12 ms·

This reminds me of a great blog post, Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Facebook by Philip Su (http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebook/ http://wor

by jmduke 13y ago

This reminds me of a great blog post, Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Facebook by Philip Su (http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebook/ http://worldofsu.com/philipsu/goodbye-microsoft-hello-facebo...): We used to get Dove Bars and beers all the time. It felt like free food was on offer at least once a week, usually with a pretense of some small milestone to celebrate. Why did we cut stuff like this? (I know the boring fiscal reasons why. I’m asking the deeper why, as in, “Was it worth the savings? Is Microsoft better now that we’ve cut these costs?”) One day, a sign appeared on a soda fridge in RedWest saying something to the effect of, “Did you know that drinks cost Microsoft [ed: millions of dollars] a year? Sodas are your perk at work. Don’t bring them home.” This depressed me on too many levels to enumerate, but I’ll toss out a few: - Someone had enough time to get these signs professionally printed and affixed to our fridges. - It was someone’s salaried, 40-hour-a-week job to do things like this. - Someone thought soda smuggling was a big enough “problem” at Microsoft to draw attention to it.

ajross 13y ago
Hm... more like: someone was smuggling sodas out of the building that were offered in good faith as an office perk. Frankly that would affect my morale more than even the removal would. What does it say about an office culture where that kind of petty thievery is tolerated? Honestly my feeling (and to be clear: like this whole subject this is subjective) would be that this response is not enough: better to name and shame the offenders.
- Anderkent 13y ago
  Define smuggling. If I pick up a soda when leaving the office, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong. If I start taking boxes, that might be an issue.
  - ajross 13y ago
    I think we both know that's not the situation at hand. Even Microsoft isn't going to go around writing HR nonsense about the occasional soda taken home. Really, this attitude is precisely the problem. You're looking at this as a confrontation from the start. Perks like this only work if they're offered and accepted in good faith. If you don't trust your employer to interpret your soda consumption charitably, your employer is getting no benefit from offering it. Basically, if you want your employer to offer snacks and soda, be grateful about it and don't look for trouble.
    - stormbrew 13y ago
      > Even Microsoft isn't going to go around writing HR nonsense about the occasional soda taken home. Well, if they're spending millions on it in general then many employees taking 1 or 2 home every day is actually probably a much greater financial 'burden' on them than a handful of employees taking entire flats every now and then. And you also don't tend to put up signs like that unless your goal is to change everyone's behaviour.
      - marshray 13y ago
        > many employees taking 1 or 2 home every day It is kind of staggering to think of 90,000 employees times 2 sodas every workday.
        wnight 13y ago
        And yet if those employees wanted soda, what's another truck out of what must be hundreds already, coming to the company? Yes, it'd be 90k * 2 * the rock-bottom wholesale price of a can of pop, but if your employees want it and it saves them time in their salaried day, it's likely worth it. Those 90,000 employees cost about $45M a day to employ, $35k on drinks is meaningless. Especially against the PR disaster of a thread full of potential employees hearing you hide the soda at night. But, as someone said, if someone is stealing from you and views it that way you should deal with them personally, directly, and immediately. Passive-aggressively hiding soda is only going to make them switch to office supplies, if you're lucky.
      - marcosdumay 13y ago
        > And you also don't tend to put up signs like that unless your goal is to change everyone's behaviour. Yes, "you" do. You specificaly may not do that, probably most people around here will not do that, but lots and lots of people do, enough so that most signs are put down by this kind of people.
  - MartinCron 13y ago
