10 ms·

Glad these guys seem to finally be noticing. I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in

Glad these guys seem to finally be noticing. I was a software engineering manager at a lean, high-margin, profitable start-up based in the NYC area starting in the late 2000s. We were acquired in 2014 by a very typical (for the time) SV-based competitor that had raised hundreds of millions in an IPO a few years earlier. Our acquirers had yet to see a single quarter of profit, of course. I and my team had so many good laughs at the attitudes of our CA counterparts. One especially strong memory is when, a week after a particularly dismal quarterly earnings report, a junior engineer based in the HQ of our new corporate overlords sent out a team-wide email complaining about the corporate decision to no longer stock the refrigerators with free fresh blueberries. They bemoaned the lack of respect for the "talent," and tossed in gratis the ubiquitous pseudo-threat "if you don't treat us right, we can always go down the road to an employer who will." On visits to HQ in Redwood City, I marveled at the paradisaical campus-like setting (several buildings around a "quad," with parks, a tennis court, swimming pool, gyms, etc. etc.) and noted the amount of time the local staff spent taking advantage of these amenities. I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Since that was Silicon Valley during one of the many gold rushes, I thought that I must have been "missing something." What seemed like common sense to me was clearly heresy to the golden people there. The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work. I came to realize I wasn't missing anything, they were. That company did end up burning through their cash stockpile, and had to sell a few years later for less than 1/4 of what they paid to acquire us.

