I never expected employers to provide snacks and beverages but it is demoralizing when executives take away such perks but continue to fly first-class for the same cost as buying a month of snacks for everyone.
Like when you have to clock in and out at lunch time, but work unpaid overtime and weekends.
Or when you lose admin rights on your own PC
Or you have to start wearing a tie.
For me it was when we had to start signing in and out with a time. Supposedly this was for fire safety, but never seemed to apply to VPs.
We worked on banking systems and often had to work all nighters while the bank was offline. The time tracking system couldn't cope with the concept of being on shift for >24hours - the HR people treated us like it was our fault. Their solution was that we all went out at 23:59 and signed back in at 00:01 and that would solve the problem WE had created.
Generally working unpaid overtime for a long time and then during a quiet patch coming in early and leaving early (5-10 minutes early). I got personally told off by the team lead.
Having a virus checker on my machine that I could not remove on pain of huge financial penalties. It scanned every input, intermediate and output of my compiler and turned the computer into a sloth. Didn't help that the final output was 230mb in size (and had a translation step into another 230mb executable). I tried in vain to get exceptions added but to no avail.
These little things slowly chip away at you and you later realise that you left for the wrong reasons - but it is too late.
It forced me to confront my unquestioning love for creating computer games and made me realise that making games can be fun, but can also be as much as a drag and grind as programming anything else. There is always plenty of meat for the grinder (read shiny-eyed students) coming into the industry to justify low wages and many of my co-workers were burnt out.
So I listened to my wife and moved backed home to New Zealand. I worked in a variety of other positions and decided that I'm not going to be satisfied in any particular 9-5 job for long. The next chapter is being written right now as I continue in my current 9-5 while spending all my free time working on Gridspy (http://gridspy.co.nz) which is the startup that will eventually set me free.
When I say free, I mean it will still be a lot of work, but I will be in control of my destiny. I'll decide what features to work on when, which technology to use and if we will have free lunches and soda. Hopefully I'll manage to democratise the process enough that everyone can enjoy themselves just as much as we grow.
There is a first time for everything I guess - somehow my FTP account was compromised and a script added to the end of the page that injected code into the page.
The script has been removed and the FTP account blocked. The logs indicate that the work was done by a botnet, quite interesting. One IP logs in and gets a file, another (different IP) logs in and replaces that file.
The static content that was compromised is stored on a separate server with separate passwords from the machine that hosts my actual application and associated data.
What really concerns me is how that password got into the open (the logs do not indicate brute forcing). Virus checking here we come!
Perhaps some machine on the wire between the two servers is a member of the botnet? You might want to switch to SCP, HTTPS upload, ipsec tunnel, or something else that'll at least be a speedbump to attackers.
Further info for those interested: My developer machine was infected with the Kryptik trojan. Using WireShark I could see that I had become the proud member of a botnet, it probably found a saved password for FTP on my machine and compromised my server that way. Makes me feel all dirty inside watching my computer send viagra emails and receive "sorry, you are blacklisted" responses.
All the passwords have been changed and the relevant computer quarantined. I'm still working on removing the virus, seems to be using drivers to mask its presence from the virus checkers I am using. I've got some ideas based on using a scanner on a live-cd.
What is really fun is that the virus definition for the trojan was added to NOD32 after I was infected, so I don't know how much help a virus checker would have been, if it was installed.
That will learn me for leaving saved passwords on an otherwise secure machine.
I used an external hard disk drive caddy to mount the infected HDD on another machine. I then used Malware bytes to scan the HDD. It found Trojan.Agent on the hdd (in a dll inside windows/system), which it hadn't found when malwarebytes was run directly on the infected system.
The infected computer has ceased sending suspicious packets. I don't know how I am going to trust this machine again.
FTP is plaintext. You'd be surprised how easy it often is to become a middleman to a transmission on the open internet. Just always assume all ftp passwords to be released to the world when you transmit them. (Or, just don't use it.)
>Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had.
I'd say this was the main reason. The original employees had already proven they could manage and grow the organization from 0->even, and hadn't slowed down expecting to move the company from even->profit.