    I knew people at MSFT who would take dozens of cans the free soda and beverage fridges to fuel their at-home weekend parties. This was over ten years ago now, I have no idea what the state of soda smuggling is today.
  - illuminate 13y ago
    I've grabbed a few for mixers at home. I don't fill my bag with them. It's a fairly loose delimiter.
- rdl 13y ago
  I'm curious what the dividing line is. I don't think taking a drink or even two with you for the drive home is particularly bad (I've certainly done it when visiting various places). Cases of soda for home, bad. Office supplies which are used for work at home, probably fine, but could look bad.
  - jerf 13y ago
    In my perhaps limited experience, people rarely ride the line. As they get away with things, they get more brazen, so there turns out not to be much middle ground in practice between the OK "one for the road" and carting things out by the case.
    - s_kilk 13y ago
      It's also often the case that most participants are playing fair, but there are one or two who step way over the line. A friend of mine used to work in a place selling baked goods. One of the perks was that if there were any cookies left over at the end of a shift then the staff could take some before the batch got dumped. This went on happily for years until one day an email came in from head-office, stating that all food was to be dumped at the end, no freebies, etc. turned out that a manager at another store had been deliberately baking up huge batches of food to be taken home at the end of the night (think a few crates of cookies to cover the neighbours kids birthday that weekend), far beyond what had been considered fair game by the company. These kinds of perks always seem to get ruined by that one idiot who goes overboard.
      - RyJones 13y ago
        This was how we lost a discount on GE appliances at Microsoft; too many employees buying and flipping the appliances. Same thing with our (super sweet) video card discounts; 75% off video cards straight from nVidia lasted about six months.
      - katbyte 13y ago
        I don't understand that reaction, one person did it so EVERYONE must be punished? Why not simply fire the person, charge them with theft, and sue them to recover costs making an example of them for anyone else who may consider doing it?
- danielweber 13y ago
  Yeah, I worked at a small company where someone was taking boxes of snacks home. It's quite noticeable and managers can't keep up with that, nor can they really guard it.
- jemfinch 13y ago
  Smuggling? Really? Why does Microsoft care where I drink my soda? My brain doesn't turn off at 5pm: last night I was up until 3am, at home, figuring out some bug my change introduced. Yes, I drank an employer-provided Diet Mountain Dew that I brought home. No, my employer doesn't care. Perks are for people, not locations: as long as I'm drinking the soda, Google doesn't care where I drink it.
  - ethomson 13y ago
    It sounds to me like you're suggesting that this sign went up because somebody took a single Diet Mountain Dew home. I strongly suspect that some joker took a case of Diet Mountain Dew home and said "what!? they're free!" when he or she was caught. And I don't think you're suggesting that it's okay to take a case of soda from work. It's a software company, after all, not a grocery store.
  - marshray 13y ago
    It's interesting to see how people interpret the intent of 'complimentary drinks in the office kitchen'. Would you take home a bunch of sodas if you were going to have a party that weekend? What if your party guests were exclusively other employees? What if your party guests were partially other employees, their families, and some unrelated families? Would you drink an employer-provided soda at home if you weren't thinking about work? What if you were at the office and not thinking about work?
    - jemfinch 13y ago
      No. I could, but I wouldn't. Too much work, and I'm paid well enough that it's easier just to buy soda. No. Yes, I do it all the time. Yes, I do it all the time.
      - illuminate 13y ago
        As a former contractor, I saw the occasional bag full of milk cartons. I find it weird. I don't think it's worth a crackdown or treating the employees like babies, though. It is true that no matter how much you pay a person, they can still be cheap and "exploit" a resource. I don't think it's important enough to worry about on the whole.