excitom 4y ago
I remember a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an Austin-based startup that crashed in 2000. At the company meeting where layoffs were announced, the floor was opened for questions. Someone asked "does this mean the rock climbing wall in the cafeteria won't be completed?"
racl101 4y ago
> Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Yes, that's how it usually works out. By the way, 'perqs' is a peculiar word. English is my second language but I'm used to seeing the word 'perks'.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  The full word is perquisite. Perk is slang.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    Huh. I'm a native English speaker and I've never seen that word in my life. I thought it was a typo for a moment
    - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
      Literally the only other time I've ever seen it spelled out was in a 11th-grade Economics class when I told the teacher that she misspelled "prerequisite" and she explained what a perk was.
  - trebbble 4y ago
    Garner's Modern English Usage covers "perquisite" in order to call out confusion between that word and "prerequisite", but notes in passing that perquisite is "often shortened to perk". No mention of "perq" which, as with other posters, I've personally never seen. In general, if you chose a usage that generates discussion about your language choices, and there was another option that would convey the exact same thing and not generate discussion, it's best to regard that as a mistake.
  - metabagel 4y ago
    There is no such word as "perq" in American English. https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=perq https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=perq Perhaps, it is British English.
mikhael28 4y ago
Ironically, they were smart to acquihire you. It seems like management was aware their employees were bums, and needed your companies energy to infuse some productivity into their lifestyle. Looks like it failed though.
strikelaserclaw 4y ago
A lot of SV engineers in the last 10 years have had it good. Like how people born in America have it good compared to people born in Africa (irrespective of intelligence, hard work, talent etc...). I think that will change.
- rconti 4y ago
  They also said that in the previous 10 years. ... and the 10 years before that...
pugworthy 4y ago
I work for a large company (2 letter name) that has none of those perks, and never really did (at least at most sites). I just perceive the company as being cheap rather than forward looking.
- ninju 4y ago
  So you work for Baskin Robbins :-) https://designbro.com/blog/inspiration/epic-two-letter-logos/ https://designbro.com/blog/inspiration/epic-two-letter-logos...
  - pugworthy 4y ago
    Hardly Possible
Salgat 4y ago
A lot of companies use those perks as an excuse to get their workers to stick around an extra 4+ hours at the office. Of course this doesn't actually help productivity (they simply drag their day and work out longer), but to simple minded managers it sure seems like a huge win.
mgfist 4y ago
Sure but the big faang stocks literally print more money than every other company (idk maybe aramco or berkshire can compete, but nothing else). So something's working there.
- jeffreyrogers 4y ago
  Casinos print money too and farms don't. The amount of cash a business throws off is only somewhat related to how much work it requires and how useful it is.
- metabagel 4y ago
  I think you have it backwards. Highly profitable companies with high growth can afford to be wasteful. Being wasteful isn't what made them successful.
  - ikrenji 4y ago
    idk that this conclusion can be made. maybe the wasteful work culture is what enables them to generate high profits...
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Assuming that in a creative art like programming that efficiency (time spent at keyboard? and cost cutting? you can get 100 staff for the price of 98+ perks!) are the route to profitability is questionable. Add in supply/demand and competition for top talent and skimping on goodies is just bizarre.
- Valakas_ 4y ago
  What's working is that they have basically monopolies. Hard not to make money when there's no competition.
quantumsequoia 4y ago
I am very curious which company this can be, can't think of any companies in Redwood City that match that description
esoterica 4y ago
Unless you got paid more money than your lazy peers it seems like they got a much better deal than you did. Why are you bragging about working harder and getting treated worse than your coworkers?
- swift532 4y ago
  I don't see them as bragging. The first part of the paragraph is their previous "hard-working" perspective, and later comes understanding of the people they were looking down on.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
> I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is far more important than a meeting that can happen at any time - and probably doesn't even need to exist in the first place. Other than that, your points stand.
- bobobob420 4y ago
  This is exactly the mindset of failure. The team standup has 10x more priority than some dumb basketball league
  - jackblemming 4y ago
    Show me the studies on the effectiveness of a daily 10 min standup and I’d be happy to listen. Otherwise I’d be happy to make up some other rituals that sound good on paper and then rationalize them with buzzwords.
    - bobobob420 4y ago
      - 8note 4y ago
        The only particularly useful standup I've been in is when our VP was joining to see if we needed any quick escalations each day for about a week Everything else is fun for memorizing what everyone's doing so I can respond immediately to random questions, but the value is questionable. Everyone else on my team would be better off if I didn't know everything off hand, and instead relied on the proper sources of truth
    - lovich 4y ago
      Speaking as a manager who at least _thinks_ I run stand ups well, I have them run for 5-10 minutes max for 5 people and treat them as an update so that I can run interference on any “status updates” other parts of the company demand across a day, and as the time for the team to tell me what problems I need to go fix for the team to be productive. I usually leave a standup with a list of 1-3 people I need to go talk to, to either move the code through bureaucratic processes, or an actual decision to make on which projects we’ll take on based on information found while engineering. That said I also don’t care if my people say they have nothing of note and skip the meeting
015a 4y ago
You know; there are two sides to view this coin from: either "those tech people are insane with all their beautiful buildings, great perks, and fantastic work-life balance" or "those tech people are forward-looking with how we could just make work less shitty for everyone, if only other industries would catch on". I'm sad that even many on here seem to be opting for the "insane" line of thinking, and not recognizing that Work Should Be This Way For Everyone. Its not insane to want to work 20 hour weeks. Its not insane to think working in a concrete windowless office building is uninspiring (our species built twenty story cathedrals to celebrate God; architecture matters; outdoor space matters). Its not insane to want some snacks & drinks throughout the 8+ hour work day (at least until we solve, you know, that pesky human drive called Hunger). Some of y'all would rather wrestle with pigs in the mud than recognize that, maybe, there shouldn't be any mud at all. But, after all, capitalism is brain worms which convince you the system is optimal when everything sucks for the very people who keep it going. Rest assured, the CEO has a secretary who will go buy fresh blueberries on the company card the moment he desires them.
- buildbot 4y ago
  Right? Like WTF are people so happy about, unless they are looking forward to exploiting workers more… It is telling when small perks that don’t effect the bottom line are cut.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  That's how you lose to hungrier competitors. TikTok engineers don't work 4 hours a day. Back in the day when Google Plus was coming out, FB engineers didn't work 4 hours a day either [1]. That's how they killed it in the cradle. If you want a chill work life balance, 20 hour weeks, etc. then you can have that. But maybe you won't have the $400k salary that big tech pays anymore. [1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-led-facebooks-war-to-crush-google-plus https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-...
