measure, and they probably blame the engineers for the outcome, not her. They may even be glad to be rid of the engineers who wouldn't adjust well to big-company culture. Big-company culture is a culture of mediocrity and interchangeability, and the guys on top like it that way. They want all the initiative and excellence to be on their level of the company, so everything that happens in the company is due to their control. Google is exceptional in even trying to avoid that fate.
  - pwnstigator 17y ago
    I doubt it. Few people are going to mention the sodas during exit interviews. In fact, I think very few people are even aware that the sodas might be a trigger for their decision, since it's not about the sodas, but the show of loyalty.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  > humans are irrational It's not irrational to recognize that the kind of thinking that would eliminate free soda on the basis of narrow cost-benefit analysis is also the kind of thinking that would transform their beloved startup into a stultifying corporate bureaucracy.
- mattmcknight 17y ago
  Is it really irrationality? If you are taking away a benefit, that is like a salary cut on something you were getting tax free. The reality is that it is revealing of a CFO attitude, let's take away as much as we can from the employees to help the bottom line. CFO's should first focus on growing revenue, not cutting benefits.
umjames 17y ago
I work for a non-profit where, to cut costs, they initially took out all the water coolers. When people complained, they gave us one water cooler per building. I'd really like to be able to say that this would make people start leaving, but no one here is really going to do that. I'll bet senior management knew (and was relying on) that. Lesson learned: In startups, people are more likely to leave on principles. In big companies (even non-profits), almost no one leaves unless they're fired.
- noonespecial 17y ago
  I work with doctors, in and around hospitals and clinics. This problem has reached epidemic proportions, especially in the US. Bean counters know that no matter how many perks are removed or how intolerable working conditions get, doctors simply won't walk away from patients. I'm sorry to say that this is being taken advantage of in the worst of ways. Be careful working at a job you "believe in", it puts you at a fearful disadvantage.
  - umjames 17y ago
    You're right. I don't know about doctors, but I work in an IT department. You can tell that pretty much no one here "believes in" the job. It's just a paycheck. I think people don't leave for a variety of reasons, but passion for the work or the good that the work is supposed to provide is definitely not one of them.
  - hugh_ 17y ago
    Another good example: academia. As of a few weeks ago, the janitor only comes once a month, and we have to take out our own trash.
    - hga 17y ago
      Heh: when MIT first started doing this in the late '80s, they started cleaning most restrooms only every other day. They called this "Frequent Cleaning"....
    - jrwoodruff 17y ago
alexgartrell 17y ago
On the very first day of my internship at a very big corporation, they removed the free sodas. Even though this was only part of a large collection of cost-cutting measures, it sent the most clear "F*&# you". (There was a number of other fun things that they did, such as allowing certain groups to use their Engineering interns as QA people without ever alerting them that this would be the case) Needless to say, Carnegie Mellon students are heavily discouraged from working there by those of us who screwed up, and I definitely think that the huge dump they took on their recruiting pipeline has affected them negatively in the quality of people they'll be able to hire.
- endtime 17y ago
  Do you mind saying which company this was?
  - alexgartrell 17y ago
    Cisco
foulmouthboy 17y ago
I think part of what would irritate me here is not just that they've taken away free soda, but they're now actively charging me for it. I wonder if it would've come across better if there just wasn't any soda offered in the office anymore. Maybe it's totally illogical, but I'd be more irritated with the idea that the company not only took away this perk, but is now trying to make a profit off of it.
- Zot95 17y ago
  No, that (removing soda as an option) wouldn't go over well at all. Forget the idea of being offended, the practical matter is that soda is no longer an option... or at least a convenient option. You may as well take away the coffee as see how that goes over.
brown9-2 17y ago
I just want to say I really love this analogy.
msluyter 17y ago
I went through this transition once. Initially, sodas were to be .50$, but that caused an uproar and price was quickly reduced to .25$, where it remains today. It's one thing for sodas to not be free; it's another for them to be a profit center. Aw well, at least coffee is still free.
elblanco 17y ago
>Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had. I'd say this was the main reason. The original employees had already proven they could manage and grow the organization from 0->even, and hadn't slowed down expecting to move the company from even->profit. Now they have "supervisors" who don't know anything about the business or technology, shoved in on top of them, who's only role is to act as liaison between them and the corporate officers. Bristling at the lack of corporate loyalty shown to the people that made the company happen, those people leave. The calculus is really very simple. I've seen this pattern happen a number of times, and the usual result is that these new managers show up, make poor decisions (because they don't understand the business) cycle out (taking their stock with them), repeat 4-5 times until a manager shows up who is so inoffensive that the remaining engineers simply end up running the show in the end anyways and the manager just shows up to weekly meetings so she/he can liaise with corporate. In the meantime, the company stock has diluted as it fled out the door to the past managers, the company lost most of its senior engineering staff, forcing them to promote lower level, less capable staff to senior positions or to hire externally (again people who don't understand the business further exacerbating the vicious cycle).
- BerislavLopac 17y ago
  Agreed. It is my understanding that the best companies are led by their original founders (cf. Apple, Google, Oracle) or by people nurtured for years to become their leaders (Microsoft, IBM).
  - jimbokun 17y ago
    I would put Microsoft in the former group. It was one of the best companies when led by its original founder. Now, not so much.
    - xcombinator 17y ago
      It was one of the best companies when led by its original founders. Fixed it for you.:-) That Paul Allen didn't liked to show up on newspapers doesn't mean he did nothing.
vii 17y ago
We all like free stuff, but there is no demonstration that the company was actually harmed by saving the money on free drinks. Did having the early engineers move on have a significant negative impact? Apparently not, or it would have been mentioned in the article. . . After all, you could hire them back if you offered them enough, and you'd do that if they were essential. Maybe it was in fact better to replace them with people happier working in a medium sized company.
- isleyaardvark 17y ago
  Having workers move on always has a cost, generally called retention costs/turnover costs. The employer has to go through the hiring process again. The position may remain unfilled until that's done, meaning your team is short on personnel. You have to train the new person, even a skilled hire needs to learn the particulars of your business. (That's one reason why employers look at how long you were at previous jobs, to avoid that turnover.) Depending on the position, the company could lose 1x to 1.5x the employee's yearly salary, sometimes more. And if you're trying to "hire them back if you offered them enough", that rather negates the point of trying to save money by eliminating soda, doesn't it?