- philwelch 13y ago
  I've heard stories of long internal flamewars over this. Apparently loading a case of free bottled water into the trunk of your car is not very "Googly".
- nathan_long 13y ago
  Only an extreme level of soda-stealing would be an actual financial problem, but I agree that the office culture would be the real issue. It's the same with any perk. Flexible schedules are nice, but not if people don't work at all. An equipment budget is nice, but not if people use it to buy stuff for their friends. If my teammates were dishonest like this, I'd feel uncomfortable working with them. But in any case, I much prefer that those individuals be confronted than that the perk be taken away from everyone.
  - FireBeyond 13y ago
    Right. If my co-worker has no problem stealing hundreds of dollars or more a week of stuff, perhaps they have no problem stealing from me, my backpack, or my wallet.
    - nathan_long 13y ago
      Even more important for the company, such a person shouldn't be trusted with SSH access, database access, etc. Another reason to fire them rather than penalize everyone.
    - boomzilla 13y ago
      Or work credits. I've seen many correlations between small, petty behaviors and plainly stealing work credits from co-workers.
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  How about this. I'll kick in $10-20 a month (how much does a soda can cost in bulk, 25 cents?), you don't ruin morale because someone is "smuggling" soda out of the office.
  - ajross 13y ago
    If I catch you walking out with a case of soda unpunished, my morale is already "ruined" and that $20 is just an insult. That's not how you see things? Too bad. Morale is subjective. The point here, which you missed, is that all these perks only work if everyone plays by a sane set of rules and doesn't try to stretch things to their advantage. Having free soda is fine. Playing games with what you're allowed to get away with wrecks things for all of us even if you never get punished.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      I wasn't saying I was taking the pop. I'm saying I'll pay $10-20/month to cover the loss for whomever is taking the pop. Whiners ruin it for everyone.
      - pyre 13y ago
        But if they do catch the person taking the soda, is that the kind of person that you want working with you? Maybe it depends for you, but some people would be uncomfortable with that.
        toomuchtodo 13y ago
        I've worked with psychopaths. Like, straight up would slaughter you in your sleep for your last dollar. So yeah, smuggling pop? I couldn't give less fucks.
        ajross 13y ago
        And if you were working with clones of yourself, that would be a sensible argument. As it is, we're talking about the workplace as a whole. And dismissing the people who give more fucks as "whiners" is hardly helping. Basically: you're part of the problem, and one of the reasons companies find it hard to offer perks like this.
malexw 13y ago
That's how the free pop at RIM ended. The story I heard is that Mike L saw an employee loading flats of coke into the trunk of their car one day, and the free pop ended shortly after that.
- jdminhbg 13y ago
  That's interesting. The story here is always "taking away free sodas is just an indicator that things are screwed up and the company has lost its way." I wonder if it actually goes one step deeper -- the fact that employees are willing or feel justified in lifting flats of free soda is the first indicator that the company is screwed; taking away free drinks is just the more visible manifestation of that.
  - malexw 13y ago
    That's a really interesting point, actually. Though I should mention that the free pop ended long before RIM hit their peak. It was gone by 2007 (along with the Wednesday movie nights), but I don't know exactly when either of those ended.
  - 300bps 13y ago
    >the fact that employees are willing or feel justified in lifting flats of free soda is the first indicator that the company is screwed Interesting theory but the major flaw I see is that the Employee Is Not Always Right. Often times, you get someone who is just a Jerk. Such people often think along the lines of, "Free soda is a perk, there is no explicit rule limiting the amount of soda I can use so I am within my rights to take as much as I can carry."