Now they have "supervisors" who don't know anything about the business or technology, shoved in on top of them, who's only role is to act as liaison between them and the corporate officers.
Bristling at the lack of corporate loyalty shown to the people that made the company happen, those people leave. The calculus is really very simple.
I've seen this pattern happen a number of times, and the usual result is that these new managers show up, make poor decisions (because they don't understand the business) cycle out (taking their stock with them), repeat 4-5 times until a manager shows up who is so inoffensive that the remaining engineers simply end up running the show in the end anyways and the manager just shows up to weekly meetings so she/he can liaise with corporate.
In the meantime, the company stock has diluted as it fled out the door to the past managers, the company lost most of its senior engineering staff, forcing them to promote lower level, less capable staff to senior positions or to hire externally (again people who don't understand the business further exacerbating the vicious cycle).
You are taking the story further then it really needs to go.
There is really no reason to assume that these managers are not a net gain for the company. I dislike the fact that a storyline where managers/business guys are the root of all evil can always find some takers. It's silly.
Changing from a 5 person team to a 50 person team is tricky. Adding hierarchies & middle managers is potentially problematic. Moving from an engineer only company to a company that also has a CFO and an HR guy and such is also tricky.
This is all part of the story. The simple story is dumb. Just as dumb as the spoiled silicon valley rockstar story.
Agreed. It is my understanding that the best companies are led by their original founders (cf. Apple, Google, Oracle) or by people nurtured for years to become their leaders (Microsoft, IBM).
I think Google (and companies like Google) has learned this lesson well.
As an organization, it appears to be focusing on keeping as flat of an organization as possible. In addition they just simply cut to the chase, and hire middle-managers purely to act as liaisons rather than drivers, and save themselves the couple years of failure they are bound to endure while a new division gets organized "properly" (as in the old way).
This has bad sides too, I've heard from numerous people that, when compared to other organizations, most of the engineers in Google have a very hard time understanding what their managers actually do. Additionally, it also can prevent unified visions from flowing down from the top in as structured a process as you might see in a traditional organization.
But we now have more than a decade to observe companies like Google applying this sort of obvious management philosophy and now have lots of lessons learned we can apply going forward.
I don't know enough about the internal organizational structure at Apple and Oracle, but I'd wager they are much more like the traditional management model than Google's semi-flat structure. Apple in particular is likely a very hierarchical organization (just a guess) due to the necessity in carrying out Jobs' vision.
My favorite corporate structure is that of the Virgin Group. Instead of a single gigantic company with a single figure at the top, there is a plethora of small companies -- startups indeed -- each focusing on its own business and market. I like to think of it as the open source version of corporate culture, with Richard Branson playing the role of a BDFL.
It's a shame more companies don't operate this way. There is such a lure toward empire building in the corporate world that it's difficult for people to see the downsides of the maga-corporation model of organization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen says he didn't return to the company after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's in 1983. Surely you and gp didn't mean that MS stopped being one of the best companies in 1983?
I think the main issue at heart is the desire that every human being has in controlling their environment.
I say this because I just read in a book (A Drunkards Walk) how seniors in a home who could arrange their rooms the way they liked and could choose a plant to take care of were measurably happier and lived longer.
Restricting machine names, removing snacks, clocking in and out these all contribute to a negative environment.
Which employee (all other things being equal) is more likely to burn out:
a) Diligent and responsible employee is essentially free to do what they need to do to get their job done.
b) Diligent and responsible employee who gets shuffled into a 'highschool' scenario: hall-passes, attendance reports, dress code.
Obviously some places feel they require these restrictions. Maybe in a large corporation you'll end up hiring employees who you can't trust to show up on time, etc. But isn't that also HR's fault?
What I find strange is the insistence on cheaping out on the food I see a lot of places. Once you've commited on food, the incremental cost of healthy vs. cheap and crappy isn't all that bad, and keeps the premiums down if you're an employer subsidizing insurance. In any case, keeping employees healthy is in fact a good thing...
