7 ms·

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 o

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.)
    - will_pseudonym 11y ago
      What exactly do you do? How did you get to that point?
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > What exactly do you do? I'm Intel's Chrome OS Architect; I serve as the technical lead for Intel Chromebooks, particularly on the software side. I particularly enjoy that I get to work on entire systems top-to-bottom: hardware, firmware, kernel, userspace, browser, apps/web... We get to work on problems like "How could this technology make Chrome OS or the web better?", or conversely "What technology could we create to solve this problem that Chrome OS or the web faces?". I've also found it awesome building up and working with several exceptional teams. (Note: on HN and elsewhere, I don't speak for Intel unless explicitly stated otherwise.) > How did you get to that point? I came in to interview for a completely different position, and found myself in the right place at the right time with the right skillset, and I was open to work on anything sufficiently interesting and challenging. It helped that I already had extensive experience in the Open Source community. Also, Intel as an employer values and rewards graduate education. Happy to talk more via email.
    - will_pseudonym 11y ago
      P.S. I live about 5 blocks from PSU! How are you liking the PhD program there? What are you studying? Mind if I pick your brain? I've considered grad school off and on so many times...
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > P.S. I live about 5 blocks from PSU! How are you liking the PhD program there? My website is badly out of date; I graduated ~4 years ago. I found their PhD program excellent. > Mind if I pick your brain? I've considered grad school off and on so many times... Sure, no problem; I can offer various pros and cons for grad school. Let's continue via email.
  - fishtoaster 11y ago
    Maybe or maybe not. This is really more about the situation where some people, when considering a new job, would rather have perks worth $X than $X in increased salary. In the $10m example, consider there to be an "assuming I didn't quit or change jobs" in there. :) As for whether I'd actually keep working, I'm not sure. I might take a break from employment for a bit, but I'd probably come back to somewhere like where I am. I have a great team, a great environment, and I'm working on something socially meaningful.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      It's hard to define "perks worth $X"; in particular, the value of those perks is higher than the amount the employer spends on them. Not least of which because everyone else has them too, and thus everyone knows that. > As for whether I'd actually keep working, I'm not sure. I might take a break from employment for a bit, but I'd probably come back to somewhere like where I am. I have a great team, a great environment, and I'm working on something socially meaningful. Exactly. I might adjust my working hours, or take a leave of absence, but I can't see myself quitting. I don't want to live a life of leisure; I want to have an impact.
  - Fomite 11y ago
    I would. The nature of how I would work would change, but not that I worked.
  - fulafel 11y ago
    For most middle class people, increasing wealth by $10M does much less to their happiness than having a good job. Short term excitement nonwithstanding.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > I can use extra salary to improve my home life (renting a bigger apartment, going to nicer restaurants, traveling to exotic places, etc), but there's not much I can do with it to improve my work life. You can use extra money to improve your work environment, but you shouldn't have to. That's a difference between working as a contractor and working as a salaried employee. As a contract employee, you get paid far more, but some of that goes to buying your own equipment (as well as benefits and myriad other things). As a salaried employee, you have the reasonable expectation of your employer supplying everything you need to do your job.
  - a3n 11y ago
    I have one of those Logitek wireless keyboard and mouse that use the same usb dongle. I never even considered asking the company for one, I just bought it after work and brought it in. Because it was cheap, I wanted that exact thing, and I wanted it now. If I asked, it either would have been non-standard and denied, or it would have taken them months to figure out how to buy one, and it would have been a toaster or a potted petunia. I probably shouldn't have had to ask, but sometimes you have to ask yourself if the process is at all worth it.
    - driverdan 11y ago
      If that was the process I'd have to go through to get cheap hardware like a keyboard I'd be looking for a new job. That's absolutely ridiculous.
      - will_pseudonym 11y ago
        It's often the path of least resistance working at a billion dollar company. I'm currently on week 4 of waiting for the ordering of a $250 docking station so that I can use a gigantic external monitor instead of my tiny laptop screen. The amount I'm being paid per hour would pay off that cost in a day. P.S. I'm paying for the monitor... P.P.S. I'm going to end up paying for the docking station out of pocket too. It's that important to my workflow. It sucks, but it's better than the alternative, and there are things that are more important that this job does get right.
