13 ms·

Getting rid of free office snacks doesn't come cheap

191 points by surement 11y ago

btilly 11y ago
A more humorous take on the same topic is http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/junk-food-first-published-in-2005.html http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/junk-food-fi....
imperialdrive 11y ago
Every startup company I've visited has in-house snacks and drinks. Works wonders for them keeping people in the office more hours of the day. Sprint is a beast. I doubt many people work a single minute over their schedule. Now, you don't see the higher-ups partake often, they know better. Much better for the soul to walk around the block, get some sun and air, and grab a coffee or snack. I get to know my neighbors as well. Builds community outside the office...
jwcacces 11y ago
Getting rid of snacks if the earliest and easiest to recognize sign of time find a better job
mynegation 11y ago
OK, I'll play the devil's advocate here. I am against free snacks in the office. First of all, it tends to be utter garbage: muffins, chips, cheese sticks, soda, sugary drinks, cookies etc. Has anyone tried to calculate lost productivity from health issues arising from eating that highly processed junk full of salt, sugar, and trans fats? Second, snacks in the office might make more sense in the suburban offices in the places with extreme climate swings (think Schaumburg or Kanata) where getting out of office for a snack is an ordeal. In large downtown cores like Toronto or New York I would say a stroll for a snack is more refreshing for productivity than mindlessly eating chips in front of the computer after a short run to the cafeteria. Third, there is this "useless perk" consideration. I'd rather get the share of money spent on the junk food and do whatever I want with them.
- bpodgursky 11y ago
  > I'd rather get the share of money spent on the junk food and do whatever I want with them. That would be true if not for taxes. A meal at the office is effectively 40-50% cheaper than the corresponding paycheck increase.
  - mynegation 11y ago
    That is a fair point. I am a contractor though and from taxation point of view my remuneration and cookies are the same for the company - they just pay me whatever and I take care of my taxes. In Canada, they may even get some R&D credit on my pay, which you do not get for cookies. I am all for power of wholesale bargains for good things, like cheaper gym membership with the corporate account.
  - such_a_casual 11y ago
    This is a really good point. I would have never thought of that.
  - kspaans 11y ago
    Aren't perks for employees a taxable benefit? (Maybe the employer pays the taxes rather than the employee...)
    - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
      I think the IRS for some reason hasn't clamped down on this benefit in kind. HMRC wanted to charge the employees tax when one big UK employer wanted to roll out free tea and coffee. Apparently the CFO got pissed off over this found a loop hole and we all got 120 free shares that year as a way of going F You to HMRC
      - kspaans 11y ago
        Yeah for snacks and company-provided meals I can see it being grey enough to be "meh". But I remember back when I worked at RIM in Waterloo, I heard that a reason they couldn't sell parking passes to their underused parking lots near the UW campus was that it would make the 'free' passes employees got a taxable benefit (and all of the headaches that implied). I guess if the perks can be taken from the office (phone bills paid?) that's an easy argument for taxability.
tbrake 11y ago
I've always liked the explanation given by __--__ [0] in a HN thread long ago on a Steve Blank post "The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free"[1] about the same subject : > "I'm not management, but I've had it described to me like this: cutting soda, while it may be insignificant and certainly isn't going to change a damned thing money-wise for the company, makes the management feel better about the situation. It makes them feel like they're doing something and something is better than nothing. It's also a CYA tactic. If the CEO wants to hold somebody personally accountable, the CFO can say "look, we did everything, we even cut back the soda!" [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5757467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5757467 [1] http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...
- crimsoneer 11y ago
  I mean...they're saving $600,000. That's not nothing.
  - pif 11y ago
    Indeed, it's not nothing compared to the aimed cut of $2,500,000,000: they've already got at nearly 1/4,000 of their target!
  - lifeformed 11y ago
    Out of $2.5B? That's $0.0006B. I mean, it basically is nothing... For 36,000 employees, that's less than $17 per person. Meanwhile, the CEO gets paid $21,800,000 per year.
    - noonespecial 11y ago
      The real question is that if the CEO somehow knew for certain that cutting the soda would allow him to earn that 21,800,000 but keeping the soda would boost productivity earning him 22,500,000 instead, would he cut it anyway because that's just the way things should be done?
patmcc 11y ago
Cutting snacks is a great signal to employees that they aren't worth the $2/day of Dr. Pepper they consume. Instead of cutting snacks just cut the job of whoever proposes that as a cost cutting measure. Probably save more money and nip a lot of other problems in the bud.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- rgbrenner 11y ago
  Sprint saved less than $0.05/day per employee by cutting snacks.
  - Johnny555 11y ago
    I think you're counting all sprint employees, even field workers and store employees, but the free snacks were only available in the corporate office. Also, I think you're assume 365 days/year, but the snacks were likely only available for ~ 253 workdays/year. According to Wikipedia, the corporate office has around 7,000 full time employees (not including 4,000 contract workers), so the company could have saved as much as much as 35 cents per employee per day.
    - jkyle 11y ago
      > so the company could have saved as much as much as 35 cents per employee per day. Sounds like the original poster is under estimating, but I don't find the higher number (35c/day) enough to update the view that it is a trivial savings that has a significant impact on morale.
      - Johnny555 11y ago
        Well yeah, clearly it's not a very significant amount per employee, but 5 cents/day seemed way too low for office snacks, so I wanted to do the math. Even 35 cents seems low, I expected it to be around a dollar or two, but there are probably a lot of people that don't eat a snack every day.
blt 11y ago
Taking away snacks might cause grumbling... Take away coffee and you might as well put the company up for sale.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  My theory is that the person most responsible for the company's success is whoever makes the coffee, because without the coffee, everything stops.
- spinlock 11y ago
  no coffee no workee
  - Avernar 11y ago
    "A programmer is an organism that converts caffeine into code."
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  As Dave Barry would say: "I am not making this up!". I once visited this company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Technology and they had a room with vending machines where you had to buy your own coffee. Not somewhere I'd ever consider working.
  - kawera 11y ago
    Yes! I did some work for then in the 80s and remember having to pay for really very bad coffee!
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    > As Dave Barry would say: "I am not making this up!". I have only had personal contact with one company outside of SV that offered free coffee (my current company doesn't count, because the machine is provided by the management company we rent our offices from). To me, free coffee is the exception, not the rule.
rdl 11y ago
Unless I'm at Google (or Facebook, or a few other places of that quality), I seem to end up mainly bringing my own snacks. Companies usually provide crappy shelf stable junk food. I'd love an office which had great drinks even if it had no food.
- santaclaus 11y ago
  > Companies usually provide crappy shelf stable junk food. I worked at a company that provided freshly sourced produce in lieu of chips/candy/etc, which was pretty badass. Hungry? Go cook up an omelette and make an espresso in the kitchen.
- spinlock 11y ago
  Right. I hate the snacks in our office because it's all chips and junk (no free drinks here :( ) But, I bet Sprint could really cut down on snack costs by providing celery sticks and water instead of chips and soda (no one would eat anything).
  - rdl 11y ago
