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I had a client that stocked kitchen fridges with free basic foods - drinks, meats, breads, etc. - and quality, healthy stuff too. That always impressed me, send
by wolverine876 4y ago
I had a client that stocked kitchen fridges with free basic foods - drinks, meats, breads, etc. - and quality, healthy stuff too. That always impressed me, sending a simple, strong message that they cared about their employees and people like me, and it had a positive impact on me when I ate my share (and didn't have to worry about taking time to get lunch).
At one point they brought in a relatively large team of contractors to work day and night on a critical, time-sensitive project. A week after the team started I was there, talking casually to the manager. They told me that there were complaints that they were running low on food in the fridge because the contractors were eating it too. What would they do? Ban the contractors, with only arms-length loyalty to the business, working day and night, and on whom the business's fortunes depended, from the kitchens.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago> At one point they brought in a relatively large team of contractors to work day and night on a critical, time-sensitive project. To me that is a huge red sign that something is seriously wrong with the company. Bringing in a bunch of new people and having them work long hours does not seem conducive to good code.
- mlyle 4y agoNot everything is permanent code that has to be maintained forever. Sometimes you have a migration, or a bunch of data to suck in one time from a vendor or acquisition, or whatever. You can run appropriate quality checks to bound the error rate.
- ReactiveJelly 4y agoBut sometimes the most permanent code is the "just once" code.
- wolverine876 4y agoIt wasn't an IT company.
- ls15 4y ago"Be my guest, but don't touch the food!"
- philwelch 4y agoThere's a lot of talk on Twitter the last couple of days about how this is apparently a cultural norm for house guests in Nordic countries!
- na85 4y agoI mean if an electrician or whatever came into my house to do a job, and ate my food without being offered it, I'd consider that extremely rude.
- Nextgrid 4y agoScale and context matters. The loss of a single food item in your own house has a much larger impact than the loss of a single food item in a kitchen stocked to feed dozens of employees - in the former case, your lunch disappeared but in the latter case there's just one less pack of crisps in a box of 100 that nobody will even notice and the positive impact of that (in terms of morale, especially for regular contractors) outweighs the 50c the pack of crisps costs.
- cgriswald 4y agoFor the curious, here is the reddit thread and comment that seems to have started it: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uxz68j/what_is_the_weirdest_thing_you_had_to_do_at/ia1ji6z/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/uxz68j/what_is_t... > @Wowimatard > I remember going to my swedish friends house. > And while we were playing in his room, his mom yelled that dinner was ready. And check this. He told me to WAIT in his room while they ate. > That shit was fucking wild.
- klipt 4y agoSo what do Swedish guests do - bring their own food to others' houses, or just always leave before mealtime?
- tomrod 4y agoAccounting/PeopleOps meets the Real World! Great anecdote. The free meals are a perk paid for by the people creating the revenue. I suspect that perk probably wasn't budgeted for addition to the Contractor work. An oversight, perhaps? Hopefully folks working got fed.