- potatolicious 17y ago
  > After all, you could hire them back if you offered them enough This is typical HR thinking, and is only valid for a certain demographic (i.e., the people on the mid-to-low end of the bell curve). In my experience the absolute top-level engineers cannot be retained with just money. Let me put it this way - you're an ace engineer with oodles of experience. You are in high demand, and if you were unemployed, you probably would have recruiters banging your door down by week's end. These are the "top talent" that all companies claim they want to hire - and they will make top dollar regardless of where they go. Having known some of these people, the motivator is not money, because money is not why they do this, and honestly they're swimming in it already. To hire these guys you need to do something more - a great working environment, a kickass team, a sane management structure, etc etc. Money can only motivate someone so far.
  - JoeAltmaier 17y ago
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
cmos 17y ago
If you look at the energy costs of a vending machine it's actually cheaper in some cases to have an efficient fridge with soda for free. (at least back in the day) The vending machine company often doesn't pay for power, so they have no incentive to cool the soda efficiently. A nice 'interim' way of making a change would be to have a $.25 'donation' for each soda which eventually goes to some animal shelter, which would then be a tax writeoff. CFO's will suck the lifeblook out of a company if nobody stops them. That is their job. Shame on the others for letting the CFO mess with their culture.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  The big cost here is likely to be labor. When you give away free sodas you have to pay someone to keep sodas in stock. When you sell sodas you can even sell a contract to a 3rd party to restock the machines. This is why free sodas are fairly rare, because soda machines are a money maker for the company and involve fewer employees on the balance sheet, whereas free sodas rack up all of the costs of an employee (salary, taxes, benefits, etc.) On the whole it's probably a silly tradeoff, since the benefits to employee retention of free sodas almost certainly far outweigh the comparatively minor costs, but if you just look at the balance sheet it can be awfully tempting to get rid of.
  - cmos 17y ago
    true - at my old company we insourced it. One couple choose to maintain a small store with soda's and candy and fruit from a warehouse store. It made enough to keep interest in it maintained, and kept the money stream in the company. Then people feel less bad about paying as they know it's not going to some vending machine company, and they can also request healthier snacks.
  - gaius 17y ago
    At my present company the free sodas (and beers, on Friday) are simply delivered in pallets and teams take a week at a time to be responsible for the fridges. Peer pressure is enough to make this work. There was the time Luke's team didn't restock the beer fridge and to this day he's known as Luke Warm...
SandB0x 17y ago
I've been in an office where the free fruit was removed. Towards the end of the afternoon I normally get quite hungry. With a bowl of fruit I would silence my stomach rumblings for an extra half hour and get some more work done. Without - screw it - time's up and I'd rather go home to cook.
- nwatson 17y ago
  A company I worked for in the south-bay area decided to order fruit from a "farm fresh office fruit delivery" service. I don't know how much the delivery company charged. It worked well for the first several months. The delivery company brought a wide assortment of fruit, many "standards" and also some more exotic varieties like papaya, kiwi, etc. Over the months though the apples took a larger and larger portion of the delivery. And the exotic varieties disappeared. People got sick of eating all those apples. We canceled the service. The company also made pretense of being "green" but used extreme and wasteful packaging.
  - flatline 17y ago
    > Over the months though the apples took a larger and larger portion of the delivery I have to ask, was this over the winter months when many fruits are out of season?
lucifer 17y ago
Based on what he says, end of the free sodas is a lagging indicator that is significant only for the reason that it serves as a "wake up call" for the "heads-down" talent. Unless the talent is entirely clueless (which makes you wonder about the "superstar" qualification), at some point they will realize that they are no longer a good fit for the company and will leave. So it seems the moral of the story is that hold off on sending overt signals to your employees until you have prepared for their (inevitable) exodus.
anonjon 17y ago
I bet I could save many times more than 10,000 a year by eliminating a CFO.
- BerislavLopac 17y ago
  A bad CFO, definitely. And a good CFO would never cut that kind of corners. A good CFO knows that a corporation's job is not to save money, but to earn it.
jchonphoenix 17y ago
Interestingly enough, the same theory applies to recruiting and internships. I was part of IBM's premier internship program (Extreme Blue) last summer, and of the 3 best developers in the lab, none of them wanted to work for IBM. One of them actually cited "no free coffee and soda" as his reasoning. Goes to show that this applies to recruiting as much as employee retention.
- derwiki 17y ago
  They took away our free popcorn at Silicon Valley Lab. It was demoralizing.
xel02 17y ago
I think the main issue at heart is the desire that every human being has in controlling their environment. I say this because I just read in a book (A Drunkards Walk) how seniors in a home who could arrange their rooms the way they liked and could choose a plant to take care of were measurably happier and lived longer. Restricting machine names, removing snacks, clocking in and out these all contribute to a negative environment. Which employee (all other things being equal) is more likely to burn out: a) Diligent and responsible employee is essentially free to do what they need to do to get their job done. b) Diligent and responsible employee who gets shuffled into a 'highschool' scenario: hall-passes, attendance reports, dress code. Obviously some places feel they require these restrictions. Maybe in a large corporation you'll end up hiring employees who you can't trust to show up on time, etc. But isn't that also HR's fault?
Scott_MacGregor 17y ago
For about the same price as the quarter eating vending machine, a 7-11 style soda dispenser could probably have been installed and the price per soda would probably have been around 2 cents each for a big gulp size. It is very cost effective, much better than bottles or cans. It might have been viewed as a step up in benefits vs. a takeaway. Pennywise, pound-foolish. http://www.sodadispenserdepot.com/dispensersused.html http://www.sodadispenserdepot.com/dispensersused.html
- flatline 17y ago
  Having worked on and off in restaurants over the years, you have to clean these things nightly - and thoroughly - or else they get disgusting very quickly. That's the biggest problem with most of this kind of thing, espresso machines too. We have a single-serve automatic coffee maker right now that's not supposed to require regular cleaning, it's a little better about it but it can still get really gross.
JoeAltmaier 17y ago
Significant: hundreds of posts on this topic. Obviously the social situation is vitally important. Corporate drones will never get it, so one solution is to never hire them. Look at W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc, they do (used to do?) it right.
rythie 17y ago
Next step in those companies is that the managers start having meetings in fancy hotels costing a lot more than that small saving.