    My definition of "healthy" is different -- I'd want low-carb. But really, just listening to employees and customizing from there.
    - TorKlingberg 11y ago
      I don't think there are a lot of carbs in celery and water.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  OTOH I'd die if all the snacks provided by the company were fruits and salads. Please give something salty or some pizza every now and then for those of us who prefer processed food :).
imgabe 11y ago
Watch Next: Four Ways to Nap at Your Desk I found this a highly amusing follow up to this article.
swang 11y ago
> http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article1123165.html http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article11... Marcelo Claure, current CEO was paid $1 million, with a $500k signing bonus, on top of $24 million in stock Previous CEO Dan Hesse was paid $1.2 million as part of $49 million worth of compensation. > Axing the free food will shave $600,000 from the budget ... Let them eat cake! (okay obviously not that extreme, but you know: bread is to office snacks as cake is to... millions in bonuses).
- moron4hire 11y ago
  I'll run your company into the ground for you for half what the other guy is charging. Hiring me as CEO will save you just as much as cutting the food budget. You can't afford to not hire me.
  - Evgeny 11y ago
    Hire him, username checks out. :)
austenallred 11y ago
It's funny: For a lot of the employees we've hired offering to buy a $500 monitor or a $600 chair moved the needle on how excited they were more than a $5,000 or $10,000 change in salary would. I think there are a few things that play into that: If you made an extra $10,000 you'd want to do something responsible with it, but you wouldn't really notice an instantaneous change in your day-to-day life. But I think more importantly than that it signals that you're supposed to have a good experience and be taken care of. Saying, "Look, if you want/need a monitor or computer to work consider it done" says something about the company. Your success means something to them. What can office snacks possibly cost a company? Say it's a 10-person company, snacks would cost maybe $1,000/month on the high end? And at that point you're probably burning >$120,000/month in salaries. It's barely even a drop in the bucket, assuming we're not talking about infinite catered meals.
- fishtoaster 11y ago
  My take on it is that my life is divided into two realms: work and home. I spend maybe 40-45% of my waking hours at work, and the rest at home on nights and weekends. I can use extra salary to improve my home life (renting a bigger apartment, going to nicer restaurants, traveling to exotic places, etc), but there's not much I can do with it to improve my work life. If my boss suddenly gave me a 10-million-dolllar bonus tomorrow, my home life would change a lot, but my work life would be nearly the same. On the other hand, a $5 improvement to my work environment affect the nearly half of my life I can't otherwise improve on my own. This is why perks like free food, nice monitors, a cool office, etc have a value to employees that is decoupled from the financial impact of them to the company.
  - rpearl 11y ago
    If you got $10M you'd keep working?
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      I would. I like what I do. (Also, once you reach the level where that's a possibility, it doesn't tend to be a one-time thing either.)
drblast 11y ago
One of the best comments I've ever read on Hacker News was about this topic. I wish I'd saved the link. The point was that this engineer took the removal of any perk as a sign to leave, and soda/snacks was a huge one. Why? During the early stages of the company, the "free" soda and food was something everyone chipped in for to save money. And why shouldn't they all save money by buying things like this in bulk? The "free" things were more valuable to each employee than the total bulk cost of those things. The "taking away" of this "perk" represented a shift from a company that one was a valued member of to one that had a management vs. employees mentality. The idea became that the free soda/snacks was something that management gifted to employees to keep them happy. And that shift in culture was the signal to leave.
- fossuser 11y ago
  I think I remember that too, though not sure if it was a comment or a submission. Is this what you're remembering? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750
  - drblast 11y ago
    Here it is, it's a comment on the Elves post that I was thinking of: http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/#comment-2163 http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...
- joshu 11y ago
  The Elves leave Middle Earth: http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...
- harryjo 11y ago
  The bulk cost-effectiveness argument makes sense, but how does the theory survive in the presence of modern hot-company behaviors that spend money on absurdly gourmet snacks and niche perks, that seem to be more about appearing cooler than the next company, instead of cost-effectively deploying comforts that make employees happier and more committed to their work?
thinkingkong 11y ago
What a weird decision. 600,000 for sprint is such a drop in the bucket, but at scale these line items like "snacks" look like big numbers. As a side note: lots of people are commenting on the quality of snacks as being the reason to not bother with them. Obviously if you're just supplying people with Dr Pepper and Mars bars you won't get much of a benefit. The snacks you bring into the office should satisfy a few things 1) You dont go hungry 2) You eat something healthy 3) You continue to harness the "serendipity of the office"
analog31 11y ago
I wonder if the snacks become a necessary medication for boredom, and taking them away places the level of boredom in sharp relief.
ceratopisan 11y ago
The same goes for better keyboards or chairs for employees. I'll have a coworker say "this keyboard is uncomfortable" or "I'm squinting a lot at this monitor", and when I offer to order something different, they reflexively say "Oh, don't get anything too fancy!" If the company's going to ask someone to work years of their life away, the least a company can do is make sure the damage to vision, posture and wrists is minimized. Note minimized - it gets a little more clear when you realize that nobody really comes out of a career with better health - even if it's just age. (someone will probably pop up and say "But I'm more healthy working now that I've lost weight at 50 years of age than I was at 30!" Fine. But you'll never get to be 30 again, fat or thin.)
- mrbill 11y ago
  I showed up at my first day at the new gig with my own keyboard (tenkeyless Cherry MX brown keyswitches) and mouse. Multiple people said "Hey, you don't have to bring your own stuff, just tell us what you want and we'll order it." Having spent a decade at a much larger company (Halliburton) I feel absolutely spoiled at this place. The system they gave me on Monday? Brand new 2015 Macbook Pro Retina 15" with 512G SSD and 16G RAM (and external USB3 hub and USB3 SATA HD for Time Machine backups). Two 23" monitors were already on my desk waiting with DVI-to-Mini-Displayport adapters. Today I sent a request for a desk lamp, and someone walked in 30 minutes later with two and asked which one I preferred. This afternoon I requested a license key for VMWare Fusion 8, and had it in email about an hour later. This stuff would have taken weeks, or never been approved, at my previous gig - where half the stuff on my desk was brought in from home because purchase requests would have been rejected with "You have a keyboard already, why do you need an expensive one?"
  - praseodym 11y ago
    This reminds me of how the guys at Panic Inc ordered new Apple stuff for their employees through a simple Slack post: https://twitter.com/panic/status/653998672707915778 https://twitter.com/panic/status/653998672707915778
  - jagtesh 11y ago
joshstrange 11y ago
