4 ms·

Reminds me of when I went to visit Intel a few years ago. I was shocked at the bare bones amenities and that employees had to pay for everything (snacks/drinks

Reminds me of when I went to visit Intel a few years ago. I was shocked at the bare bones amenities and that employees had to pay for everything (snacks/drinks/etc.). That might sound insignificant but in the talent war in SV that stuff mattered a lot back then. It was a stark contrast from nearly every other fast-growing tech company in the area.

NobodyNada 6y ago
> employees had to pay for everything (snacks/drinks/etc.). That’s not entirely true, at least in Hillsboro (I interned there recently). Drinks were free, and so was fruit, but you had to pay for e.g. donuts or chips.
- rdiddly 6y ago
  The fruit's hilarious because if you're a contractor the fruit's not free. It's forbidden fruit.
  - NobodyNada 6y ago
    Ah yeah, I forgot to mention that part. Contractors have to pay for a weekly subscription to the drinks and fruit.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Which is not a bad policy. I'm not sure I would want to work somewhere that offered free junk food.
Animats 6y ago
Ah, Intel. Acre-sized floors of tiny cubicles. Everything is grey. Really.[1] I visited Intel HQ once, and it really did look like that. Is it still like that? [1] https://youtu.be/gXReifFHXbY?t=44 https://youtu.be/gXReifFHXbY?t=44
- eznzt 6y ago
  I was hoping to hear in the background "corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking... just a moment..."
- graton 6y ago
  Actually that was back when they were nice cubicles. Sure the colors weren't great, but the cubes were about five feet high and relatively big. They blocked out most of the sound and very few visual distractions when you were sitting down. They worked well if you wanted relative peace and quiet to concentrate. Since then they have switched to open-concept with cubes about half the size and walls that are maybe four feet high. So now people have plenty of visual distractions and a lot more noise. Didn't help they added sit-stand desks so you will have people who get on calls while standing and can be heard 30+ feet away.
- conradfr 6y ago
  In the comments: "I worked there when this was filmed. Immediately following the airing there was so much shame that they launched a whole office redesign and open office concept. Nothing like some well deserved ribbing to shake things up!!!" "The "gray on gray" quip led to an attempt to add color to some office buildings. The open office redesign looked much better than the 80s and 90s cubicles, at least the one I saw in Santa Clara. Much more current, modern aesthetic, without walls. I left the company a couple of years after that so not sure how well it took hold. Friends who stayed said it didn't work out too well but it's been years since then (Conan did this bit in 2007)."
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  No. It's all about open space now.
romanoderoma 6y ago
I'm on the opposite side on this I don't need snacks and drinks at work, just water and the occasional coffe, which I get at the bar anyway so I can have a little walk and clear up my mind Workplaces that looks like a teenage dream party give me the chill When I need to relax I stop working entirely and go out I consider more money or more free time (or both) an incentive I appreciate solid forniture, a comfortable seat, big windows with natural light, a nice neighborhood (last work I accepted was because they had an office in Duomo in Milan, the one I have now has an office 5 minutes away from the Colosseum in Rome), I don't care much about "free stuff" Paying for my drinks or snacks it's not what will bankrupt me
- rmk 6y ago
  Snacks and other tchotchkes have become de rigueur in SV: I haven't had to buy my own lunch or snack for 8+ years now. With the pandemic in force and the prospect of going into an office itself coming into question, companies will have to stop relying on the (lazy but admittedly effective) lure of free snacks and lunch. Good times. On the whole, I agree with you: when I see people crumpled up in bean bags and picking at salad on picnic tables in companies' 'Come work with us' webpages, I get the chills. How very juvenile! But we all know that the industry feeds on a steady influx of juveniles and there's a new batch every summer!
  - romanoderoma 6y ago
    To be fair with my employers, they usually paid for my lunches or had a cafeteria, usually not free, but very affordable. It's good to have the option, it's not what drives my decisions. I have no problem with people that see it as a bonus, to each his own, it simply doesn't matter much to me. But maybe SV corporate culture has gone a little bit too far on it.
    - rmk 6y ago
      A lot of the old-school employers run subsidised cafeterias. Cisco used to, back in the day. Pretty decent choices and reasonable pricing, until they started whittling down options making the cafes pretty unattractive compared to surrounding eateries in Milpitas (this was during the '09 recession). I know that Apple still runs them but they are of course notoriously thrifty (I'm pretty sure they don't subsidise as heavily as others). Same with Yahoo. Not sure if we had to pay, but it was pretty reasonable. Soon after that first recession, I started seeing a trend of catered food at smaller places, and completely in-house operations at the larger places. That trend has kept up until the pandemic struck.
01100011 6y ago
Hardware companies, and even some legacy software companies, have very different cultures than recent software companies. The 'recent' upstarts like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc are either powered by massive profit engines or endless VC/investment money. Those places can set standards that aren't achievable by older companies that have lower margins and need to actually show profits. There is also a cultural difference between hardware engineers, who are usually more 'serious engineers' who actually engineer things vs software engineers who are often less rigorous in their architecture and design. HW folks deal with long lead times and can't usually fix errors after production, so that creates a vastly different culture.
- hweng-suckat-sw 6y ago
  Hardware engineers may think they are more serious, but how many hardware engineers take the time to verify the numerics of the finite element, finite difference, or spectral method codes they rely upon for computational electromagnetics, fluid dynamics, quantum or classical mechanics modeling that they often are fully reliant upon to do their jobs. As someone who has spent a career writing tools for internal teams at hardware shops, or at software companies that cater to hardware engineers, I have seen far more rigor in my technical computing software colleagues than I have seen from my hardware engineering colleagues. Most of my hardware engineering colleagues have had no idea what version control is, don’t know or care how floating point calculations can wreak havoc on their models, and can’t craft anything more complex than a straight line Matlab script. Software written by hardware engineers is often atrociously bad, has no tests, and can only run on the machine where it was written. I know I can’t even consider ever asking most of my hardware design engineering colleagues to touch a C compiler or validate the numerics of their models. They just as often prefer to rely upon their magical point and click GUIs or back of the envelope spherical cow based scripts and spreadsheets.
chihuahua 6y ago
I wonder if they still have the sign-in sheet at the entrance where you have to write down your name if you show up after 8am. I bet that didn't attract or retain a lot of top-quality talent.