  - qazwse_ 4y ago
    Yeah, they're probably working some gruelling 996 schedule, I guess we'll all need to go back to accepting 12 hours a day, 6 days a week to compete. https://www.ft.com/content/174ed2e2-f88e-4759-9a7f-133629aab94a https://www.ft.com/content/174ed2e2-f88e-4759-9a7f-133629aab...
shagie 4y ago
> The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work. {soapbox} I believe a lot of companies are trying to establish a third place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/02/28/20030228/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/02/28/20030228/ ) to help transition new grads and young adults from a college atmosphere to a professional atmosphere... but putting a lot of emphasis on having that third place. Having it _also_ means that employees tend to stay later at work. Things like https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/custom-woodworking/cabinet-making-case-studies/Woodshop-Facebooks-Latest-Geek-Perk-229134491.html https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/custom-woodworking/cabine... These are ways to use excess money in a way that rewards employees and makes some of the aspects hard to leave ("I could switch companies but then I'd lose the woodshop!") but it also sets up another set of problems in the nature of the third place - that its not work. The coffee shop that you show up to outside of work shouldn't have a manager / employee relationship between the patrons, but the coffee shop on the campus of a big company - that's harder. It is those third space encroachments where the company is sponsoring it and yet the company wanting to not be political / social / getting into those HR issues, but yet the invariably show up there that lead to articles about how the company is going to be not political, or that half the staff is leaving because the company took a certain stance in a not-3rd space. These third space encroachments where company life is used as a substitute for one's own hobbies and stepping beyond the college life atmosphere is where companies have social problems. {/soapbox}
- dpedu 4y ago
  I don't think the Facebook woodshop fits the definition of a Third place. It's just another room at your employer's office. People using this facility are still AT work, just not working and anything that happens there is going to happen by your employer's rules. Perhaps this view is affected by my personal stance of never ever ever using employer-owned perks like this because it's just a trick to keep you there longer. I much prefer to pay for access to a hackerspace than use that shop facebook offers. And, wouldn't a hackerspace be a true Third place anyway?
  - 4y ago
jrockway 4y ago
I see where you're coming from. One of the pieces of cognitive dissonance I had at Google was that I always had so much work to do, and there were just so many people around the office chilling out; waiting in long lines for free food, playing ping pong, making themselves an espresso. I never really felt like I had time for that; I got a grab and go sandwich and drip coffee and then hung out at my desk for 8 hours. I started the day with an infinite amount of work, and ended the day with an infinite amount of work. The melancholy of a good idea is that working on it just yields more good ideas; no matter how much work you get done, you'll always be making more. The downside to my approach is that I super burned out. I had "strongly exceeding expectations" for 2 quarters, then my project was cancelled so I switched teams and went on a PIP. Indeed, I flat up stopped showing up to work. (I was so bitter about the fact that I lined up a new job immediately, but people that didn't do that got 6 months of paid vacation to explore other teams. I got nothing, and I needed it bad. The company doctor did give me antidepressants and some unpaid leave though. Thanks for that, turns out antidepressants don't treat burnout.) I didn't even know that burnout was a thing back then, but if I did, I would know that making sure that you jam in 40 hours of programming and meetings into every week without taking a break isn't that healthy or productive over the long term. All these people chatting in the lunch line or playing ping pong or doing an aggressive workout and then showering in the middle of the day were optimizing for their long-term productivity. 1 hour less task-doing today, 10 extra years in their career. Not a bad tradeoff at all. At a startup, you might not be able to afford that; by the time you're burned out, you've already sold your company and are retired, so it's all good. But at a big company, it makes a lot of sense; talent acquisition is expensive and if you can get 10 years out of someone instead of 6 months, you're going to be a lot more successful. And there's that uncomfortable medium where that extreme productivity didn't actually make a business that can afford to not burn people out, but now everyone's burned out. A lot of companies are in that state, and there isn't an easy way out of that without a time machine. Engineers that call you out on you burning them out are absolutely right to complain. The basketball game is a much better use of their time than the standup. Standups only matter to people organizing the project; the meeting is only for your benefit. It saves you the time of reading their commits and design docs, sitting in on their engineering discussions, soliciting feedback when writing performance reviews, etc. The actual creative work of software engineering is done when your head is free from distractions and anything you don't need to know about. A walk around the quad or a basketball game is a great way to chew on the ideas, discard all that's unnecessary, and set you up for the 4 hours where you physically translate a quarter's worth of thinking into code that can be checked in. At the end of the day, it's not really the software engineer's fault for the company losing money. Businesses fail because there is not a plan for making money and the actual engineering tasks are irrelevant. "Sprint 12323: rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic." is what 90% of software engineers are doing right now. They are right to go elsewhere when your business plan is so bad that the company can't even afford blueberries. Do you really think that if people just sat in front of their computer for 30 more minutes a day, or provided better updates in their standup, that the bad idea of a company would be saved? Some companies just weren't meant to be. VCs are very bad at not giving these companies money, though, so there are a lot of people running in circles doing nothing as they slowly realize they never should have started the company. Ultimately, you can't blame the nice campus or intramural basketball league for that.
compiler-guy 4y ago
re: No more blueberries: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
kortilla 4y ago
That is a big pile of specious reasoning. All of the things you listed could have had effectively no meaningful impact on the bottom line. There are tech companies that absolutely print money and have those perks. There are also companies that grind and don’t turn out shit. If fresh blueberries for software engineers are gonna wreck you, you aren’t in a business worth doing.
allenu 4y ago
I agree that there is definitely a sense of entitlement in this industry, especially with these larger companies. On the other hand, if you’re coming from a startup, you’re going to be way more incentivized to put in the work since that ultimately determines your future (and likely, your pay). These guys playing basketball in the middle of the day are getting paid either way, regardless of how well their projects turn out. I don’t blame them. I’ve been at those cushy jobs and doing extra work often doesn’t get rewarded anyway, so you may as well maximize your quality of life.