Personally snacks aren't huge for me. They are normally junk food or something "healthy" like baked chips which I also don't eat. Now fruit is something I would be interested in but the short shelf life of things like that normally makes it unattractive to businesses. Also drinks don't interest me much as I drink water all day. All of that said I've worked at places that had snacks and worked with coworkers who took advantage of those snacks all the time and they seemed to really enjoy that perk. So I don't hate when a place has snacks/drinks it's just not a value-add for me 99% of the time. Now free lunch every once in awhile? That's a very attractive perk. I once worked for a company that took all the employees (max of ~15) out to lunch once a week which was a lot of fun. We rotated between everyone to choose where to go so everyone got a choice and just about anywhere you would go there would be at least something you liked. Now I get that snacks/drinks probably cost way less but we wouldn't have had to go out to eat. I've got friends at jobs that regularly cater in food which is pretty awesome as well. Right now the company I work at has a cafeteria (with subsidised prices, lunch is max of $5 more or less) so cost of food and need to leave campus really isn't an issue and every once in awhile we have a free lunch event like for Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Christmas, etc... This ticks so many more boxes for me than free snacks/drinks ever would.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Where I work now, I had requested fresh fruit be added to the snack bins... unfortunately it goes so quickly that there's rarely any there when I get around to a snack in the later afternoon...
mrbill 11y ago
I just started (two days ago) at a company that not only provides free drinks (soda, coffee, tea) and snacks ($10 credit per week for the vending machines), but they cater lunch from a local restaurant every day. If you don't want what is being served that day, you have a $10 daily credit that can be used at a local deli sandwich shop (and have it delivered). I accepted the job without hesitation even though it's a tiny pay cut over what I was making previously. "little things" like this can make a huge difference in employee morale.
Shank 11y ago
When I worked in an office position doing very demanding work on intelligence software, the only thing that acted as a good reprieve from the day to day grind was being able to get up, go to the break room, and get something to eat and snack on to keep everything going. It was an excellent thing to have -- cutting it could easily kill off that kind of "brain refresh" that's needed in highly technical jobs. Sprint certainly employs IT and development, and if these cuts affect them, they're almost certainly signing a death warrant for their company if their most skilled employees start leaving.
- daemin 11y ago
  Having a common place with free snacks also allows people from different groups to come together and mingle, exchanging ideas and knowledge through the company. At my first job the new good coffee machine was a place we'd all congregate at twice a day for a coffee and a chat between teams and other random people in the company.
oxplot 11y ago
I can understand the convenience of having snacks a dozen steps away, but where is the evidence that correlates the length of time present in the office with productivity? I can certainly tell from my own experience that stepping outside for even 5 minutes boosted my mental state after I returned.
skybrian 11y ago
Cutting snacks altogether shows lack of creativity. A more subtle move is to switch to healthier (and less popular) snacks.
chrisbennet 11y ago
Sometimes people do counterproductive things (to the company) because of poor incentives. If someone gets rewarded for cuttings costs, but not for increasing company revenue, guess what they do? If HR gets rewarded for hiring a low risk, average employee but doesn't get any credit for hiring a brilliant college drop out, guess what they do?
justjico 11y ago
Not long ago I was running a small office of 4-6 devs and at least once a month I would make a trip to Costo or Sams and buy some good stock of soda's and snacks for everyone. This was easy to do, and cost negligible. Then at some point I hired an admin assistant and she correctly pointed out that, long term, this was likely a very bad thing for everyone's health. Drinking 1 or 2 soda's a day is not healthy for anyone. I know we were all adults in the office but at least I felt responsible for providing more healthy alternatives. Easier said than done as I was never really able to figure a good alternative at that scale. Most beverages in a can seemed as bad or worse than soda. I wonder if the office density in cities like SF or big startup hubs offer an alternative for this. I mean logistics of fresh fruit vs once a month trip are very different.
- jayess 11y ago
  Unsweetened ice tea?
  - cableshaft 11y ago
    If unsweetened iced tea were already prepared and in pitchers in my office, I'd drink that all day instead of soda. It's me having to spend time preparing it that insures I don't end up drinking it that often compared to soda.
- cloverich 11y ago
  Sparkling water. Our office runs on TopoChico. Prior office stocked "LaCroix" flavored sparkling waters; same deal. Or just diet soda.
- rev_bird 11y ago
  At a previous job, I was in a decidedly un-hip city, and even then our employer found a local farm co-op thing (not sure of the details) that just showed up every Wednesday and left oranges and bananas and kiwis on a bunch of the centrally located filing cabinets. Such a simple service, but it ran like clockwork.
- ElijahLynn 11y ago
bra-ket 11y ago
actually snacks are very unhealthy
mikekchar 11y ago
What I am about to say will probably anger a lot of people, but I think it is worth thinking about, so I'll just go ahead and say it. I have to say that I don't think that snacks are really the issue. I've worked in offices with snacks and offices without snacks and I don't think it makes any difference at all. Snacks (and monitors and new computers and expensive chairs and company purchased gadgets) are a proxy for appreciation. It is quite easy to set up a delivery of drinks. Everyone can chip in, and as programmers get paid multiples of the minimum wage everywhere in the world, every programmer can afford it. However, when I have worked on teams that attempted to do this, it has been shut down by those that feel that "We should not have to do this. The company should provide for us!" There is a rock star mentality amongst programmers. To be honest, I don't think it's unique to programmers. Sales people and management traditionally have their junkets that say to them, "You are special". Just like a salesperson would ideally like an open bar, programmers would ideally like an open budget for snacks/toys. But why do programmers and managers and salespeople value this extra (and really inconsequential) thing? Shouldn't actual appreciation trump the purchase of drinks, or gadgets or copious quantities of alcohol? In my experience, it does not. We have all seen and heard horror stories of bad management and we have all had the feeling of "Well, if I have to put up with this crap, they are going to have to pay a lot of money." But I have also seen good managers go to unreasonable extremes to help employees and to back them through difficult times. Instead of thinking, "I have an amazing manager. I don't care about soda." normally I see reactions that border on "What have you done for me lately? This cheap crap is unacceptable." I have never been in a traditional management role ("agile coach" is the closest I've come and I always concentrated on improving the skills of developers rather than working on business processes). What I find frustrating about this situation is that smart managers realize that for an extra 10% of their budget, they can provide a modicum of luxury for the programmers in lieu of actual appreciation. Soda trumps helping a developer make it through a rough patch in their life. A monitor with pixels too small to even see is more important than being able to sit down and talk about how to make work situations better. Programmers will burn down the building if they don't get their name brand chair, but will tolerate never having discussions about how to develop their career. That sucks.
- matwood 11y ago
  I see snacks and/or sodas as just a proxy. A company who thinks about their employees enough to provider sodas and coffee is often the same company who thinks about career development or helping an employee through a rough patch. Remember, the free soda is not about the free soda as much as it is a signal about how the company acts towards employees.
misiogames 11y ago
I worked for a big company that had this policy: "no free stuff, we just going to pay you top dollar and you can buy whatever you want" good, nobody complain. When they added free snacks I knew it was time to jump ship :P
prawn 11y ago
A canary-in-the-coal-mine indicator of cultural change in a growing business.
happywolf 11y ago
I had a really relevant experience in my ex-company. It was a small company doing video analytics and monitoring. It did well in initial stage and the pantry was stocked with real bean coffee maker, beers, sodas, and pastries. Then its business went down hill, and the beer was removed (beers are expensive in Singapore), then cheap beans were used, then no bean coffee but 3-in-1 instant coffees. Guess what was the ultimate items they scrimped on? Toilet paper. You read it right and I am not kidding. They swapped 3-ply to 2-ply and that was when I called it quit. The company went bankrupt after 1.5 years. The lesson here is not about how much 'gift' it was taken from employees, it is more on the changing wind in the air that employees need to watch out for. If a company is so desperate to cut snacks, usually it means it has much bigger shit at the backyard that employees may or may not be aware of.