    - gwillen 13y ago
      I wonder what the fraction of such people is, in an average company. I've encountered people before whose feeling is "if there's no written rule against it, I'm entitled to do it." Is the best solution to the "soda problem" just to fire those people and be done with it? I'm sure they take liberties with more than just sodas.
QEDturtles 13y ago
The chances of someone in the habit of smuggling home soda stopping because of that sign are close to nil.
- rodgerd 13y ago
  That's possibly true. However, having had the experience of someone show up to a disciplinary meeting to argue that he couldn't be sacked for spending hours a week looking at porn on his work computer, because there wasn't a specific line item in the workplace manuals or codes of conduct saying so, you'd be surprised at what people will argue to avoid getting fired when they're doing something anyone without some serious mental or moral impairment would recognise as not OK. Or, to put it another way, every bizarre rule or sign usually has a story behind it.
RyJones 13y ago
My experience at Microsoft was having a fellow FTE loading up a cooler full of "free drinks" and shopping bags of kitchen supplies to use at home, then make weak excuses when asked WTF he was doing.
- curiousDog 13y ago
  You should definitely report him to HR. This is just stupid
  - RyJones 13y ago
    This was 2005 or 2006. He's moved on the greener pastures, as have I
FireBeyond 13y ago
I worked in RedWest a few years ago. People were fired, more than one, because they were caught bringing in -roller luggage- multiple times a week to fill with varying drinks. It was only noticed and a problem because Catering noticed they were needing to refill those fridges more than twice as much (and there were four commercial sliding glass door fridges) - so a group of people were taking multiple fridges a week home. That's probably in the order of a couple of thousand dollars a week. -That- was the problem. Not people like me who might grab a can of Talking Rain as we left the office for the commute home. So when the smuggling ""problem"" amounted to thousands of dollars a week of goods going missing from one building/floor alone, then yes, they drew attention to it. As for his other points: - Microsoft has its own inhouse printing departments. It was hardly a project in itself to arrange for a small plastic sign to be made and glued. - Yes, Catering has people whose salaried, 40 hour a week job is to handle the logistics of food ordering, and predict supply and demand. People like this are needed when you have upwards of 50,000 people working in your facility. - a $100,000/year theft problem is worthy of most people's attention. If you're stealing multiple commercial fridges-worth of soda a week, it's not even that you're taking it home - you're almost certainly reselling it. So it's not even a perk, it's a commercial gain. Maybe I should have been raiding the Office Supplies and selling them, a la Dilbert.
- nobodysfool 13y ago
  My company solved the problem by installing a soda fountain.
  - marshray 13y ago
    Soda fountains are awesome but need daily cleaning by food service staff to avoid bacterial badness.
  - ChiperSoft 13y ago
    Fountains stops people from emptying the fridge, but it doesn't stop them from filling up two liters. This was a problem at one of the cinemas I worked at as a teenager. Management had to crack down on "abuse of the free soda policy" after they realized we were going through way more syrup than we should be.
reeses 13y ago
RedWest was kind of like,"Not really Microsoft" to those of us on the main campus. You were closer to Nintendo than you were to us. :-) I remember taking the campus bus there not long after it opened and it was a much different world. It was a very clear sign that MSFT had become a "big" company. Passing dozens of "Herbalife" signs on the way just reinforced that. The biggest "cost" issue we had was a) don't print if you don't have to, and b) if you have to, use the back side of previously printed paper. That was more environmental-green vs financial-green, though. Then I went to Amazon, and it was a whole new world of getting no perks whatsoever. Non-adjustable "desks", the slowest development machines possible, and a bunch of false economies around operations and infrastructure.