excitom 4y ago

I remember a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an Austin-based startup that crashed in 2000. At the company meeting where layoffs were announced, the floor was opened for questions. Someone asked "does this mean the rock climbing wall in the cafeteria won't be completed?"

racl101 4y ago

> Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Yes, that's how it usually works out. By the way, 'perqs' is a peculiar word. English is my second language but I'm used to seeing the word 'perks'.

rootusrootus 4y ago
The full word is perquisite. Perk is slang.
- brundolf 4y ago
  Huh. I'm a native English speaker and I've never seen that word in my life. I thought it was a typo for a moment
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    Literally the only other time I've ever seen it spelled out was in a 11th-grade Economics class when I told the teacher that she misspelled "prerequisite" and she explained what a perk was.
- trebbble 4y ago
  Garner's Modern English Usage covers "perquisite" in order to call out confusion between that word and "prerequisite", but notes in passing that perquisite is "often shortened to perk". No mention of "perq" which, as with other posters, I've personally never seen. In general, if you chose a usage that generates discussion about your language choices, and there was another option that would convey the exact same thing and not generate discussion, it's best to regard that as a mistake.
- metabagel 4y ago
  There is no such word as "perq" in American English. https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=perq https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=perq Perhaps, it is British English.

mikhael28 4y ago

Ironically, they were smart to acquihire you. It seems like management was aware their employees were bums, and needed your companies energy to infuse some productivity into their lifestyle. Looks like it failed though.