- tacostakohashi 11y ago
  Hey, since you mention being in Singapore, and poor employment options - I happen have a small, established, mainly online lifestyle business based in Singapore that I'm looking for a new partner / owner to work with as I've moved onto other things. If you, or anyone else based in Singapore with some HN-type (web, entrepreneurial, etc) skills and interests wanted to discuss further, drop me an introductory email - kovanroad@gmail.com.
  - happywolf 11y ago
    Thanks. I will send an email to you.
- daemin 11y ago
  Well when someone is pinching pennies that badly - changing toilet paper of all things - it means that they've run out of other ideas to cut costs or increase revenue.
- tbrownaw 11y ago
  * Guess what was the ultimate items they scrimped on? Toilet paper. You read it right and I am not kidding. They swapped 3-ply to 2-ply and that was when I called it quit.* ...I wasn't aware that 3-ply was even a thing. That said, my lack of attention to brand names means I've discovered quite a range of quality in the local 2-ply offerings here.
madengr 11y ago
Hell, my employer of 2500 people doesn't even offer free rot-gut coffee.
a3n 11y ago
If management feels they need to cut snacks, sodas, whatever, then they've lost confidence in the company's viability. Time to leave.
welly 11y ago
As a self confessed sugar addict, I wish my office didn't have free snacks. Or that they'd change them to something healthy.
makecheck 11y ago
I worked as an engineer at a place that not only had free soda but one of the multi-flavor fountains like you'd see in a fast food place. It was initially quite cool; you could come in with your cup and just fill up whatever you wanted. Of course, soda syrup costs literally pennies. Food places pay more for cups than soda, and since the engineering group wasn't buying that many cups (people used their own) the cost was essentially wrapped up in the machine itself. Now comes the true stupidity. To "cut costs" they stopped refilling the soda dispenser but they kept the machine and even left it plugged in. It became a glorified ice dispenser (when the break room already had a different ice dispenser), consuming electricity. It had a bunch of now-useless fountain dispensers on the front of it. Think about that. The company decided not to pay the pennies it would have cost to make employees happy, and elected to continue operating a machine that didn't have any reason to exist without the soda. The beginning of the end was signaled loud and clear to employees and I saw a marked drop in giving-a-crap-about-things after that point. The company is not around anymore, long since divided into pieces and sold to the lowest bidder.
- vacri 11y ago
  Why wouldn't you sell the pieces to the highest bidder?
  - lucasnemeth 11y ago
    They were masochists.
lordfoom 11y ago
> "There's an old saying where they say the goal is to pluck the feathers from the bird with the least amount of squawking," said Chamberlain. The less visible the cuts, the better—even if it means taking money out of employee pockets. "Changes to contributions to employee retirement plans," he suggested as a less disruptive cut than emptying the snack larder. "These are highly obscure from a worker standpoint." That's some cold shit right there.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  You don't have employe trustees for pensions in the USA? - sounds like the sort of thing that got Robert Maxwell (a nastier version of Rupert Murdoch) in trouble. Basically Embezzled the employees pension funds.
- jib 11y ago
  I'm ok with that. Perception matters. I dont think it is cold as much as realistic. I would much rather have my contributions to the pension cut. Someone decided that providing milk is too much of a pain in my office. We used to have a guy who dumped off a dozen litres fresh milk a day in the break areas. Now I buy my own. That annoys me. Buying milk takes up cognitive space that I could use for other stuff. No milk annoys me way more than if we were to cut pension contribution cap by 1%. I save about 500 euro/month or so in the pension (I dont even know exactly how much, I just went with the cap). Lowering the cap by a percent would probably save about 50 euro / month per employee or so. There is no way I spend 50 euro / month on milk. Cutting the pension contribution cap by 1% would have been a worse deal financially for me, but the milk annoys me way more than a cap cut does.
paganel 11y ago
What's wrong with leaving the office in order to get one's "munchie fix"? How else are we going to breath some fresh air during the day? Or to actually walk, on our two legs, not barely moving from one chair to another?
J-dawg 11y ago
If we're talking about corporate stinginess, look no further than IBM's London office. They don't even provide a place to make your own tea or coffee, let alone the actual tea or coffee. Bringing in your own kettle is banned. The best you can do is buy a cup of hot water from the canteen for 23p and put your own teabag in. It's become a bit of a running joke among staff there, but nobody seems to seriously complain about it. I guess they've just got used to it. I do think it says something about IBM's current attitude to its employees.
glenndebacker 11y ago
Where I work we have a soda machine and a can of soda costs about 0,80 euro cent, which isn't that really cheap knowing how much a soda can costs.The idea is that we so fund tickets for a local PHP conference. Water and fruit is free. I don't have particular negative feelings about it (there are more important things) but it is certainly one of the more remarkable differences if I compare it will all the other places that I have worked. My previous employer was even mad if you took soda's from home. The most choice I ever had was working at Lernout and Hauspie. All the free soda, coffee or even soup that you could possibly think of.
lyschoening 11y ago
> "They would never have given the snacks to begin with if they didn’t think it was helping boost productivity somehow." The same logic explains why austerity on the national level does not work.
illumen 11y ago
This is a classic way for management to get people to leave. Make the conditions worse, and people leave. Then management don't need to pay them to leave.
mamon 11y ago
In Poland no snack is really free: if company provides it then it's obliged to count it as employee's taxable income. That's how ridiculous this country is :) EDIT: there's also one more ridiculous example of taxation in Poland: if company throws a party for its employees (there are many such parties, usually focused around "Employee of the month" awards, and other corporate bullshit) then attending such party counts as "income" for the employee. But, according to Tax Office, you have to pay tax even if you don't attend a party, because the opportunity to attend is your income by itself :)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
simonh 11y ago
This subject came up at a previous employer and one of my colleagues argued that she didn't drink soda or eat snacks and it was unfair to offer freebies that she got no benefit from, and if you want snacks and drinks you should pay for them yourself. At first I thought that was being a bit mean, but when you scale up an organisation you might go from having one or two people of that opinion to having hundreds or thousands. Big organisations have to pay a lot more attention to issues of fairness and discrimination, and being seen to implicitly subsidize a lifestyle or habit clearly detrimental to health such as snacks and soft drink consumption is actually a bit of a can of worms. Subsidizing things like gym membership could be seen as discriminatory as well I suppose, but at least it can be justified to shareholders on the basis that it's a benefit to the company to have healthy employees.
- devopsproject 11y ago
  This country is doomed if we have to start trying to placate everyone's feelings. Don't like soda? Don't drink it.
- atom-morgan 11y ago
  I'm in the same situation as your colleague. But this would be like me asking for extra vacation because I don't plan on having kids.
bluedino 11y ago
What if your employees start abusing it and taking the snacks home? http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebook/ http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebo...