That's pretty amusing. You get health and dental benefits, along with one of the leading causes of health and dental problems... I know soda is considered holy water among many HNers, but for those of us who are highly health-conscious, that sounds a bit like the Detroit assembly lines with the cigarette vending machines.
Yeah, the irony was not lost on me. I actually requested some sparkling water be added to the mix, but apparently that costs more from the distributor.
The company I work for provides coffees, sodas, and spring water. Most of the time I'm happy with just water. But I asked for some healthier alternatives and they started offering fruit juices =)
There's a vast overlap. We have free soda, I know how horrible soda is for my body, my teeth, etc and so I quit drinking it. The problem is I quit long enough to prove to myself that I could (about three months) and since then I've quit once a week or so.
Ha! I did the same thing. Went years without soda. Then after I started drinking it again, stopped for a few months. Now ever couple of months I quit for a week or two. One of these days I'll give it up for good...
I was never a huge soda drinker, but I did have it regularly with lunch, or sometimes energy drinks at night, etc. Once I stopped drinking it regularly, I discovered how absolutely shitty it made me feel. If I go to the theater and eat a bag of popcorn with a soda, for instance.
I'm not really a health nut, but when you look at the way soda and highly processed carbs are metabolized it's pretty scary. Given the rates of obesity and diabetes in the US, I rank soda and snack foods right up there with cigarettes in terms of long-term healthcare costs.
We've just quit the sodas perk, replaced them with fruit
and we took time to explain why. While we didn't get high fives for the changing policy, now two three months later we're hearing, "gee, thanks, this is a great idea".
A couple years back, I was working in an office where it was usual to go out of the building to smoke and/or get some coffee. More than once I had my cup of coffee stolen by very aggressive bees that, I thought, were attracted to the sugar.
I then switched to sweetener, but the bees kept coming. They had either associated the smell of the coffee with the presence of sugar, or were addicted to caffeine.
I felt it was better to leave the coffee to the bees than to argue with caffeine-addicted africanized bees.
my employment contract listed all you can drink star bucks coffee as a benefit. We used to have a credit card we would pass around, and you could go around the corner. After $18k a year coffee benefits the president purchased a star bucks coffee machine. Personally I like this a lot better, far more coffee.
Where I used to work we got a coffee machine (quite a good one too) as a gift/award from management for being productive and getting stuff done. Best purchase by them ever, since it's an alternative water cooler and has saved many hours of walking down to the coffee shop. Granted we drink more coffee but when we go to get one we do so as a group and have an impromptu discussion (usually 50% work related) which gives us a break and allows communication between the hardware and software teams to flow freely.
I can imagine that if they ever took that away there would immediately be a mass exodus of employees.
Oh, and I do drink the coffee without sugar or any sweetener and with skim milk (mostly) so it's not that bad for my health.
Outstanding. Using "jumped the shark" just never felt right for this situation. "The elves have left middle earth". A spot on perfect description of this sad and awkward phase all startups encounter as they grow to successful bigcorps. I love it.
A minor flaw in the metaphor: Middle Earth doesn't have to compete with whatever the elves create in Valinor. Talented employees leaving is both a loss for the company and a gain for competitors.
There is a good chance that other employees will follow them to their new, more attractive company. They might not compete for clients but instead for other employees.
There is also a potential that they have a great idea related to your company that they pursue once they leave.
Every company has you sign agreements about not recruiting from your old co-workers. But nothing in those agreements says that you can't pass along resumes that people push on you.
When morale is bad, people who are left tend to offer you resumes when you quit. In that situation I've been glad to forward resumes of people who are good, and have avoided forwarding resumes of people who aren't. (After all you get judged by the quality of people that you recommend.) To the extent that I'm someone people want to work with again, this results in cherry picking the best people.
The effect is even more direct when employees go through recruiters. Recruiters ask about the work environment where you are, and have no problem trying to track people down if they get the sense that good people may be available.
I'd presume you'd have some grapevine contacts with your chief competitor, but I'm not in HR, nor have I ever been involved in sniping competitors' employees...