- Nursie 11y ago
  And I look upon some of that as quite foolish. Give me an extra few thousand to take home over a "nice monitor" any day. I can make do with whatever the company decides is best in terms of resources like that, that's up to them and has no value to me at all.
ashark 11y ago
Hesitation to provide quality tools/equipment falls under the "run—run far away" category, IMO.
Consultant32452 11y ago
I once got a contract with $household_name_restaurant's corporate headquarters. The first day they didn't have a PC for me. Meh, that happens. Around the 3rd day they gave me a 5 year old Celeron laptop with 2GB of RAM. This was about 2 years ago and it was a Java gig. It was an impossible task and that set my mood for the entire time I was there. I helped them out as best I could but didn't extend the contract when it was over. I was unhappy pretty much every day.
- bluedino 11y ago
  The biggest (non-tech) companies seem to have the worst systems for developers. Writing code for a $500m ERP system for a $4b company? Here's a 19" LCD and a Pentium 4 2.4GHz and 3GB of RAM. You can only open one project at a time, blah blah. Work at a 20-person company? Picked out the loaded MacBook Pro, monitor, and keyboard I wanted to use after my interview.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
fleitz 11y ago
I spend more 'money' aka. Time getting coffee 2-3 times a day than I could ever consume in snacks/coffee.
tetraodonpuffer 11y ago
that is a huge pet peeve of mine, the whole nickel and diming and paying developers $xxx,xxx a year and expecting them to make do with a single $200 1080p crappy monitor and the cheapest possible pc one can get. This seems to happen sometimes because of budgeting issues and silos and so on, but it is still penny wise and pound foolish to expect "passionate" folks and not give them the tools to excel, and creates ongoing friction which will definitely not help with attrition/retention. If I owned my company I would honestly nowadays give every developer an 8-core 128gig workstation or two with 2-3 21:9 35" 1440p screens and 1TB+ of nvme ssd and a $1k+ allowance to get whatever best-of-the-best chair they want to get (say, a steelcase leap or similar) Even if you spent $10k on each engineer for this (and the above would be less than that) it would be worth it just from the perspective of you want your employees' workspace to get out of the way as much as possible to enable them to be productive and write good quality code. The output and code quality gains from having a top-of-the-line machine/monitor pay for themselves in spades, but for some reason this never seems to be noticed in any company I have worked for, it can go from "we are a startup, we have no money to waste" all the way to "we are a large company and beholden to our shareholders, we have no money to waste" but the end result is the same, the people who could do with better tools don't get them and gripe (justifiably) about it.
- rhinoceraptor 11y ago
  My company gave me a Windows laptop with spinning rust inside. It's 2015, you can get big SSDs for $200 now. Even without the productivity gains, it's just infuriating to try and do work when I have to wait for the computer.
  - FireBeyond 11y ago
    Right, I bought 2 Samsung EVO 850s yesterday, 256GB for $80 each.
- dasil003 11y ago
  It only pays for itself a priori if you are profitable. If you are not profitable then burn-rate is an existential threat which no one will take seriously if the founders don't. I definitely agree that you should give developers everything they need to maximize their productivity, including spending an extra few thousands on their workstation, but it should really be what they need. For the typical startup I'd really question the need for 1TB SSDs, or the fastest CPUs. Focus on big displays, good ergonomics, ample RAM and good software tools, but that's just me.
x0x0 11y ago
Feeling like work is a good experience is important. I left a job in part because they nickel and dimed me on airline seats. I gave up my Sunday to fly across the country for a work conference (as if it were a reward to go pull booth duty for 3 days), and they were pissy about reimbursing the $30 or $39 each way for extra legroom for someone who's 6ft 2in and 225 pounds from lifting. iow flying is awful, and that nyc/sf flight is 6 hours of hell. I just couldn't get over $80 being more important than me not being absolutely miserable, and that after I had my SO drop me off at the airport, saving them $50 in cab fees.
jvvw 11y ago
Also, from a practical perspective, most large organisations don't have a system where you can go to your manager and say 'please can I spend $X of my own money on my monitor/chair etc' and then have them buy them for you. It might work in a start-up but the infrastructure for that isn't in place in most organisations - you could bring stuff in yourself I guess but it wouldn't be insured. Likewise, my (carefully adjusted!) chair regularly finds itself in some other part of the office when I'm not in, and if I'd paid for it myself, that would be mighty annoying.