191 points by surement 11y ago

A more humorous take on the same topic is http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/junk-food-first-published-in-2005.html http://consultingadultblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/junk-food-fi....

imperialdrive 11y ago

Every startup company I've visited has in-house snacks and drinks. Works wonders for them keeping people in the office more hours of the day. Sprint is a beast. I doubt many people work a single minute over their schedule. Now, you don't see the higher-ups partake often, they know better. Much better for the soul to walk around the block, get some sun and air, and grab a coffee or snack. I get to know my neighbors as well. Builds community outside the office...

jwcacces 11y ago

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

mynegation 11y ago

OK, I'll play the devil's advocate here. I am against free snacks in the office. First of all, it tends to be utter garbage: muffins, chips, cheese sticks, soda, sugary drinks, cookies etc. Has anyone tried to calculate lost productivity from health issues arising from eating that highly processed junk full of salt, sugar, and trans fats? Second, snacks in the office might make more sense in the suburban offices in the places with extreme climate swings (think Schaumburg or Kanata) where getting out of office for a snack is an ordeal. In large downtown cores like Toronto or New York I would say a stroll for a snack is more refreshing for productivity than mindlessly eating chips in front of the computer after a short run to the cafeteria. Third, there is this "useless perk" consideration. I'd rather get the share of money spent on the junk food and do whatever I want with them.

bpodgursky 11y ago
> I'd rather get the share of money spent on the junk food and do whatever I want with them. That would be true if not for taxes. A meal at the office is effectively 40-50% cheaper than the corresponding paycheck increase.
- mynegation 11y ago
  That is a fair point. I am a contractor though and from taxation point of view my remuneration and cookies are the same for the company - they just pay me whatever and I take care of my taxes. In Canada, they may even get some R&D credit on my pay, which you do not get for cookies. I am all for power of wholesale bargains for good things, like cheaper gym membership with the corporate account.
- such_a_casual 11y ago
  This is a really good point. I would have never thought of that.
- kspaans 11y ago
  Aren't perks for employees a taxable benefit? (Maybe the employer pays the taxes rather than the employee...)
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    I think the IRS for some reason hasn't clamped down on this benefit in kind. HMRC wanted to charge the employees tax when one big UK employer wanted to roll out free tea and coffee. Apparently the CFO got pissed off over this found a loop hole and we all got 120 free shares that year as a way of going F You to HMRC
    - kspaans 11y ago
      Yeah for snacks and company-provided meals I can see it being grey enough to be "meh". But I remember back when I worked at RIM in Waterloo, I heard that a reason they couldn't sell parking passes to their underused parking lots near the UW campus was that it would make the 'free' passes employees got a taxable benefit (and all of the headaches that implied). I guess if the perks can be taken from the office (phone bills paid?) that's an easy argument for taxability.

tbrake 11y ago

I've always liked the explanation given by __--__ [0] in a HN thread long ago on a Steve Blank post "The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free"[1] about the same subject : > "I'm not management, but I've had it described to me like this: cutting soda, while it may be insignificant and certainly isn't going to change a damned thing money-wise for the company, makes the management feel better about the situation. It makes them feel like they're doing something and something is better than nothing. It's also a CYA tactic. If the CEO wants to hold somebody personally accountable, the CFO can say "look, we did everything, we even cut back the soda!" [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5757467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5757467 [1] http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...

crimsoneer 11y ago
I mean...they're saving $600,000. That's not nothing.
- pif 11y ago
  Indeed, it's not nothing compared to the aimed cut of $2,500,000,000: they've already got at nearly 1/4,000 of their target!
- lifeformed 11y ago
  Out of $2.5B? That's $0.0006B. I mean, it basically is nothing... For 36,000 employees, that's less than $17 per person. Meanwhile, the CEO gets paid $21,800,000 per year.
  - noonespecial 11y ago
    The real question is that if the CEO somehow knew for certain that cutting the soda would allow him to earn that 21,800,000 but keeping the soda would boost productivity earning him 22,500,000 instead, would he cut it anyway because that's just the way things should be done?

patmcc 11y ago

Cutting snacks is a great signal to employees that they aren't worth the $2/day of Dr. Pepper they consume. Instead of cutting snacks just cut the job of whoever proposes that as a cost cutting measure. Probably save more money and nip a lot of other problems in the bud.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rgbrenner 11y ago
Sprint saved less than $0.05/day per employee by cutting snacks.
- Johnny555 11y ago
  I think you're counting all sprint employees, even field workers and store employees, but the free snacks were only available in the corporate office. Also, I think you're assume 365 days/year, but the snacks were likely only available for ~ 253 workdays/year. According to Wikipedia, the corporate office has around 7,000 full time employees (not including 4,000 contract workers), so the company could have saved as much as much as 35 cents per employee per day.
  - jkyle 11y ago
    > so the company could have saved as much as much as 35 cents per employee per day. Sounds like the original poster is under estimating, but I don't find the higher number (35c/day) enough to update the view that it is a trivial savings that has a significant impact on morale.
    - Johnny555 11y ago
      Well yeah, clearly it's not a very significant amount per employee, but 5 cents/day seemed way too low for office snacks, so I wanted to do the math. Even 35 cents seems low, I expected it to be around a dollar or two, but there are probably a lot of people that don't eat a snack every day.