strikelaserclaw 4y ago

A lot of SV engineers in the last 10 years have had it good. Like how people born in America have it good compared to people born in Africa (irrespective of intelligence, hard work, talent etc...). I think that will change.

rconti 4y ago
They also said that in the previous 10 years. ... and the 10 years before that...

pugworthy 4y ago

I work for a large company (2 letter name) that has none of those perks, and never really did (at least at most sites). I just perceive the company as being cheap rather than forward looking.

ninju 4y ago
So you work for Baskin Robbins :-) https://designbro.com/blog/inspiration/epic-two-letter-logos/ https://designbro.com/blog/inspiration/epic-two-letter-logos...
- pugworthy 4y ago
  Hardly Possible

Salgat 4y ago

A lot of companies use those perks as an excuse to get their workers to stick around an extra 4+ hours at the office. Of course this doesn't actually help productivity (they simply drag their day and work out longer), but to simple minded managers it sure seems like a huge win.

mgfist 4y ago

Sure but the big faang stocks literally print more money than every other company (idk maybe aramco or berkshire can compete, but nothing else). So something's working there.

jeffreyrogers 4y ago
Casinos print money too and farms don't. The amount of cash a business throws off is only somewhat related to how much work it requires and how useful it is.
metabagel 4y ago
I think you have it backwards. Highly profitable companies with high growth can afford to be wasteful. Being wasteful isn't what made them successful.
- ikrenji 4y ago
  idk that this conclusion can be made. maybe the wasteful work culture is what enables them to generate high profits...
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Assuming that in a creative art like programming that efficiency (time spent at keyboard? and cost cutting? you can get 100 staff for the price of 98+ perks!) are the route to profitability is questionable. Add in supply/demand and competition for top talent and skimping on goodies is just bizarre.
Valakas_ 4y ago
What's working is that they have basically monopolies. Hard not to make money when there's no competition.

quantumsequoia 4y ago

I am very curious which company this can be, can't think of any companies in Redwood City that match that description

esoterica 4y ago

Unless you got paid more money than your lazy peers it seems like they got a much better deal than you did. Why are you bragging about working harder and getting treated worse than your coworkers?

swift532 4y ago
I don't see them as bragging. The first part of the paragraph is their previous "hard-working" perspective, and later comes understanding of the people they were looking down on.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

> I remember the engineers on my team from HQ explaining to me that my proposed stand-up meeting schedule wouldn't work beacuse their intramural basketball league scheduled their games for that time. Meanwhile, in our low-perqs atmosphere in NY, distractions were limited and productivity was high. We also all made money. Your standup meeting could've been an email. Their immovable basketball game (quality of life) is far more important than a meeting that can happen at any time - and probably doesn't even need to exist in the first place. Other than that, your points stand.

bobobob420 4y ago
This is exactly the mindset of failure. The team standup has 10x more priority than some dumb basketball league
- jackblemming 4y ago
  Show me the studies on the effectiveness of a daily 10 min standup and I’d be happy to listen. Otherwise I’d be happy to make up some other rituals that sound good on paper and then rationalize them with buzzwords.
  - bobobob420 4y ago
    - 8note 4y ago
      The only particularly useful standup I've been in is when our VP was joining to see if we needed any quick escalations each day for about a week Everything else is fun for memorizing what everyone's doing so I can respond immediately to random questions, but the value is questionable. Everyone else on my team would be better off if I didn't know everything off hand, and instead relied on the proper sources of truth
  - lovich 4y ago
    Speaking as a manager who at least _thinks_ I run stand ups well, I have them run for 5-10 minutes max for 5 people and treat them as an update so that I can run interference on any “status updates” other parts of the company demand across a day, and as the time for the team to tell me what problems I need to go fix for the team to be productive. I usually leave a standup with a list of 1-3 people I need to go talk to, to either move the code through bureaucratic processes, or an actual decision to make on which projects we’ll take on based on information found while engineering. That said I also don’t care if my people say they have nothing of note and skip the meeting