Where would you imagine they would go? They'll either burnout of the industry entirely, or go to work in a similar role elsewhere or become self-employed via freelancing or their own startups.
On the very first day of my internship at a very big corporation, they removed the free sodas. Even though this was only part of a large collection of cost-cutting measures, it sent the most clear "F*&# you". (There was a number of other fun things that they did, such as allowing certain groups to use their Engineering interns as QA people without ever alerting them that this would be the case)
Needless to say, Carnegie Mellon students are heavily discouraged from working there by those of us who screwed up, and I definitely think that the huge dump they took on their recruiting pipeline has affected them negatively in the quality of people they'll be able to hire.
I've been in an office where the free fruit was removed. Towards the end of the afternoon I normally get quite hungry. With a bowl of fruit I would silence my stomach rumblings for an extra half hour and get some more work done. Without - screw it - time's up and I'd rather go home to cook.
A company I worked for in the south-bay area decided to order fruit from a "farm fresh office fruit delivery" service. I don't know how much the delivery company charged.
It worked well for the first several months. The delivery company brought a wide assortment of fruit, many "standards" and also some more exotic varieties like papaya, kiwi, etc. Over the months though the apples took a larger and larger portion of the delivery. And the exotic varieties disappeared.
People got sick of eating all those apples. We canceled the service.
The company also made pretense of being "green" but used extreme and wasteful packaging.
A certain VP I know once remarked that at one of his previous startup employers, he advised the upper management against providing employees with free coffee in the first place, because savvy employees know that losing the free coffee is a leading indicator for layoffs.
He said this at the engineering staff meeting following our day of carnage at which a third of the company was laid off. We also lost the free soda.
At the last company that I worked for, they didn't remove the free coffee but they took away the free napkins, sugar, creamer, coffee cups, etc. I was laid off two months later.
The coffee also got better right before the layoffs. In an effort to save money, they looked for a cheaper coffee source than the crappy business supply company they had been using. They managed to stumble upon a deal at a local coffee roaster to get cheaper coffee.
It was pretty good when made correctly. One of the worst things than can happen at a company is for someone who doesn't like "strong coffee" to be the first one into the office in the morning. Not putting enough coffee grounds in the filter basket makes coffee taste bitter and horrible. If you want weak coffee, add water to a strong cup. Someone eventually had to put up signs giving this same advice.
If you look at the energy costs of a vending machine it's actually cheaper in some cases to have an efficient fridge with soda for free. (at least back in the day) The vending machine company often doesn't pay for power, so they have no incentive to cool the soda efficiently.
A nice 'interim' way of making a change would be to have a $.25 'donation' for each soda which eventually goes to some animal shelter, which would then be a tax writeoff.
CFO's will suck the lifeblook out of a company if nobody stops them. That is their job. Shame on the others for letting the CFO mess with their culture.
The big cost here is likely to be labor. When you give away free sodas you have to pay someone to keep sodas in stock. When you sell sodas you can even sell a contract to a 3rd party to restock the machines. This is why free sodas are fairly rare, because soda machines are a money maker for the company and involve fewer employees on the balance sheet, whereas free sodas rack up all of the costs of an employee (salary, taxes, benefits, etc.)
On the whole it's probably a silly tradeoff, since the benefits to employee retention of free sodas almost certainly far outweigh the comparatively minor costs, but if you just look at the balance sheet it can be awfully tempting to get rid of.
At my present company the free sodas (and beers, on Friday) are simply delivered in pallets and teams take a week at a time to be responsible for the fridges. Peer pressure is enough to make this work. There was the time Luke's team didn't restock the beer fridge and to this day he's known as Luke Warm...
true - at my old company we insourced it. One couple choose to maintain a small store with soda's and candy and fruit from a warehouse store. It made enough to keep interest in it maintained, and kept the money stream in the company.
Then people feel less bad about paying as they know it's not going to some vending machine company, and they can also request healthier snacks.
Dr. Pepper isn't a Coke brand, in many markets Pepsi has distribution rights for Dr. Pepper. So in those markets, they offer those products.