blt 11y ago

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

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
My theory is that the person most responsible for the company's success is whoever makes the coffee, because without the coffee, everything stops.
spinlock 11y ago
no coffee no workee
- Avernar 11y ago
  "A programmer is an organism that converts caffeine into code."
PhantomGremlin 11y ago
As Dave Barry would say: "I am not making this up!". I once visited this company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLSI_Technology and they had a room with vending machines where you had to buy your own coffee. Not somewhere I'd ever consider working.
- kawera 11y ago
  Yes! I did some work for then in the 80s and remember having to pay for really very bad coffee!
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > As Dave Barry would say: "I am not making this up!". I have only had personal contact with one company outside of SV that offered free coffee (my current company doesn't count, because the machine is provided by the management company we rent our offices from). To me, free coffee is the exception, not the rule.

rdl 11y ago

Unless I'm at Google (or Facebook, or a few other places of that quality), I seem to end up mainly bringing my own snacks. Companies usually provide crappy shelf stable junk food. I'd love an office which had great drinks even if it had no food.

santaclaus 11y ago
> Companies usually provide crappy shelf stable junk food. I worked at a company that provided freshly sourced produce in lieu of chips/candy/etc, which was pretty badass. Hungry? Go cook up an omelette and make an espresso in the kitchen.
spinlock 11y ago
Right. I hate the snacks in our office because it's all chips and junk (no free drinks here :( ) But, I bet Sprint could really cut down on snack costs by providing celery sticks and water instead of chips and soda (no one would eat anything).
- rdl 11y ago
  My definition of "healthy" is different -- I'd want low-carb. But really, just listening to employees and customizing from there.
  - TorKlingberg 11y ago
    I don't think there are a lot of carbs in celery and water.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
OTOH I'd die if all the snacks provided by the company were fruits and salads. Please give something salty or some pizza every now and then for those of us who prefer processed food :).

imgabe 11y ago

Watch Next: Four Ways to Nap at Your Desk I found this a highly amusing follow up to this article.

swang 11y ago

> http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article1123165.html http://www.kansascity.com/news/business/technology/article11... Marcelo Claure, current CEO was paid $1 million, with a $500k signing bonus, on top of $24 million in stock Previous CEO Dan Hesse was paid $1.2 million as part of $49 million worth of compensation. > Axing the free food will shave $600,000 from the budget ... Let them eat cake! (okay obviously not that extreme, but you know: bread is to office snacks as cake is to... millions in bonuses).

moron4hire 11y ago
I'll run your company into the ground for you for half what the other guy is charging. Hiring me as CEO will save you just as much as cutting the food budget. You can't afford to not hire me.
- Evgeny 11y ago
  Hire him, username checks out. :)

austenallred 11y ago

It's funny: For a lot of the employees we've hired offering to buy a $500 monitor or a $600 chair moved the needle on how excited they were more than a $5,000 or $10,000 change in salary would. I think there are a few things that play into that: If you made an extra $10,000 you'd want to do something responsible with it, but you wouldn't really notice an instantaneous change in your day-to-day life. But I think more importantly than that it signals that you're supposed to have a good experience and be taken care of. Saying, "Look, if you want/need a monitor or computer to work consider it done" says something about the company. Your success means something to them. What can office snacks possibly cost a company? Say it's a 10-person company, snacks would cost maybe $1,000/month on the high end? And at that point you're probably burning >$120,000/month in salaries. It's barely even a drop in the bucket, assuming we're not talking about infinite catered meals.

fishtoaster 11y ago
My take on it is that my life is divided into two realms: work and home. I spend maybe 40-45% of my waking hours at work, and the rest at home on nights and weekends. I can use extra salary to improve my home life (renting a bigger apartment, going to nicer restaurants, traveling to exotic places, etc), but there's not much I can do with it to improve my work life. If my boss suddenly gave me a 10-million-dolllar bonus tomorrow, my home life would change a lot, but my work life would be nearly the same. On the other hand, a $5 improvement to my work environment affect the nearly half of my life I can't otherwise improve on my own. This is why perks like free food, nice monitors, a cool office, etc have a value to employees that is decoupled from the financial impact of them to the company.
- rpearl 11y ago
  If you got $10M you'd keep working?
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    I would. I like what I do. (Also, once you reach the level where that's a possibility, it doesn't tend to be a one-time thing either.)

drblast 11y ago

One of the best comments I've ever read on Hacker News was about this topic. I wish I'd saved the link. The point was that this engineer took the removal of any perk as a sign to leave, and soda/snacks was a huge one. Why? During the early stages of the company, the "free" soda and food was something everyone chipped in for to save money. And why shouldn't they all save money by buying things like this in bulk? The "free" things were more valuable to each employee than the total bulk cost of those things. The "taking away" of this "perk" represented a shift from a company that one was a valued member of to one that had a management vs. employees mentality. The idea became that the free soda/snacks was something that management gifted to employees to keep them happy. And that shift in culture was the signal to leave.

fossuser 11y ago
I think I remember that too, though not sure if it was a comment or a submission. Is this what you're remembering? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1007750
- drblast 11y ago
  Here it is, it's a comment on the Elves post that I was thinking of: http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/#comment-2163 http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...
joshu 11y ago
The Elves leave Middle Earth: http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-eart...
harryjo 11y ago
The bulk cost-effectiveness argument makes sense, but how does the theory survive in the presence of modern hot-company behaviors that spend money on absurdly gourmet snacks and niche perks, that seem to be more about appearing cooler than the next company, instead of cost-effectively deploying comforts that make employees happier and more committed to their work?

thinkingkong 11y ago

What a weird decision. 600,000 for sprint is such a drop in the bucket, but at scale these line items like "snacks" look like big numbers. As a side note: lots of people are commenting on the quality of snacks as being the reason to not bother with them. Obviously if you're just supplying people with Dr Pepper and Mars bars you won't get much of a benefit. The snacks you bring into the office should satisfy a few things 1) You dont go hungry 2) You eat something healthy 3) You continue to harness the "serendipity of the office"

analog31 11y ago

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

ceratopisan 11y ago

The same goes for better keyboards or chairs for employees. I'll have a coworker say "this keyboard is uncomfortable" or "I'm squinting a lot at this monitor", and when I offer to order something different, they reflexively say "Oh, don't get anything too fancy!" If the company's going to ask someone to work years of their life away, the least a company can do is make sure the damage to vision, posture and wrists is minimized. Note minimized - it gets a little more clear when you realize that nobody really comes out of a career with better health - even if it's just age. (someone will probably pop up and say "But I'm more healthy working now that I've lost weight at 50 years of age than I was at 30!" Fine. But you'll never get to be 30 again, fat or thin.)