015a 4y ago

You know; there are two sides to view this coin from: either "those tech people are insane with all their beautiful buildings, great perks, and fantastic work-life balance" or "those tech people are forward-looking with how we could just make work less shitty for everyone, if only other industries would catch on". I'm sad that even many on here seem to be opting for the "insane" line of thinking, and not recognizing that Work Should Be This Way For Everyone. Its not insane to want to work 20 hour weeks. Its not insane to think working in a concrete windowless office building is uninspiring (our species built twenty story cathedrals to celebrate God; architecture matters; outdoor space matters). Its not insane to want some snacks & drinks throughout the 8+ hour work day (at least until we solve, you know, that pesky human drive called Hunger). Some of y'all would rather wrestle with pigs in the mud than recognize that, maybe, there shouldn't be any mud at all. But, after all, capitalism is brain worms which convince you the system is optimal when everything sucks for the very people who keep it going. Rest assured, the CEO has a secretary who will go buy fresh blueberries on the company card the moment he desires them.

buildbot 4y ago
Right? Like WTF are people so happy about, unless they are looking forward to exploiting workers more… It is telling when small perks that don’t effect the bottom line are cut.
ceeplusplus 4y ago
That's how you lose to hungrier competitors. TikTok engineers don't work 4 hours a day. Back in the day when Google Plus was coming out, FB engineers didn't work 4 hours a day either [1]. That's how they killed it in the cradle. If you want a chill work life balance, 20 hour weeks, etc. then you can have that. But maybe you won't have the $400k salary that big tech pays anymore. [1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-led-facebooks-war-to-crush-google-plus https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-...
- qazwse_ 4y ago
  Yeah, they're probably working some gruelling 996 schedule, I guess we'll all need to go back to accepting 12 hours a day, 6 days a week to compete. https://www.ft.com/content/174ed2e2-f88e-4759-9a7f-133629aab94a https://www.ft.com/content/174ed2e2-f88e-4759-9a7f-133629aab...

shagie 4y ago

> The explanation I arrived at was that such perqs were the necessary counterpart to an expectation that your employees have no life other than work. {soapbox} I believe a lot of companies are trying to establish a third place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/02/28/20030228/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/02/28/20030228/ ) to help transition new grads and young adults from a college atmosphere to a professional atmosphere... but putting a lot of emphasis on having that third place. Having it _also_ means that employees tend to stay later at work. Things like https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/custom-woodworking/cabinet-making-case-studies/Woodshop-Facebooks-Latest-Geek-Perk-229134491.html https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/custom-woodworking/cabine... These are ways to use excess money in a way that rewards employees and makes some of the aspects hard to leave ("I could switch companies but then I'd lose the woodshop!") but it also sets up another set of problems in the nature of the third place - that its not work. The coffee shop that you show up to outside of work shouldn't have a manager / employee relationship between the patrons, but the coffee shop on the campus of a big company - that's harder. It is those third space encroachments where the company is sponsoring it and yet the company wanting to not be political / social / getting into those HR issues, but yet the invariably show up there that lead to articles about how the company is going to be not political, or that half the staff is leaving because the company took a certain stance in a not-3rd space. These third space encroachments where company life is used as a substitute for one's own hobbies and stepping beyond the college life atmosphere is where companies have social problems. {/soapbox}

dpedu 4y ago
I don't think the Facebook woodshop fits the definition of a Third place. It's just another room at your employer's office. People using this facility are still AT work, just not working and anything that happens there is going to happen by your employer's rules. Perhaps this view is affected by my personal stance of never ever ever using employer-owned perks like this because it's just a trick to keep you there longer. I much prefer to pay for access to a hackerspace than use that shop facebook offers. And, wouldn't a hackerspace be a true Third place anyway?
- 4y ago

jrockway 4y ago

I see where you're coming from. One of the pieces of cognitive dissonance I had at Google was that I always had so much work to do, and there were just so many people around the office chilling out; waiting in long lines for free food, playing ping pong, making themselves an espresso. I never really felt like I had time for that; I got a grab and go sandwich and drip coffee and then hung out at my desk for 8 hours. I started the day with an infinite amount of work, and ended the day with an infinite amount of work. The melancholy of a good idea is that working on it just yields more good ideas; no matter how much work you get done, you'll always be making more. The downside to my approach is that I super burned out. I had "strongly exceeding expectations" for 2 quarters, then my project was cancelled so I switched teams and went on a PIP. Indeed, I flat up stopped showing up to work. (I was so bitter about the fact that I lined up a new job immediately, but people that didn't do that got 6 months of paid vacation to explore other teams. I got nothing, and I needed it bad. The company doctor did give me antidepressants and some unpaid leave though. Thanks for that, turns out antidepressants don't treat burnout.) I didn't even know that burnout was a thing back then, but if I did, I would know that making sure that you jam in 40 hours of programming and meetings into every week without taking a break isn't that healthy or productive over the long term. All these people chatting in the lunch line or playing ping pong or doing an aggressive workout and then showering in the middle of the day were optimizing for their long-term productivity. 1 hour less task-doing today, 10 extra years in their career. Not a bad tradeoff at all. At a startup, you might not be able to afford that; by the time you're burned out, you've already sold your company and are retired, so it's all good. But at a big company, it makes a lot of sense; talent acquisition is expensive and if you can get 10 years out of someone instead of 6 months, you're going to be a lot more successful. And there's that uncomfortable medium where that extreme productivity didn't actually make a business that can afford to not burn people out, but now everyone's burned out. A lot of companies are in that state, and there isn't an easy way out of that without a time machine. Engineers that call you out on you burning them out are absolutely right to complain. The basketball game is a much better use of their time than the standup. Standups only matter to people organizing the project; the meeting is only for your benefit. It saves you the time of reading their commits and design docs, sitting in on their engineering discussions, soliciting feedback when writing performance reviews, etc. The actual creative work of software engineering is done when your head is free from distractions and anything you don't need to know about. A walk around the quad or a basketball game is a great way to chew on the ideas, discard all that's unnecessary, and set you up for the 4 hours where you physically translate a quarter's worth of thinking into code that can be checked in. At the end of the day, it's not really the software engineer's fault for the company losing money. Businesses fail because there is not a plan for making money and the actual engineering tasks are irrelevant. "Sprint 12323: rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic." is what 90% of software engineers are doing right now. They are right to go elsewhere when your business plan is so bad that the company can't even afford blueberries. Do you really think that if people just sat in front of their computer for 30 more minutes a day, or provided better updates in their standup, that the bad idea of a company would be saved? Some companies just weren't meant to be. VCs are very bad at not giving these companies money, though, so there are a lot of people running in circles doing nothing as they slowly realize they never should have started the company. Ultimately, you can't blame the nice campus or intramural basketball league for that.

compiler-guy 4y ago

re: No more blueberries: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

kortilla 4y ago

That is a big pile of specious reasoning. All of the things you listed could have had effectively no meaningful impact on the bottom line. There are tech companies that absolutely print money and have those perks. There are also companies that grind and don’t turn out shit. If fresh blueberries for software engineers are gonna wreck you, you aren’t in a business worth doing.

allenu 4y ago

I agree that there is definitely a sense of entitlement in this industry, especially with these larger companies. On the other hand, if you’re coming from a startup, you’re going to be way more incentivized to put in the work since that ultimately determines your future (and likely, your pay). These guys playing basketball in the middle of the day are getting paid either way, regardless of how well their projects turn out. I don’t blame them. I’ve been at those cushy jobs and doing extra work often doesn’t get rewarded anyway, so you may as well maximize your quality of life.