327 points by icey 17y ago

gaius 17y ago

Absolutely. Another symptom is machine naming. When people who will never themselves log into them tell you to dump whatever whimsical themes you had and call your boxes according to an official convention, you gotta wonder what value they're adding to the organization.

ramanujan 17y ago
Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained. Your own personal laptop is a different matter. Moreover, if you want personality, just set up your ~/.ssh/config to retain the legacy name for yourself, e.g. "ssh middleearthname" to connect to server001.foo.com
- dagw 17y ago
  The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random. There is often structure and information embedded in the naming scheme, even when it might not be obvious to an outsider. Having someone come in and replace all of that with server001-server999 will often remove information.
  - blhack 17y ago
    The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random. Exactly. For instance, my firewall is called "charon". Personification is a good thing and should be encouraged. It's easier to visualize things that way. From an inside-out perspective (people such as accountants who see everything but, for the most part, do not understand it), naming servers like $function_$row_$rack_$slot or whatever else makes sense...it will simplify things. The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective. Think about it like this: you have things in your kitchen, right? Say you have a toaster, a refrigerator, a mixer, and a microwave. You would NEVER call them things like "appliance_counter1_left", "appliance_floor_right" etc. This would be confusing. It is for this reason that humans give things names; toaster, refrigerator, and mixer are all names, they're just very common ones.
    - jodrellblank 17y ago
      If you worked managing a supermarket you would call them City17_shop5_aisle4_refridgerator2. > The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective. That depends - I'd much rather a firewall rule that told me that Glasgow Database Server 2 can talk to London Mail Server 3 for SMTP traffic than one that told me MissPiggy can talk to Kermit for χάρτης traffic. Especially when it's not a system I deal with every day and I haven't cached the name/function mappings in my head. On the other hand, the UK postal system works well with a mixture of numeric sequences (house and flat numbers), cutesy names (road names, city names) and arbitrary government assigned gibberish (Post Codes).
- gaius 17y ago
  The names aren't random, tho'. The people using the machines every day know that (for example) all the database servers are named after planets, all the web servers are elements of the periodic table, all the development boxes are Muppets characters, etc. It costs nothing and makes your engineers happy. Plus it is intuitive, mistakes of the kind of being logged into the wrong box never happen. I personally have very nearly experienced a disaster because the official naming convention had only one character difference between production and UAT... Anyway, you've missed my point a bit. It doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things what the boxes are called. It DOES matter than your company is employing people to impose pointless, trivial changes and policies on people with real work to do.
  - Poiesis 17y ago
    I much rather prefer managing names rather than codes/numbers. One major reason is that often in a standardized system, the least significant bits are on the right, and at least in Windows often a longer name will be truncated in a display. I don't need many characters to tell one dwarf from another, but to tell names of the type XXYYYNNNNN0-12 from XXYYYNNNNN0-13 is a huge pain sometimes. The big win, though, for a more clinical naming is that shared context/training can be easier, and in a larger org the standardization of course makes things a lot easier to deal with. But of course, standardization can be done with the more whimsical names. And a lot of the time the naming scheme that is drawn up by committee takes just as long to learn as the more fun ones (mostly because they need to be abbreviated a bunch). I suppose the one thing you can say for formal naming systems that is fairly inarguable is that once you understand the rules, you can look at an unfamiliar machine name and know instantly what it does. For machines named after fictional characters that's only true if you read/watch the same books/shows as the people doing the naming.
  - misterbwong 17y ago
    Honestly, the muppets/elements/planets works really well...until there's some turnover. Then the new sysadmin thinks the three stooges should be the db servers and capital cities should be the web servers. Then you end up having conversations like: "Hey, can you move some data up to larry, moe, and saturn? We're building on hydrogen, oxygen, and sacramento." The confusion this causes for new hires and non-natives is real, albeit somewhat comical. edit: ServerXX is no better-the names should give a clue to what function they perform (i.e. IRV-FNP01 = located in irvine, file and print server, 01 [oldest server])
- bcl 17y ago
  It depends on the number of machines. When I have 3 or 4 they get names (currently using Firefly characters), but when I have say 20 or more they get numbers. Or they get both so that my scripts are easier to write. For me it also depends on function. If its just another app server cloned from the master, it gets a number -- it has no personality. But if it is a backup server, mail server, dev or test system it gets a name.
- xiaoma 17y ago
  "Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained." That's true. However, humans do better with names than numbers. Otherwise, DNS wouldn't exist. The real question is who do you want to optimize for?
  - msluyter 17y ago
    I think it's dependent on the situation. I enjoy the charm of machines named "frodo" and whatnot, but when I first arrived at my current company, the totally arbitrary naming conventions was highly confusing because we had three environments (dev/stage/prod) and several databases and other classes of server per environment. Now we have a standardized naming convention with names like "dev-foo01", "stage-bar02", "prod-baz01" etc.. (were foo/bar/baz denote the purpose of the machine) and it's much easier to deal with.
    - garnet7 17y ago
      dev servers: gnomes staging: dwarves prod: elves
      - whatusername 17y ago
        Sure. But with a DEV_SYD_DB03, UAT_MEL_APP07, PROD_BNE_DB01 kind of scheme, I've got much more information at a glance than you do.
    - BerislavLopac 17y ago
      @garnet7, there are no gnomes in LoTR. ;) Or, actually, there are, but they are actually Elves...
      - garnet7 17y ago
        Aw, son of a ... And I can't go back and fix it either! s/gnomes/hobbits/ Well, let's hope no hobbits read this website.
- raganwald 17y ago
  Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained. I bet you could save $10,000 a year by eliminating the arbitrary names and calling them ServerXXX. Sorry for the attempt at a witty reply. Let's start again. Agreed, there are efficiencies. The point of the article is that when you institute changes like this, you may create unintended consequences like a mass exodus of people who liked working for a company where the servers were named after Muppet characters and associate "Server042" with a company where professional managers demand cover sheets for their TPS reports. Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company?
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    > Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company? If you knew what the consequences were going to be then they wouldn't be unanticipated, but if you didn't know then you couldn't accurately answer the question. Aren't you just asking people to 'know the unknown unknowns' and never make poor decisions? Wouldn't it be a more realistic suggestion to ask them to ask "Was this good for the company and if not, should we revert to how it was before?"
    - gridspy 17y ago
      It is very rare for any individual to completely reverse their previous decision, especially when the results of that decision are subjective, delayed and hard to measure. By the time management realises that soda should have been free, the opinions of the top engineers have irreversibly changed.
    - mnemonicsloth 17y ago
      It's an Office Space reference. In the movie, the PHBs hold a meeting in which they solemnly instruct all their employees to ask "Is what I'm doing good for the company?" before they do anything. The audience rolls its eyes in sympathy, for the reasons you've pointed out here.
      - 17y ago
- jimbokun 17y ago
  How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "server001" vs. "server002" or "server003", etc.? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that?