NobodyNada 6y ago

> employees had to pay for everything (snacks/drinks/etc.). That’s not entirely true, at least in Hillsboro (I interned there recently). Drinks were free, and so was fruit, but you had to pay for e.g. donuts or chips.

rdiddly 6y ago
The fruit's hilarious because if you're a contractor the fruit's not free. It's forbidden fruit.
- NobodyNada 6y ago
  Ah yeah, I forgot to mention that part. Contractors have to pay for a weekly subscription to the drinks and fruit.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Which is not a bad policy. I'm not sure I would want to work somewhere that offered free junk food.

Animats 6y ago

Ah, Intel. Acre-sized floors of tiny cubicles. Everything is grey. Really.[1] I visited Intel HQ once, and it really did look like that. Is it still like that? [1] https://youtu.be/gXReifFHXbY?t=44 https://youtu.be/gXReifFHXbY?t=44

eznzt 6y ago
I was hoping to hear in the background "corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking... just a moment..."
graton 6y ago
Actually that was back when they were nice cubicles. Sure the colors weren't great, but the cubes were about five feet high and relatively big. They blocked out most of the sound and very few visual distractions when you were sitting down. They worked well if you wanted relative peace and quiet to concentrate. Since then they have switched to open-concept with cubes about half the size and walls that are maybe four feet high. So now people have plenty of visual distractions and a lot more noise. Didn't help they added sit-stand desks so you will have people who get on calls while standing and can be heard 30+ feet away.
conradfr 6y ago
In the comments: "I worked there when this was filmed. Immediately following the airing there was so much shame that they launched a whole office redesign and open office concept. Nothing like some well deserved ribbing to shake things up!!!" "The "gray on gray" quip led to an attempt to add color to some office buildings. The open office redesign looked much better than the 80s and 90s cubicles, at least the one I saw in Santa Clara. Much more current, modern aesthetic, without walls. I left the company a couple of years after that so not sure how well it took hold. Friends who stayed said it didn't work out too well but it's been years since then (Conan did this bit in 2007)."
skocznymroczny 6y ago
No. It's all about open space now.