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.)
  - will_pseudonym 11y ago
    What exactly do you do? How did you get to that point?
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      > What exactly do you do? I'm Intel's Chrome OS Architect; I serve as the technical lead for Intel Chromebooks, particularly on the software side. I particularly enjoy that I get to work on entire systems top-to-bottom: hardware, firmware, kernel, userspace, browser, apps/web... We get to work on problems like "How could this technology make Chrome OS or the web better?", or conversely "What technology could we create to solve this problem that Chrome OS or the web faces?". I've also found it awesome building up and working with several exceptional teams. (Note: on HN and elsewhere, I don't speak for Intel unless explicitly stated otherwise.) > How did you get to that point? I came in to interview for a completely different position, and found myself in the right place at the right time with the right skillset, and I was open to work on anything sufficiently interesting and challenging. It helped that I already had extensive experience in the Open Source community. Also, Intel as an employer values and rewards graduate education. Happy to talk more via email.
  - will_pseudonym 11y ago
    P.S. I live about 5 blocks from PSU! How are you liking the PhD program there? What are you studying? Mind if I pick your brain? I've considered grad school off and on so many times...
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      > P.S. I live about 5 blocks from PSU! How are you liking the PhD program there? My website is badly out of date; I graduated ~4 years ago. I found their PhD program excellent. > Mind if I pick your brain? I've considered grad school off and on so many times... Sure, no problem; I can offer various pros and cons for grad school. Let's continue via email.
- fishtoaster 11y ago
  Maybe or maybe not. This is really more about the situation where some people, when considering a new job, would rather have perks worth $X than $X in increased salary. In the $10m example, consider there to be an "assuming I didn't quit or change jobs" in there. :) As for whether I'd actually keep working, I'm not sure. I might take a break from employment for a bit, but I'd probably come back to somewhere like where I am. I have a great team, a great environment, and I'm working on something socially meaningful.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    It's hard to define "perks worth $X"; in particular, the value of those perks is higher than the amount the employer spends on them. Not least of which because everyone else has them too, and thus everyone knows that. > As for whether I'd actually keep working, I'm not sure. I might take a break from employment for a bit, but I'd probably come back to somewhere like where I am. I have a great team, a great environment, and I'm working on something socially meaningful. Exactly. I might adjust my working hours, or take a leave of absence, but I can't see myself quitting. I don't want to live a life of leisure; I want to have an impact.
- Fomite 11y ago
  I would. The nature of how I would work would change, but not that I worked.
- fulafel 11y ago
  For most middle class people, increasing wealth by $10M does much less to their happiness than having a good job. Short term excitement nonwithstanding.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
> I can use extra salary to improve my home life (renting a bigger apartment, going to nicer restaurants, traveling to exotic places, etc), but there's not much I can do with it to improve my work life. You can use extra money to improve your work environment, but you shouldn't have to. That's a difference between working as a contractor and working as a salaried employee. As a contract employee, you get paid far more, but some of that goes to buying your own equipment (as well as benefits and myriad other things). As a salaried employee, you have the reasonable expectation of your employer supplying everything you need to do your job.
- a3n 11y ago
  I have one of those Logitek wireless keyboard and mouse that use the same usb dongle. I never even considered asking the company for one, I just bought it after work and brought it in. Because it was cheap, I wanted that exact thing, and I wanted it now. If I asked, it either would have been non-standard and denied, or it would have taken them months to figure out how to buy one, and it would have been a toaster or a potted petunia. I probably shouldn't have had to ask, but sometimes you have to ask yourself if the process is at all worth it.
  - driverdan 11y ago
    If that was the process I'd have to go through to get cheap hardware like a keyboard I'd be looking for a new job. That's absolutely ridiculous.
    - will_pseudonym 11y ago
      It's often the path of least resistance working at a billion dollar company. I'm currently on week 4 of waiting for the ordering of a $250 docking station so that I can use a gigantic external monitor instead of my tiny laptop screen. The amount I'm being paid per hour would pay off that cost in a day. P.S. I'm paying for the monitor... P.P.S. I'm going to end up paying for the docking station out of pocket too. It's that important to my workflow. It sucks, but it's better than the alternative, and there are things that are more important that this job does get right.
Nursie 11y ago
And I look upon some of that as quite foolish. Give me an extra few thousand to take home over a "nice monitor" any day. I can make do with whatever the company decides is best in terms of resources like that, that's up to them and has no value to me at all.

ashark 11y ago

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

Consultant32452 11y ago

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

bluedino 11y ago
The biggest (non-tech) companies seem to have the worst systems for developers. Writing code for a $500m ERP system for a $4b company? Here's a 19" LCD and a Pentium 4 2.4GHz and 3GB of RAM. You can only open one project at a time, blah blah. Work at a 20-person company? Picked out the loaded MacBook Pro, monitor, and keyboard I wanted to use after my interview.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

fleitz 11y ago

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

tetraodonpuffer 11y ago

that is a huge pet peeve of mine, the whole nickel and diming and paying developers $xxx,xxx a year and expecting them to make do with a single $200 1080p crappy monitor and the cheapest possible pc one can get. This seems to happen sometimes because of budgeting issues and silos and so on, but it is still penny wise and pound foolish to expect "passionate" folks and not give them the tools to excel, and creates ongoing friction which will definitely not help with attrition/retention. If I owned my company I would honestly nowadays give every developer an 8-core 128gig workstation or two with 2-3 21:9 35" 1440p screens and 1TB+ of nvme ssd and a $1k+ allowance to get whatever best-of-the-best chair they want to get (say, a steelcase leap or similar) Even if you spent $10k on each engineer for this (and the above would be less than that) it would be worth it just from the perspective of you want your employees' workspace to get out of the way as much as possible to enable them to be productive and write good quality code. The output and code quality gains from having a top-of-the-line machine/monitor pay for themselves in spades, but for some reason this never seems to be noticed in any company I have worked for, it can go from "we are a startup, we have no money to waste" all the way to "we are a large company and beholden to our shareholders, we have no money to waste" but the end result is the same, the people who could do with better tools don't get them and gripe (justifiably) about it.

rhinoceraptor 11y ago
My company gave me a Windows laptop with spinning rust inside. It's 2015, you can get big SSDs for $200 now. Even without the productivity gains, it's just infuriating to try and do work when I have to wait for the computer.
- FireBeyond 11y ago
  Right, I bought 2 Samsung EVO 850s yesterday, 256GB for $80 each.
dasil003 11y ago
It only pays for itself a priori if you are profitable. If you are not profitable then burn-rate is an existential threat which no one will take seriously if the founders don't. I definitely agree that you should give developers everything they need to maximize their productivity, including spending an extra few thousands on their workstation, but it should really be what they need. For the typical startup I'd really question the need for 1TB SSDs, or the fastest CPUs. Focus on big displays, good ergonomics, ample RAM and good software tools, but that's just me.

x0x0 11y ago

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

jvvw 11y ago

Also, from a practical perspective, most large organisations don't have a system where you can go to your manager and say 'please can I spend $X of my own money on my monitor/chair etc' and then have them buy them for you. It might work in a start-up but the infrastructure for that isn't in place in most organisations - you could bring stuff in yourself I guess but it wouldn't be insured. Likewise, my (carefully adjusted!) chair regularly finds itself in some other part of the office when I'm not in, and if I'd paid for it myself, that would be mighty annoying.