  - jodrellblank 17y ago
    How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "Feynman" vs. "Fermi" or "Farnsworth"? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that? And what do you call the next server? By contrast, "hq-web-001" is an early webserver at head quarters, while "br1-sql-020" is a later database server at branch office 1, and the next server name is the next in the appropriate sequence.
    - aplusbi 17y ago
      "Feynmann", "Fermi" and "Farnsworth" are much better than "server001", "server002" and "server003" but are arguably a step behind "hq-web-001" and "br1-sql-020". I work for a company where most of the servers are just numbered and it's can be rather confusing.
- billybob 17y ago
  "It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained." I'm not a systems admin, but I presume this is because you can write a for loop that counts through your machines and does something to each, right? In that case, couldn't you just have nested arrays? machines = ['mailservers'=>['Earth'=>'some IP', 'Mars'=>'some IP'],'devservers'=>['Dopey'=>'some IP', 'Sneezy'=>'some IP']] ...etc. Now everyone can connect to a machine with a memorable name, AND you can loop through all the dbservers if you need to, AND anyone who doesn't understand the system can look in one place to grok it. What's the problem?
  - blueben 17y ago
    The problem is that you're not a sysadmin. I'm going to assume that you are a programmer since you are assuming this is simply a programming problem. I am a sysadmin, and I can tell you that I outgrew cute server names many years ago because they hurt more than they could ever help. Reading this thread, it is painfully obvious to me that most people here have not been meaningfully exposed to large server installations. The last time I had servers with cute names, there were 12 machines total. Since then, I've worked in environments with hundreds and thousands of hosts. Even past a couple dozen servers, cute names become a liability and a significant distraction. Divining purpose, location, and other meaning by looking at a cute name when you have 30 servers is difficult and unnecessary. Applying the 3am standard (can a sleep deprived sysadmin do this task with minimal error at 3am?) cute names actually become rather cruel. The answer is to build an inventory system that lets the sysadmin map cute names to functional information. Or simply build that functional information in to the naming scheme. So sorry guys. As a professional sysadmin and fellow engineer I appreciate that you are looking out for what you perceive to be our sysadmin needs, but cute names are one thing we don't want or need. Unless perhaps you can come up with a justification for renaming the functions and classes in your code with cute names...
- theBobMcCormick 17y ago
  How is managing boxes named server001 easier than giving the servers, oh, I don't know.... actual NAMES! Are you seriously gonna tell me you manage the boxes with scripts that iterate through the numeric portion of the server names?!? Because if that's the case, your problems are WAAAYYY bigger than just naming convention problems. Names like server001 are great and fine for a cluster of more or less identical, interchangable machines (Beowolf cluster, cluster of VMware hosts, etc.). But it sucks ass for most other circumstances. Seriously. Try having discussions about a project involving a dozen servers (out of hundreds in the company mind you), each with names like server3056, server3087, server3109. It sucks, because 5 minutes after talking about it you find yourself wondering: Hmmm... was I supposed to reboot 3087? or 3078? :-)
pavel_lishin 17y ago
Having only ever worked for one small company, it's really hard for me to imagine this actually happening. Hell, from most of the stories I've heard from people working for bigger places, people who don't log into the machines frequently don't even know that the machines have names.
- allenbrunson 17y ago
  you might be surprised, then! i used to work for a company where i wrote critical pieces of their software infrastructure. it's a series of interconnected apps which i named after marsupials. i have now left, and they are in the process of giving the apps boring names that more directly indicate what they do.
  - BerislavLopac 17y ago
    This sounds like a good candidate for a The Daily WTF story. ;)
  - pavel_lishin 17y ago
    Well, to be fair, that sounds fairly logical. If I get hired in your place, I don't want to have to figure out that I have to run Possum before I can run Koala, and if I'm going to be running Kangaroo I have to explicitly specify the target port or whatever.
DannoHung 17y ago
I understand the appeal, but I disagree. Even at my most whimsical, I'd rather have the name a of a machine really be tied to some actual information about the machine. You don't have to use muppet names to indicate that something is a development database server, for example.
- gaius 17y ago
  At one job, the convention imposed on us was <manufacturer><number>. So dell001, dell002, sun67, etc etc. You can see why I have issues with this ;-)
  - raganwald 17y ago
    That optimizes for ordering replacement parts :-)
    - wingo 17y ago
      Replacement engineers as well :)
    - mosburger 17y ago
      One company I worked for named every machine for its service tag for that very reason. gag They're no longer in business.
iamwil 17y ago
This reminds me being told the column names in a table of the admin panel that customers would never see would have to be changed. Furious but didn't contest it.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  Some care required. Four years ago we coined some names for internal use that we knew no one would ever see. Now they've leaked out into places where some customers can see them and the entire code-base really ought to be cleaned for consistency. Currently we have visible names and hidden names, and remembering the dichotomy is proving difficult. We're cleaning as we go, but we are all wishing we'd been a bit less whimsical.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
shpxnvz 17y ago
I've seen this happen once, and I can almost understand why it did. In this case there was a rather severe production problem that had potential long term revenue effects for the company. In the course of the after-action report some screen dumps were shown to the executives in which the "whimsical" server names appeared.They were (understandably) in a rather agitated and non-whimsical mood, and incorrectly (in my opinion) correlated the seriousness of the problem which the perceived lack of seriousness of the naming scheme. They could not see that the naming scheme was not whimsical - it was in fact quite methodical and conveyed more meaning to the engineers who lived with the machines everyday than the strict, sanitized names we eventually ended up with.
- potatolicious 17y ago
  ... and this is why I absolutely oppose letting non-engineering-background people run a company. You really have to have been in the trenches yourself to be qualified to manage those who are.
  - qjz 17y ago
    This was a failure on the part of the executives in doing their jobs. It doesn't take an engineer to recognize that they needn't be concerned with machine names (unless the names were so bad that public disclosure would result in a PR nightmare).
  - dasil003 17y ago
    Nice in theory, but it's just not possible for every single person to be an engineer, and yet every single company has IT.
    - rdtsc 17y ago
      The danger is when managers think of themselves as engineers.
      - Teulon 17y ago
        Or when engineers think they are the best qualified managers...only because they are engineers.
Scott_MacGregor 17y ago
I like having my servers named things like HQDC01 instead of something like MrSpock or Samantha, but I do know others who prescribe to the Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (Full Metal Jacket) style of server naming--"Tonight, you p*kes will sleep with your servers. You will give your server a girl's name. Because this is the only...etc...". The HQ is for Headquarters, DC for Domain Controller, 01. HQDS01 for Headquarters Development Server 01, etc... It's an MCSE best practices naming convention to locate and indentify servers.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  Yup. And then you are forced to move the physical location of the server to some remote data center. But because your infrastructure is tightly coupled to the specific machine name you can't change it, so now the name is misleading.
  - count 17y ago
    If your infrastructure cannot handle the move of a machine, you're doing it wrong.
    - InclinedPlane 17y ago
      Of course. But "doing it wrong" is state of the industry in IT/software dev.

ax0n 17y ago

I've worked at two startups while they slowly took away the free stuff. It sucks, but it's a phase that successful (okay, and not-so-successful, in their death throes) companies eventually need to go through. Also, thank you for removing the apostrophe, icey. gnashes teeth at stray apostrophes

algorias 17y ago
Why do they need to go through it? free soda will always be a tiny expense in relation to everything else. Sure 10K sounds like a lot of cash for soda, but a company with 50 employees is spending millions on salaries.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  10K sounds like a lot of cash for soda This, by the way, is the very definition of bikeshedding. Everyone knows about soda; everyone has bought it before. So cutting out soda is something that the entire executive team feels competent to discuss -- unlike, say, the efficiency of the QA department's staffing schedule, or climate control zones, or the use of electricity for lighting offices at 3am, or the difficult politics of downsizing particular business units. Soda is a simple theatrical stunt for making the CFO look good. It's a good show. Of course, as Steve points out, it sends a very clear message to the people who've been drinking those sodas: Your work is no longer considered an investment in the future. Now you're a cost center.
  - pwnstigator 17y ago
    Soda is a simple theatrical stunt for making the CFO look good. It's a good show. Nailed it.
  - noonespecial 17y ago
    Unfortunately, shows are just that. Pure signaling. If you cut $10k for snacks but the executive keeps his $30k company car lease, what have you just told the engineers who made the company possible in the first place? To them its about respect. Its worth more than money to most of these types, and when it dries up, they're gone. Most "I will work harder" types at startups just kind of know when the pigs are trading them to the glue factory for a case of whiskey.

bmj 17y ago

Maybe I'm just weird, but this wouldn't bother me. My employer does offer free sodas and snacks, but I don't take advantage of them (I don't drink soda, and tend not to snack on junk food). I do drink the free coffee, but in the past, I've survived this by bringing a thermos from home. I can understand why some people might not like the free stuff to be taken away, but I'd prefer to work for an employer that compensated fairly for my work, and one that does not expect that I work more than 40-45 hours on a regular basis.

dagw 17y ago
The point, as mentioned in the article, is not so much the (lack of) free soda, but what it is a leading indicator of. Once a company starts pinching pennies and ignoring the effect it has on moral then there is a good chance that worse is to come.
- gaius 17y ago
  See this for why it doesn't make sense: http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/11/why-companies-fire-people-not-fancy-snacks http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/11/why-companies-fire-pe...
algorias 17y ago
It's not about your compensation at all. The impact of free snacks is so tiny for the employers cost structure that the decision to offer them or not is completely unrelated to their ability (or willingness) to pay a fair salary. Would you really prefer an extra $200 or so per year over free soda? I think you wouldn't even notice the difference in your bank balance.
- qjz 17y ago
  The company has to succeed, my stock has to go up in value, and as the company grows in size it can get much better deals on things like health insurance than I can alone. $200/yr spent on soda doesn't benefit me in any way at all. I'll drink tapwater at work if I'm thirsty. Is startup culture really so averse to frugality and so blind to its benefits?

scj 17y ago

I'm kind of confused on the timeline: "Last week as a favor to a friend..." "The best engineers quietly put the word out that they were available, and in less than month..." While both statements can be true together, it would seem to me that "in less than a week..." would be more appropriate, and devastating. I realize I'm just fussing over unimportant details though.

gvb 17y ago
The second statement is referring to the four times Steve saw this happen in the past, in other companies. If his prediction is correct, the company whose board he sat in on last week will start seeing an exodus soon.
deleted 17y ago
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barrkel 17y ago
You left out the bit in the middle: "I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences."
- scj 17y ago
  I would agree completely with you, if the next sentence was "In a similar situation at a different company, no one on the board..." But without such a line, I read that as commentary based on previous experiences, followed by a continuation of the main story. (I assumed that "the board" in the next sentence referred to the board in the first part, which lead to the continuation. This is re-enforced by using "This company" and "the company" which would imply that the author was referring to the only company introduced)

briancooley 17y ago

If the accoutants looked at free sodas and snacks as leveraged salary/retention bonuses, they wouldn't suggest eliminating them.