mrbill 11y ago
I showed up at my first day at the new gig with my own keyboard (tenkeyless Cherry MX brown keyswitches) and mouse. Multiple people said "Hey, you don't have to bring your own stuff, just tell us what you want and we'll order it." Having spent a decade at a much larger company (Halliburton) I feel absolutely spoiled at this place. The system they gave me on Monday? Brand new 2015 Macbook Pro Retina 15" with 512G SSD and 16G RAM (and external USB3 hub and USB3 SATA HD for Time Machine backups). Two 23" monitors were already on my desk waiting with DVI-to-Mini-Displayport adapters. Today I sent a request for a desk lamp, and someone walked in 30 minutes later with two and asked which one I preferred. This afternoon I requested a license key for VMWare Fusion 8, and had it in email about an hour later. This stuff would have taken weeks, or never been approved, at my previous gig - where half the stuff on my desk was brought in from home because purchase requests would have been rejected with "You have a keyboard already, why do you need an expensive one?"
- praseodym 11y ago
  This reminds me of how the guys at Panic Inc ordered new Apple stuff for their employees through a simple Slack post: https://twitter.com/panic/status/653998672707915778 https://twitter.com/panic/status/653998672707915778
- jagtesh 11y ago

joshstrange 11y ago

Personally snacks aren't huge for me. They are normally junk food or something "healthy" like baked chips which I also don't eat. Now fruit is something I would be interested in but the short shelf life of things like that normally makes it unattractive to businesses. Also drinks don't interest me much as I drink water all day. All of that said I've worked at places that had snacks and worked with coworkers who took advantage of those snacks all the time and they seemed to really enjoy that perk. So I don't hate when a place has snacks/drinks it's just not a value-add for me 99% of the time. Now free lunch every once in awhile? That's a very attractive perk. I once worked for a company that took all the employees (max of ~15) out to lunch once a week which was a lot of fun. We rotated between everyone to choose where to go so everyone got a choice and just about anywhere you would go there would be at least something you liked. Now I get that snacks/drinks probably cost way less but we wouldn't have had to go out to eat. I've got friends at jobs that regularly cater in food which is pretty awesome as well. Right now the company I work at has a cafeteria (with subsidised prices, lunch is max of $5 more or less) so cost of food and need to leave campus really isn't an issue and every once in awhile we have a free lunch event like for Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Christmas, etc... This ticks so many more boxes for me than free snacks/drinks ever would.

tracker1 11y ago
Where I work now, I had requested fresh fruit be added to the snack bins... unfortunately it goes so quickly that there's rarely any there when I get around to a snack in the later afternoon...

mrbill 11y ago

I just started (two days ago) at a company that not only provides free drinks (soda, coffee, tea) and snacks ($10 credit per week for the vending machines), but they cater lunch from a local restaurant every day. If you don't want what is being served that day, you have a $10 daily credit that can be used at a local deli sandwich shop (and have it delivered). I accepted the job without hesitation even though it's a tiny pay cut over what I was making previously. "little things" like this can make a huge difference in employee morale.

Shank 11y ago

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

daemin 11y ago
Having a common place with free snacks also allows people from different groups to come together and mingle, exchanging ideas and knowledge through the company. At my first job the new good coffee machine was a place we'd all congregate at twice a day for a coffee and a chat between teams and other random people in the company.

oxplot 11y ago

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

skybrian 11y ago

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

chrisbennet 11y ago

Sometimes people do counterproductive things (to the company) because of poor incentives. If someone gets rewarded for cuttings costs, but not for increasing company revenue, guess what they do? If HR gets rewarded for hiring a low risk, average employee but doesn't get any credit for hiring a brilliant college drop out, guess what they do?

justjico 11y ago

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

jayess 11y ago
Unsweetened ice tea?
- cableshaft 11y ago
  If unsweetened iced tea were already prepared and in pitchers in my office, I'd drink that all day instead of soda. It's me having to spend time preparing it that insures I don't end up drinking it that often compared to soda.
cloverich 11y ago
Sparkling water. Our office runs on TopoChico. Prior office stocked "LaCroix" flavored sparkling waters; same deal. Or just diet soda.
rev_bird 11y ago
At a previous job, I was in a decidedly un-hip city, and even then our employer found a local farm co-op thing (not sure of the details) that just showed up every Wednesday and left oranges and bananas and kiwis on a bunch of the centrally located filing cabinets. Such a simple service, but it ran like clockwork.
ElijahLynn 11y ago

bra-ket 11y ago

actually snacks are very unhealthy

mikekchar 11y ago

What I am about to say will probably anger a lot of people, but I think it is worth thinking about, so I'll just go ahead and say it. I have to say that I don't think that snacks are really the issue. I've worked in offices with snacks and offices without snacks and I don't think it makes any difference at all. Snacks (and monitors and new computers and expensive chairs and company purchased gadgets) are a proxy for appreciation. It is quite easy to set up a delivery of drinks. Everyone can chip in, and as programmers get paid multiples of the minimum wage everywhere in the world, every programmer can afford it. However, when I have worked on teams that attempted to do this, it has been shut down by those that feel that "We should not have to do this. The company should provide for us!" There is a rock star mentality amongst programmers. To be honest, I don't think it's unique to programmers. Sales people and management traditionally have their junkets that say to them, "You are special". Just like a salesperson would ideally like an open bar, programmers would ideally like an open budget for snacks/toys. But why do programmers and managers and salespeople value this extra (and really inconsequential) thing? Shouldn't actual appreciation trump the purchase of drinks, or gadgets or copious quantities of alcohol? In my experience, it does not. We have all seen and heard horror stories of bad management and we have all had the feeling of "Well, if I have to put up with this crap, they are going to have to pay a lot of money." But I have also seen good managers go to unreasonable extremes to help employees and to back them through difficult times. Instead of thinking, "I have an amazing manager. I don't care about soda." normally I see reactions that border on "What have you done for me lately? This cheap crap is unacceptable." I have never been in a traditional management role ("agile coach" is the closest I've come and I always concentrated on improving the skills of developers rather than working on business processes). What I find frustrating about this situation is that smart managers realize that for an extra 10% of their budget, they can provide a modicum of luxury for the programmers in lieu of actual appreciation. Soda trumps helping a developer make it through a rough patch in their life. A monitor with pixels too small to even see is more important than being able to sit down and talk about how to make work situations better. Programmers will burn down the building if they don't get their name brand chair, but will tolerate never having discussions about how to develop their career. That sucks.

matwood 11y ago
I see snacks and/or sodas as just a proxy. A company who thinks about their employees enough to provider sodas and coffee is often the same company who thinks about career development or helping an employee through a rough patch. Remember, the free soda is not about the free soda as much as it is a signal about how the company acts towards employees.