romanoderoma 6y ago

I'm on the opposite side on this I don't need snacks and drinks at work, just water and the occasional coffe, which I get at the bar anyway so I can have a little walk and clear up my mind Workplaces that looks like a teenage dream party give me the chill When I need to relax I stop working entirely and go out I consider more money or more free time (or both) an incentive I appreciate solid forniture, a comfortable seat, big windows with natural light, a nice neighborhood (last work I accepted was because they had an office in Duomo in Milan, the one I have now has an office 5 minutes away from the Colosseum in Rome), I don't care much about "free stuff" Paying for my drinks or snacks it's not what will bankrupt me

rmk 6y ago
Snacks and other tchotchkes have become de rigueur in SV: I haven't had to buy my own lunch or snack for 8+ years now. With the pandemic in force and the prospect of going into an office itself coming into question, companies will have to stop relying on the (lazy but admittedly effective) lure of free snacks and lunch. Good times. On the whole, I agree with you: when I see people crumpled up in bean bags and picking at salad on picnic tables in companies' 'Come work with us' webpages, I get the chills. How very juvenile! But we all know that the industry feeds on a steady influx of juveniles and there's a new batch every summer!
- romanoderoma 6y ago
  To be fair with my employers, they usually paid for my lunches or had a cafeteria, usually not free, but very affordable. It's good to have the option, it's not what drives my decisions. I have no problem with people that see it as a bonus, to each his own, it simply doesn't matter much to me. But maybe SV corporate culture has gone a little bit too far on it.
  - rmk 6y ago
    A lot of the old-school employers run subsidised cafeterias. Cisco used to, back in the day. Pretty decent choices and reasonable pricing, until they started whittling down options making the cafes pretty unattractive compared to surrounding eateries in Milpitas (this was during the '09 recession). I know that Apple still runs them but they are of course notoriously thrifty (I'm pretty sure they don't subsidise as heavily as others). Same with Yahoo. Not sure if we had to pay, but it was pretty reasonable. Soon after that first recession, I started seeing a trend of catered food at smaller places, and completely in-house operations at the larger places. That trend has kept up until the pandemic struck.

01100011 6y ago

Hardware companies, and even some legacy software companies, have very different cultures than recent software companies. The 'recent' upstarts like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc are either powered by massive profit engines or endless VC/investment money. Those places can set standards that aren't achievable by older companies that have lower margins and need to actually show profits. There is also a cultural difference between hardware engineers, who are usually more 'serious engineers' who actually engineer things vs software engineers who are often less rigorous in their architecture and design. HW folks deal with long lead times and can't usually fix errors after production, so that creates a vastly different culture.

hweng-suckat-sw 6y ago
Hardware engineers may think they are more serious, but how many hardware engineers take the time to verify the numerics of the finite element, finite difference, or spectral method codes they rely upon for computational electromagnetics, fluid dynamics, quantum or classical mechanics modeling that they often are fully reliant upon to do their jobs. As someone who has spent a career writing tools for internal teams at hardware shops, or at software companies that cater to hardware engineers, I have seen far more rigor in my technical computing software colleagues than I have seen from my hardware engineering colleagues. Most of my hardware engineering colleagues have had no idea what version control is, don’t know or care how floating point calculations can wreak havoc on their models, and can’t craft anything more complex than a straight line Matlab script. Software written by hardware engineers is often atrociously bad, has no tests, and can only run on the machine where it was written. I know I can’t even consider ever asking most of my hardware design engineering colleagues to touch a C compiler or validate the numerics of their models. They just as often prefer to rely upon their magical point and click GUIs or back of the envelope spherical cow based scripts and spreadsheets.

chihuahua 6y ago

I wonder if they still have the sign-in sheet at the entrance where you have to write down your name if you show up after 8am. I bet that didn't attract or retain a lot of top-quality talent.