eli 17y ago
My employment contract lists free sodas as one of the benefits, right next to health and dental. Probably one of the main reasons we still have them.
- numair 17y ago
  That's pretty amusing. You get health and dental benefits, along with one of the leading causes of health and dental problems... I know soda is considered holy water among many HNers, but for those of us who are highly health-conscious, that sounds a bit like the Detroit assembly lines with the cigarette vending machines.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    I was never a huge soda drinker, but I did have it regularly with lunch, or sometimes energy drinks at night, etc. Once I stopped drinking it regularly, I discovered how absolutely shitty it made me feel. If I go to the theater and eat a bag of popcorn with a soda, for instance. I'm not really a health nut, but when you look at the way soda and highly processed carbs are metabolized it's pretty scary. Given the rates of obesity and diabetes in the US, I rank soda and snack foods right up there with cigarettes in terms of long-term healthcare costs.
  - skorgu 17y ago
    There's a vast overlap. We have free soda, I know how horrible soda is for my body, my teeth, etc and so I quit drinking it. The problem is I quit long enough to prove to myself that I could (about three months) and since then I've quit once a week or so.
    - aplusbi 17y ago

noonespecial 17y ago

Outstanding. Using "jumped the shark" just never felt right for this situation. "The elves have left middle earth". A spot on perfect description of this sad and awkward phase all startups encounter as they grow to successful bigcorps. I love it.

jcl 17y ago
A minor flaw in the metaphor: Middle Earth doesn't have to compete with whatever the elves create in Valinor. Talented employees leaving is both a loss for the company and a gain for competitors.
- pyre 17y ago
  That assumes that they move to competitors.
  - gridspy 17y ago
    There is a good chance that other employees will follow them to their new, more attractive company. They might not compete for clients but instead for other employees. There is also a potential that they have a great idea related to your company that they pursue once they leave.
  - potatolicious 17y ago
    If I knew my chief competitor just made a bunch of major bungles, and that their morale is at an all-time low... I'd get my recruiters in there fast.
    - pyre 17y ago
      How would you know about the morale within the company? HR dept. spies?
      - btilly 17y ago
        Every company has you sign agreements about not recruiting from your old co-workers. But nothing in those agreements says that you can't pass along resumes that people push on you. When morale is bad, people who are left tend to offer you resumes when you quit. In that situation I've been glad to forward resumes of people who are good, and have avoided forwarding resumes of people who aren't. (After all you get judged by the quality of people that you recommend.) To the extent that I'm someone people want to work with again, this results in cherry picking the best people. The effect is even more direct when employees go through recruiters. Recruiters ask about the work environment where you are, and have no problem trying to track people down if they get the sense that good people may be available.

snorkel 17y ago

I never expected employers to provide snacks and beverages but it is demoralizing when executives take away such perks but continue to fly first-class for the same cost as buying a month of snacks for everyone.

iuytgfghjmk 17y ago
So for you there is a different breaking point. Like when you have to clock in and out at lunch time, but work unpaid overtime and weekends. Or when you lose admin rights on your own PC Or you have to start wearing a tie. For me it was when we had to start signing in and out with a time. Supposedly this was for fire safety, but never seemed to apply to VPs. We worked on banking systems and often had to work all nighters while the bank was offline. The time tracking system couldn't cope with the concept of being on shift for >24hours - the HR people treated us like it was our fault. Their solution was that we all went out at 23:59 and signed back in at 00:01 and that would solve the problem WE had created.
- gridspy 17y ago
  For me it was : Generally working unpaid overtime for a long time and then during a quiet patch coming in early and leaving early (5-10 minutes early). I got personally told off by the team lead. Having a virus checker on my machine that I could not remove on pain of huge financial penalties. It scanned every input, intermediate and output of my compiler and turned the computer into a sloth. Didn't help that the final output was 230mb in size (and had a translation step into another 230mb executable). I tried in vain to get exceptions added but to no avail. These little things slowly chip away at you and you later realise that you left for the wrong reasons - but it is too late.
  - iron_ball 17y ago
    Those sound like great reasons to me, as long as you have another job waiting. What was the rest of the story?
    - 17y ago

sethg 17y ago

A certain VP I know once remarked that at one of his previous startup employers, he advised the upper management against providing employees with free coffee in the first place, because savvy employees know that losing the free coffee is a leading indicator for layoffs. He said this at the engineering staff meeting following our day of carnage at which a third of the company was laid off. We also lost the free soda.

blackguardx 17y ago
At the last company that I worked for, they didn't remove the free coffee but they took away the free napkins, sugar, creamer, coffee cups, etc. I was laid off two months later. The coffee also got better right before the layoffs. In an effort to save money, they looked for a cheaper coffee source than the crappy business supply company they had been using. They managed to stumble upon a deal at a local coffee roaster to get cheaper coffee. It was pretty good when made correctly. One of the worst things than can happen at a company is for someone who doesn't like "strong coffee" to be the first one into the office in the morning. Not putting enough coffee grounds in the filter basket makes coffee taste bitter and horrible. If you want weak coffee, add water to a strong cup. Someone eventually had to put up signs giving this same advice.

pwnstigator 17y ago

The CFO failed to anticipate that humans are irrational, and that people will read all sorts of things into the loss of free sodas. It's not just an economic transaction. I thought the sales point of "business" types was that they were good at managing the irrationality of humans.