misiogames 11y ago

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

prawn 11y ago

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

happywolf 11y ago

I had a really relevant experience in my ex-company. It was a small company doing video analytics and monitoring. It did well in initial stage and the pantry was stocked with real bean coffee maker, beers, sodas, and pastries. Then its business went down hill, and the beer was removed (beers are expensive in Singapore), then cheap beans were used, then no bean coffee but 3-in-1 instant coffees. Guess what was the ultimate items they scrimped on? Toilet paper. You read it right and I am not kidding. They swapped 3-ply to 2-ply and that was when I called it quit. The company went bankrupt after 1.5 years. The lesson here is not about how much 'gift' it was taken from employees, it is more on the changing wind in the air that employees need to watch out for. If a company is so desperate to cut snacks, usually it means it has much bigger shit at the backyard that employees may or may not be aware of.

tacostakohashi 11y ago
Hey, since you mention being in Singapore, and poor employment options - I happen have a small, established, mainly online lifestyle business based in Singapore that I'm looking for a new partner / owner to work with as I've moved onto other things. If you, or anyone else based in Singapore with some HN-type (web, entrepreneurial, etc) skills and interests wanted to discuss further, drop me an introductory email - kovanroad@gmail.com.
- happywolf 11y ago
  Thanks. I will send an email to you.
daemin 11y ago
Well when someone is pinching pennies that badly - changing toilet paper of all things - it means that they've run out of other ideas to cut costs or increase revenue.
tbrownaw 11y ago
* Guess what was the ultimate items they scrimped on? Toilet paper. You read it right and I am not kidding. They swapped 3-ply to 2-ply and that was when I called it quit.* ...I wasn't aware that 3-ply was even a thing. That said, my lack of attention to brand names means I've discovered quite a range of quality in the local 2-ply offerings here.

madengr 11y ago

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

a3n 11y ago

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

welly 11y ago

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

makecheck 11y ago

I worked as an engineer at a place that not only had free soda but one of the multi-flavor fountains like you'd see in a fast food place. It was initially quite cool; you could come in with your cup and just fill up whatever you wanted. Of course, soda syrup costs literally pennies. Food places pay more for cups than soda, and since the engineering group wasn't buying that many cups (people used their own) the cost was essentially wrapped up in the machine itself. Now comes the true stupidity. To "cut costs" they stopped refilling the soda dispenser but they kept the machine and even left it plugged in. It became a glorified ice dispenser (when the break room already had a different ice dispenser), consuming electricity. It had a bunch of now-useless fountain dispensers on the front of it. Think about that. The company decided not to pay the pennies it would have cost to make employees happy, and elected to continue operating a machine that didn't have any reason to exist without the soda. The beginning of the end was signaled loud and clear to employees and I saw a marked drop in giving-a-crap-about-things after that point. The company is not around anymore, long since divided into pieces and sold to the lowest bidder.

vacri 11y ago
Why wouldn't you sell the pieces to the highest bidder?
- lucasnemeth 11y ago
  They were masochists.

lordfoom 11y ago

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

spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
You don't have employe trustees for pensions in the USA? - sounds like the sort of thing that got Robert Maxwell (a nastier version of Rupert Murdoch) in trouble. Basically Embezzled the employees pension funds.
jib 11y ago
I'm ok with that. Perception matters. I dont think it is cold as much as realistic. I would much rather have my contributions to the pension cut. Someone decided that providing milk is too much of a pain in my office. We used to have a guy who dumped off a dozen litres fresh milk a day in the break areas. Now I buy my own. That annoys me. Buying milk takes up cognitive space that I could use for other stuff. No milk annoys me way more than if we were to cut pension contribution cap by 1%. I save about 500 euro/month or so in the pension (I dont even know exactly how much, I just went with the cap). Lowering the cap by a percent would probably save about 50 euro / month per employee or so. There is no way I spend 50 euro / month on milk. Cutting the pension contribution cap by 1% would have been a worse deal financially for me, but the milk annoys me way more than a cap cut does.

paganel 11y ago

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

J-dawg 11y ago

If we're talking about corporate stinginess, look no further than IBM's London office. They don't even provide a place to make your own tea or coffee, let alone the actual tea or coffee. Bringing in your own kettle is banned. The best you can do is buy a cup of hot water from the canteen for 23p and put your own teabag in. It's become a bit of a running joke among staff there, but nobody seems to seriously complain about it. I guess they've just got used to it. I do think it says something about IBM's current attitude to its employees.

glenndebacker 11y ago

Where I work we have a soda machine and a can of soda costs about 0,80 euro cent, which isn't that really cheap knowing how much a soda can costs.The idea is that we so fund tickets for a local PHP conference. Water and fruit is free. I don't have particular negative feelings about it (there are more important things) but it is certainly one of the more remarkable differences if I compare it will all the other places that I have worked. My previous employer was even mad if you took soda's from home. The most choice I ever had was working at Lernout and Hauspie. All the free soda, coffee or even soup that you could possibly think of.

lyschoening 11y ago

> "They would never have given the snacks to begin with if they didn’t think it was helping boost productivity somehow." The same logic explains why austerity on the national level does not work.

illumen 11y ago

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

mamon 11y ago

In Poland no snack is really free: if company provides it then it's obliged to count it as employee's taxable income. That's how ridiculous this country is :) EDIT: there's also one more ridiculous example of taxation in Poland: if company throws a party for its employees (there are many such parties, usually focused around "Employee of the month" awards, and other corporate bullshit) then attending such party counts as "income" for the employee. But, according to Tax Office, you have to pay tax even if you don't attend a party, because the opportunity to attend is your income by itself :)

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

simonh 11y ago

This subject came up at a previous employer and one of my colleagues argued that she didn't drink soda or eat snacks and it was unfair to offer freebies that she got no benefit from, and if you want snacks and drinks you should pay for them yourself. At first I thought that was being a bit mean, but when you scale up an organisation you might go from having one or two people of that opinion to having hundreds or thousands. Big organisations have to pay a lot more attention to issues of fairness and discrimination, and being seen to implicitly subsidize a lifestyle or habit clearly detrimental to health such as snacks and soft drink consumption is actually a bit of a can of worms. Subsidizing things like gym membership could be seen as discriminatory as well I suppose, but at least it can be justified to shareholders on the basis that it's a benefit to the company to have healthy employees.

devopsproject 11y ago
This country is doomed if we have to start trying to placate everyone's feelings. Don't like soda? Don't drink it.
atom-morgan 11y ago
I'm in the same situation as your colleague. But this would be like me asking for extra vacation because I don't plan on having kids.

bluedino 11y ago

What if your employees start abusing it and taking the snacks home? http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebook/ http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebo...