People near the senior levels of management spend a lot of time worrying about dollars, to the exclusion of everything else. And since they tend to do a pretty

People near the senior levels of management spend a lot of time worrying about dollars, to the exclusion of everything else. And since they tend to do a pretty piss-poor job of quantifying employee morale as it relates to productivity, that gets ignored. My company saved a half million dollars a year by making the lease smaller. Great, right? Except that in our building we have hundreds of developers. Let's say ~100M in fully loaded costs. So if moving them all from cubicles into six-foot bench seating (no, not kidding) knocked down their productivity by 10%, then the open office was a net loss. But they can't quantify that, so it's not even considered. Well, until we lost about 10% of our developers in a single year, but I'm not sure if even then senior management got a clue. My last company tried to end their practice of providing plastic spoons in the break area. Probably spent more money in wages to write the email than it costs to buy a box of spoons that'll last the better part of a year. That one actually got people riled up enough to complain, because it was both inconvenient and incredibly petty. We were just going to buy a box of spoons from Webstaurant Store and expense it. LOL. Silly managers trying to impress their own managers by saving every penny.