by jmduke 13y ago

ajross 13y ago

Hm... more like: someone was smuggling sodas out of the building that were offered in good faith as an office perk. Frankly that would affect my morale more than even the removal would. What does it say about an office culture where that kind of petty thievery is tolerated? Honestly my feeling (and to be clear: like this whole subject this is subjective) would be that this response is not enough: better to name and shame the offenders.

Anderkent 13y ago
Define smuggling. If I pick up a soda when leaving the office, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong. If I start taking boxes, that might be an issue.
- ajross 13y ago
  I think we both know that's not the situation at hand. Even Microsoft isn't going to go around writing HR nonsense about the occasional soda taken home. Really, this attitude is precisely the problem. You're looking at this as a confrontation from the start. Perks like this only work if they're offered and accepted in good faith. If you don't trust your employer to interpret your soda consumption charitably, your employer is getting no benefit from offering it. Basically, if you want your employer to offer snacks and soda, be grateful about it and don't look for trouble.
  - stormbrew 13y ago
    > Even Microsoft isn't going to go around writing HR nonsense about the occasional soda taken home. Well, if they're spending millions on it in general then many employees taking 1 or 2 home every day is actually probably a much greater financial 'burden' on them than a handful of employees taking entire flats every now and then. And you also don't tend to put up signs like that unless your goal is to change everyone's behaviour.
    - marshray 13y ago
      > many employees taking 1 or 2 home every day It is kind of staggering to think of 90,000 employees times 2 sodas every workday.
      - wnight 13y ago
        And yet if those employees wanted soda, what's another truck out of what must be hundreds already, coming to the company? Yes, it'd be 90k * 2 * the rock-bottom wholesale price of a can of pop, but if your employees want it and it saves them time in their salaried day, it's likely worth it. Those 90,000 employees cost about $45M a day to employ, $35k on drinks is meaningless. Especially against the PR disaster of a thread full of potential employees hearing you hide the soda at night. But, as someone said, if someone is stealing from you and views it that way you should deal with them personally, directly, and immediately. Passive-aggressively hiding soda is only going to make them switch to office supplies, if you're lucky.
    - marcosdumay 13y ago
      > And you also don't tend to put up signs like that unless your goal is to change everyone's behaviour. Yes, "you" do. You specificaly may not do that, probably most people around here will not do that, but lots and lots of people do, enough so that most signs are put down by this kind of people.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  I knew people at MSFT who would take dozens of cans the free soda and beverage fridges to fuel their at-home weekend parties. This was over ten years ago now, I have no idea what the state of soda smuggling is today.
- illuminate 13y ago
  I've grabbed a few for mixers at home. I don't fill my bag with them. It's a fairly loose delimiter.
rdl 13y ago
I'm curious what the dividing line is. I don't think taking a drink or even two with you for the drive home is particularly bad (I've certainly done it when visiting various places). Cases of soda for home, bad. Office supplies which are used for work at home, probably fine, but could look bad.
- jerf 13y ago
  In my perhaps limited experience, people rarely ride the line. As they get away with things, they get more brazen, so there turns out not to be much middle ground in practice between the OK "one for the road" and carting things out by the case.
  - s_kilk 13y ago
    It's also often the case that most participants are playing fair, but there are one or two who step way over the line. A friend of mine used to work in a place selling baked goods. One of the perks was that if there were any cookies left over at the end of a shift then the staff could take some before the batch got dumped. This went on happily for years until one day an email came in from head-office, stating that all food was to be dumped at the end, no freebies, etc. turned out that a manager at another store had been deliberately baking up huge batches of food to be taken home at the end of the night (think a few crates of cookies to cover the neighbours kids birthday that weekend), far beyond what had been considered fair game by the company. These kinds of perks always seem to get ruined by that one idiot who goes overboard.
    - RyJones 13y ago
      This was how we lost a discount on GE appliances at Microsoft; too many employees buying and flipping the appliances. Same thing with our (super sweet) video card discounts; 75% off video cards straight from nVidia lasted about six months.
    - katbyte 13y ago
      I don't understand that reaction, one person did it so EVERYONE must be punished? Why not simply fire the person, charge them with theft, and sue them to recover costs making an example of them for anyone else who may consider doing it?
danielweber 13y ago
Yeah, I worked at a small company where someone was taking boxes of snacks home. It's quite noticeable and managers can't keep up with that, nor can they really guard it.
jemfinch 13y ago
Smuggling? Really? Why does Microsoft care where I drink my soda? My brain doesn't turn off at 5pm: last night I was up until 3am, at home, figuring out some bug my change introduced. Yes, I drank an employer-provided Diet Mountain Dew that I brought home. No, my employer doesn't care. Perks are for people, not locations: as long as I'm drinking the soda, Google doesn't care where I drink it.
- ethomson 13y ago
  It sounds to me like you're suggesting that this sign went up because somebody took a single Diet Mountain Dew home. I strongly suspect that some joker took a case of Diet Mountain Dew home and said "what!? they're free!" when he or she was caught. And I don't think you're suggesting that it's okay to take a case of soda from work. It's a software company, after all, not a grocery store.
- marshray 13y ago
  It's interesting to see how people interpret the intent of 'complimentary drinks in the office kitchen'. Would you take home a bunch of sodas if you were going to have a party that weekend? What if your party guests were exclusively other employees? What if your party guests were partially other employees, their families, and some unrelated families? Would you drink an employer-provided soda at home if you weren't thinking about work? What if you were at the office and not thinking about work?
  - jemfinch 13y ago
    No. I could, but I wouldn't. Too much work, and I'm paid well enough that it's easier just to buy soda. No. Yes, I do it all the time. Yes, I do it all the time.
    - illuminate 13y ago
      As a former contractor, I saw the occasional bag full of milk cartons. I find it weird. I don't think it's worth a crackdown or treating the employees like babies, though. It is true that no matter how much you pay a person, they can still be cheap and "exploit" a resource. I don't think it's important enough to worry about on the whole.
philwelch 13y ago
I've heard stories of long internal flamewars over this. Apparently loading a case of free bottled water into the trunk of your car is not very "Googly".
nathan_long 13y ago
Only an extreme level of soda-stealing would be an actual financial problem, but I agree that the office culture would be the real issue. It's the same with any perk. Flexible schedules are nice, but not if people don't work at all. An equipment budget is nice, but not if people use it to buy stuff for their friends. If my teammates were dishonest like this, I'd feel uncomfortable working with them. But in any case, I much prefer that those individuals be confronted than that the perk be taken away from everyone.
- FireBeyond 13y ago
  Right. If my co-worker has no problem stealing hundreds of dollars or more a week of stuff, perhaps they have no problem stealing from me, my backpack, or my wallet.
  - nathan_long 13y ago
    Even more important for the company, such a person shouldn't be trusted with SSH access, database access, etc. Another reason to fire them rather than penalize everyone.
  - boomzilla 13y ago
    Or work credits. I've seen many correlations between small, petty behaviors and plainly stealing work credits from co-workers.
toomuchtodo 13y ago
How about this. I'll kick in $10-20 a month (how much does a soda can cost in bulk, 25 cents?), you don't ruin morale because someone is "smuggling" soda out of the office.
- ajross 13y ago
  If I catch you walking out with a case of soda unpunished, my morale is already "ruined" and that $20 is just an insult. That's not how you see things? Too bad. Morale is subjective. The point here, which you missed, is that all these perks only work if everyone plays by a sane set of rules and doesn't try to stretch things to their advantage. Having free soda is fine. Playing games with what you're allowed to get away with wrecks things for all of us even if you never get punished.
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    I wasn't saying I was taking the pop. I'm saying I'll pay $10-20/month to cover the loss for whomever is taking the pop. Whiners ruin it for everyone.
    - pyre 13y ago
      But if they do catch the person taking the soda, is that the kind of person that you want working with you? Maybe it depends for you, but some people would be uncomfortable with that.
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        I've worked with psychopaths. Like, straight up would slaughter you in your sleep for your last dollar. So yeah, smuggling pop? I couldn't give less fucks.
        ajross 13y ago
        And if you were working with clones of yourself, that would be a sensible argument. As it is, we're talking about the workplace as a whole. And dismissing the people who give more fucks as "whiners" is hardly helping. Basically: you're part of the problem, and one of the reasons companies find it hard to offer perks like this.