dkarl 17y ago
Do you think the CFO who proposed this dismal change regrets it? She raised her standing with her peer group by proposing a popular cost-cutting measure, and they probably blame the engineers for the outcome, not her. They may even be glad to be rid of the engineers who wouldn't adjust well to big-company culture. Big-company culture is a culture of mediocrity and interchangeability, and the guys on top like it that way. They want all the initiative and excellence to be on their level of the company, so everything that happens in the company is due to their control. Google is exceptional in even trying to avoid that fate.
- pwnstigator 17y ago
  I doubt it. Few people are going to mention the sodas during exit interviews. In fact, I think very few people are even aware that the sodas might be a trigger for their decision, since it's not about the sodas, but the show of loyalty.
RyanMcGreal 17y ago
> humans are irrational It's not irrational to recognize that the kind of thinking that would eliminate free soda on the basis of narrow cost-benefit analysis is also the kind of thinking that would transform their beloved startup into a stultifying corporate bureaucracy.
mattmcknight 17y ago
Is it really irrationality? If you are taking away a benefit, that is like a salary cut on something you were getting tax free. The reality is that it is revealing of a CFO attitude, let's take away as much as we can from the employees to help the bottom line. CFO's should first focus on growing revenue, not cutting benefits.

umjames 17y ago

I work for a non-profit where, to cut costs, they initially took out all the water coolers. When people complained, they gave us one water cooler per building. I'd really like to be able to say that this would make people start leaving, but no one here is really going to do that. I'll bet senior management knew (and was relying on) that. Lesson learned: In startups, people are more likely to leave on principles. In big companies (even non-profits), almost no one leaves unless they're fired.

noonespecial 17y ago
I work with doctors, in and around hospitals and clinics. This problem has reached epidemic proportions, especially in the US. Bean counters know that no matter how many perks are removed or how intolerable working conditions get, doctors simply won't walk away from patients. I'm sorry to say that this is being taken advantage of in the worst of ways. Be careful working at a job you "believe in", it puts you at a fearful disadvantage.
- umjames 17y ago
  You're right. I don't know about doctors, but I work in an IT department. You can tell that pretty much no one here "believes in" the job. It's just a paycheck. I think people don't leave for a variety of reasons, but passion for the work or the good that the work is supposed to provide is definitely not one of them.
- hugh_ 17y ago
  Another good example: academia. As of a few weeks ago, the janitor only comes once a month, and we have to take out our own trash.
  - hga 17y ago
    Heh: when MIT first started doing this in the late '80s, they started cleaning most restrooms only every other day. They called this "Frequent Cleaning"....
  - jrwoodruff 17y ago

alexgartrell 17y ago

On the very first day of my internship at a very big corporation, they removed the free sodas. Even though this was only part of a large collection of cost-cutting measures, it sent the most clear "F*&# you". (There was a number of other fun things that they did, such as allowing certain groups to use their Engineering interns as QA people without ever alerting them that this would be the case) Needless to say, Carnegie Mellon students are heavily discouraged from working there by those of us who screwed up, and I definitely think that the huge dump they took on their recruiting pipeline has affected them negatively in the quality of people they'll be able to hire.

endtime 17y ago
Do you mind saying which company this was?
- alexgartrell 17y ago
  Cisco

foulmouthboy 17y ago

I think part of what would irritate me here is not just that they've taken away free soda, but they're now actively charging me for it. I wonder if it would've come across better if there just wasn't any soda offered in the office anymore. Maybe it's totally illogical, but I'd be more irritated with the idea that the company not only took away this perk, but is now trying to make a profit off of it.

Zot95 17y ago
No, that (removing soda as an option) wouldn't go over well at all. Forget the idea of being offended, the practical matter is that soda is no longer an option... or at least a convenient option. You may as well take away the coffee as see how that goes over.

brown9-2 17y ago

I just want to say I really love this analogy.

msluyter 17y ago

I went through this transition once. Initially, sodas were to be .50$, but that caused an uproar and price was quickly reduced to .25$, where it remains today. It's one thing for sodas to not be free; it's another for them to be a profit center. Aw well, at least coffee is still free.

elblanco 17y ago

>Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had. I'd say this was the main reason. The original employees had already proven they could manage and grow the organization from 0->even, and hadn't slowed down expecting to move the company from even->profit. Now they have "supervisors" who don't know anything about the business or technology, shoved in on top of them, who's only role is to act as liaison between them and the corporate officers. Bristling at the lack of corporate loyalty shown to the people that made the company happen, those people leave. The calculus is really very simple. I've seen this pattern happen a number of times, and the usual result is that these new managers show up, make poor decisions (because they don't understand the business) cycle out (taking their stock with them), repeat 4-5 times until a manager shows up who is so inoffensive that the remaining engineers simply end up running the show in the end anyways and the manager just shows up to weekly meetings so she/he can liaise with corporate. In the meantime, the company stock has diluted as it fled out the door to the past managers, the company lost most of its senior engineering staff, forcing them to promote lower level, less capable staff to senior positions or to hire externally (again people who don't understand the business further exacerbating the vicious cycle).

BerislavLopac 17y ago
Agreed. It is my understanding that the best companies are led by their original founders (cf. Apple, Google, Oracle) or by people nurtured for years to become their leaders (Microsoft, IBM).
- jimbokun 17y ago
  I would put Microsoft in the former group. It was one of the best companies when led by its original founder. Now, not so much.
  - xcombinator 17y ago
    It was one of the best companies when led by its original founders. Fixed it for you.:-) That Paul Allen didn't liked to show up on newspapers doesn't mean he did nothing.

vii 17y ago

We all like free stuff, but there is no demonstration that the company was actually harmed by saving the money on free drinks. Did having the early engineers move on have a significant negative impact? Apparently not, or it would have been mentioned in the article. . . After all, you could hire them back if you offered them enough, and you'd do that if they were essential. Maybe it was in fact better to replace them with people happier working in a medium sized company.

isleyaardvark 17y ago
Having workers move on always has a cost, generally called retention costs/turnover costs. The employer has to go through the hiring process again. The position may remain unfilled until that's done, meaning your team is short on personnel. You have to train the new person, even a skilled hire needs to learn the particulars of your business. (That's one reason why employers look at how long you were at previous jobs, to avoid that turnover.) Depending on the position, the company could lose 1x to 1.5x the employee's yearly salary, sometimes more. And if you're trying to "hire them back if you offered them enough", that rather negates the point of trying to save money by eliminating soda, doesn't it?
potatolicious 17y ago
> After all, you could hire them back if you offered them enough This is typical HR thinking, and is only valid for a certain demographic (i.e., the people on the mid-to-low end of the bell curve). In my experience the absolute top-level engineers cannot be retained with just money. Let me put it this way - you're an ace engineer with oodles of experience. You are in high demand, and if you were unemployed, you probably would have recruiters banging your door down by week's end. These are the "top talent" that all companies claim they want to hire - and they will make top dollar regardless of where they go. Having known some of these people, the motivator is not money, because money is not why they do this, and honestly they're swimming in it already. To hire these guys you need to do something more - a great working environment, a kickass team, a sane management structure, etc etc. Money can only motivate someone so far.
- JoeAltmaier 17y ago

deleted 17y ago

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cmos 17y ago

If you look at the energy costs of a vending machine it's actually cheaper in some cases to have an efficient fridge with soda for free. (at least back in the day) The vending machine company often doesn't pay for power, so they have no incentive to cool the soda efficiently. A nice 'interim' way of making a change would be to have a $.25 'donation' for each soda which eventually goes to some animal shelter, which would then be a tax writeoff. CFO's will suck the lifeblook out of a company if nobody stops them. That is their job. Shame on the others for letting the CFO mess with their culture.

InclinedPlane 17y ago
The big cost here is likely to be labor. When you give away free sodas you have to pay someone to keep sodas in stock. When you sell sodas you can even sell a contract to a 3rd party to restock the machines. This is why free sodas are fairly rare, because soda machines are a money maker for the company and involve fewer employees on the balance sheet, whereas free sodas rack up all of the costs of an employee (salary, taxes, benefits, etc.) On the whole it's probably a silly tradeoff, since the benefits to employee retention of free sodas almost certainly far outweigh the comparatively minor costs, but if you just look at the balance sheet it can be awfully tempting to get rid of.
- cmos 17y ago
  true - at my old company we insourced it. One couple choose to maintain a small store with soda's and candy and fruit from a warehouse store. It made enough to keep interest in it maintained, and kept the money stream in the company. Then people feel less bad about paying as they know it's not going to some vending machine company, and they can also request healthier snacks.
- gaius 17y ago
  At my present company the free sodas (and beers, on Friday) are simply delivered in pallets and teams take a week at a time to be responsible for the fridges. Peer pressure is enough to make this work. There was the time Luke's team didn't restock the beer fridge and to this day he's known as Luke Warm...

SandB0x 17y ago

I've been in an office where the free fruit was removed. Towards the end of the afternoon I normally get quite hungry. With a bowl of fruit I would silence my stomach rumblings for an extra half hour and get some more work done. Without - screw it - time's up and I'd rather go home to cook.

nwatson 17y ago
A company I worked for in the south-bay area decided to order fruit from a "farm fresh office fruit delivery" service. I don't know how much the delivery company charged. It worked well for the first several months. The delivery company brought a wide assortment of fruit, many "standards" and also some more exotic varieties like papaya, kiwi, etc. Over the months though the apples took a larger and larger portion of the delivery. And the exotic varieties disappeared. People got sick of eating all those apples. We canceled the service. The company also made pretense of being "green" but used extreme and wasteful packaging.
- flatline 17y ago
  > Over the months though the apples took a larger and larger portion of the delivery I have to ask, was this over the winter months when many fruits are out of season?

lucifer 17y ago

Based on what he says, end of the free sodas is a lagging indicator that is significant only for the reason that it serves as a "wake up call" for the "heads-down" talent. Unless the talent is entirely clueless (which makes you wonder about the "superstar" qualification), at some point they will realize that they are no longer a good fit for the company and will leave. So it seems the moral of the story is that hold off on sending overt signals to your employees until you have prepared for their (inevitable) exodus.

anonjon 17y ago

I bet I could save many times more than 10,000 a year by eliminating a CFO.

BerislavLopac 17y ago
A bad CFO, definitely. And a good CFO would never cut that kind of corners. A good CFO knows that a corporation's job is not to save money, but to earn it.

jchonphoenix 17y ago

Interestingly enough, the same theory applies to recruiting and internships. I was part of IBM's premier internship program (Extreme Blue) last summer, and of the 3 best developers in the lab, none of them wanted to work for IBM. One of them actually cited "no free coffee and soda" as his reasoning. Goes to show that this applies to recruiting as much as employee retention.

derwiki 17y ago
They took away our free popcorn at Silicon Valley Lab. It was demoralizing.

xel02 17y ago

I think the main issue at heart is the desire that every human being has in controlling their environment. I say this because I just read in a book (A Drunkards Walk) how seniors in a home who could arrange their rooms the way they liked and could choose a plant to take care of were measurably happier and lived longer. Restricting machine names, removing snacks, clocking in and out these all contribute to a negative environment. Which employee (all other things being equal) is more likely to burn out: a) Diligent and responsible employee is essentially free to do what they need to do to get their job done. b) Diligent and responsible employee who gets shuffled into a 'highschool' scenario: hall-passes, attendance reports, dress code. Obviously some places feel they require these restrictions. Maybe in a large corporation you'll end up hiring employees who you can't trust to show up on time, etc. But isn't that also HR's fault?

Scott_MacGregor 17y ago

For about the same price as the quarter eating vending machine, a 7-11 style soda dispenser could probably have been installed and the price per soda would probably have been around 2 cents each for a big gulp size. It is very cost effective, much better than bottles or cans. It might have been viewed as a step up in benefits vs. a takeaway. Pennywise, pound-foolish. http://www.sodadispenserdepot.com/dispensersused.html http://www.sodadispenserdepot.com/dispensersused.html

flatline 17y ago
Having worked on and off in restaurants over the years, you have to clean these things nightly - and thoroughly - or else they get disgusting very quickly. That's the biggest problem with most of this kind of thing, espresso machines too. We have a single-serve automatic coffee maker right now that's not supposed to require regular cleaning, it's a little better about it but it can still get really gross.

JoeAltmaier 17y ago

Significant: hundreds of posts on this topic. Obviously the social situation is vitally important. Corporate drones will never get it, so one solution is to never hire them. Look at W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc, they do (used to do?) it right.

rythie 17y ago

Next step in those companies is that the managers start having meetings in fancy hotels costing a lot more than that small saving.