malexw 13y ago

That's how the free pop at RIM ended. The story I heard is that Mike L saw an employee loading flats of coke into the trunk of their car one day, and the free pop ended shortly after that.

jdminhbg 13y ago
That's interesting. The story here is always "taking away free sodas is just an indicator that things are screwed up and the company has lost its way." I wonder if it actually goes one step deeper -- the fact that employees are willing or feel justified in lifting flats of free soda is the first indicator that the company is screwed; taking away free drinks is just the more visible manifestation of that.
- malexw 13y ago
  That's a really interesting point, actually. Though I should mention that the free pop ended long before RIM hit their peak. It was gone by 2007 (along with the Wednesday movie nights), but I don't know exactly when either of those ended.
- 300bps 13y ago
  >the fact that employees are willing or feel justified in lifting flats of free soda is the first indicator that the company is screwed Interesting theory but the major flaw I see is that the Employee Is Not Always Right. Often times, you get someone who is just a Jerk. Such people often think along the lines of, "Free soda is a perk, there is no explicit rule limiting the amount of soda I can use so I am within my rights to take as much as I can carry."
  - gwillen 13y ago
    I wonder what the fraction of such people is, in an average company. I've encountered people before whose feeling is "if there's no written rule against it, I'm entitled to do it." Is the best solution to the "soda problem" just to fire those people and be done with it? I'm sure they take liberties with more than just sodas.

QEDturtles 13y ago

The chances of someone in the habit of smuggling home soda stopping because of that sign are close to nil.

rodgerd 13y ago
That's possibly true. However, having had the experience of someone show up to a disciplinary meeting to argue that he couldn't be sacked for spending hours a week looking at porn on his work computer, because there wasn't a specific line item in the workplace manuals or codes of conduct saying so, you'd be surprised at what people will argue to avoid getting fired when they're doing something anyone without some serious mental or moral impairment would recognise as not OK. Or, to put it another way, every bizarre rule or sign usually has a story behind it.

RyJones 13y ago

My experience at Microsoft was having a fellow FTE loading up a cooler full of "free drinks" and shopping bags of kitchen supplies to use at home, then make weak excuses when asked WTF he was doing.

curiousDog 13y ago
You should definitely report him to HR. This is just stupid
- RyJones 13y ago
  This was 2005 or 2006. He's moved on the greener pastures, as have I

FireBeyond 13y ago

I worked in RedWest a few years ago. People were fired, more than one, because they were caught bringing in -roller luggage- multiple times a week to fill with varying drinks. It was only noticed and a problem because Catering noticed they were needing to refill those fridges more than twice as much (and there were four commercial sliding glass door fridges) - so a group of people were taking multiple fridges a week home. That's probably in the order of a couple of thousand dollars a week. -That- was the problem. Not people like me who might grab a can of Talking Rain as we left the office for the commute home. So when the smuggling ""problem"" amounted to thousands of dollars a week of goods going missing from one building/floor alone, then yes, they drew attention to it. As for his other points: - Microsoft has its own inhouse printing departments. It was hardly a project in itself to arrange for a small plastic sign to be made and glued. - Yes, Catering has people whose salaried, 40 hour a week job is to handle the logistics of food ordering, and predict supply and demand. People like this are needed when you have upwards of 50,000 people working in your facility. - a $100,000/year theft problem is worthy of most people's attention. If you're stealing multiple commercial fridges-worth of soda a week, it's not even that you're taking it home - you're almost certainly reselling it. So it's not even a perk, it's a commercial gain. Maybe I should have been raiding the Office Supplies and selling them, a la Dilbert.

nobodysfool 13y ago
My company solved the problem by installing a soda fountain.
- marshray 13y ago
  Soda fountains are awesome but need daily cleaning by food service staff to avoid bacterial badness.
- ChiperSoft 13y ago
  Fountains stops people from emptying the fridge, but it doesn't stop them from filling up two liters. This was a problem at one of the cinemas I worked at as a teenager. Management had to crack down on "abuse of the free soda policy" after they realized we were going through way more syrup than we should be.

reeses 13y ago

RedWest was kind of like,"Not really Microsoft" to those of us on the main campus. You were closer to Nintendo than you were to us. :-) I remember taking the campus bus there not long after it opened and it was a much different world. It was a very clear sign that MSFT had become a "big" company. Passing dozens of "Herbalife" signs on the way just reinforced that. The biggest "cost" issue we had was a) don't print if you don't have to, and b) if you have to, use the back side of previously printed paper. That was more environmental-green vs financial-green, though. Then I went to Amazon, and it was a whole new world of getting no perks whatsoever. Non-adjustable "desks", the slowest development machines possible, and a bunch of false economies around operations and infrastructure.