Pepsi wouldn't be caught dead selling Coke products in their machines. Some machines have both, but those are offered by third parties (Canteen/Vending companies) that buy in bulk from Pepsi & Coke and resell.
I work for a non-profit where, to cut costs, they initially took out all the water coolers. When people complained, they gave us one water cooler per building.
I'd really like to be able to say that this would make people start leaving, but no one here is really going to do that. I'll bet senior management knew (and was relying on) that.
Lesson learned: In startups, people are more likely to leave on principles. In big companies (even non-profits), almost no one leaves unless they're fired.
I worked at a very large company, which post-merger started rolling out various changes which negatively impacted our development group. $0.25 sodas, redbull, and snacks went to normal prices, release night dinners were cut, flex time became less flexible, etc...
While no one quit due to any one of those changes, it did change the place from somewhere fun to work to somewhere that wasn't fun. As a result about three months later a large number of the architecture group and other key people quit within a 1-2 week span. So while no one may quit the day the water coolers are removed, that type of change will lead to higher turn over later on, especially among the top folks, who can find a new job pretty easily.
While no one quit due to any one of those changes...about three months later a large number of the architecture group and other key people quit within a 1-2 week span
Sounds to me like they put out resumes shortly after the cost-cutting, it just took a few months to get a better job.
That's true. It's also bad PR for the company. Disgruntled former employees will not recommend anyone they know to work at such companies for these reasons.
That might not seem to be such a big deal (as compared to an external, traditional PR problem), but if your best employees are the ones leaving on bad terms, then most likely the people they know are above average too. Now the company will have a harder time recruiting great people.
I work with doctors, in and around hospitals and clinics. This problem has reached epidemic proportions, especially in the US. Bean counters know that no matter how many perks are removed or how intolerable working conditions get, doctors simply won't walk away from patients. I'm sorry to say that this is being taken advantage of in the worst of ways.
Be careful working at a job you "believe in", it puts you at a fearful disadvantage.
Seems like this is becoming commonplace. Another example: newspapers. Photographers are spending thousands to buy their own camera rigs b/c the company won't spring for replace 5-year old equipment, reporters are using their own laptops/cameras (even notepads!) because they have to. All while they're being pushed to be tech savvy. Sad.
You're right. I don't know about doctors, but I work in an IT department. You can tell that pretty much no one here "believes in" the job. It's just a paycheck. I think people don't leave for a variety of reasons, but passion for the work or the good that the work is supposed to provide is definitely not one of them.
Interestingly enough, the same theory applies to recruiting and internships.
I was part of IBM's premier internship program (Extreme Blue) last summer, and of the 3 best developers in the lab, none of them wanted to work for IBM.
One of them actually cited "no free coffee and soda" as his reasoning.
Goes to show that this applies to recruiting as much as employee retention.
Maybe I'm just weird, but this wouldn't bother me. My employer does offer free sodas and snacks, but I don't take advantage of them (I don't drink soda, and tend not to snack on junk food). I do drink the free coffee, but in the past, I've survived this by bringing a thermos from home. I can understand why some people might not like the free stuff to be taken away, but I'd prefer to work for an employer that compensated fairly for my work, and one that does not expect that I work more than 40-45 hours on a regular basis.
It's not really about compensation... or even about soda.
These engineers joined a start-up in its early days because they wanted to work at the fun, informal sort of place that would stock free sodas.
(That said, it's not like keeping free sodas would have prevented everyone from noticing the changing culture forever; it's just an emblematic change that is difficult to ignore, even if you rarely look up from the screen)
I see this point, and can understand it. I'm not criticizing people for leaving the company, either--merely saying that I would be less concerned about _that_ particular culture change. For me, losing my ability to work remotely would be a HUGE deal, and probable cause for me to look elsewhere for employment.
When I worked at an environment where being able to work remotely was tolerated, I often had a 30 minute turn around to IMs. Today, I stand up, see if the person I want to talk to is around, and then IM/walk over there.
If you're working completely independently, working remotely is fine. I'd also avoid a job where I don't have to collaborate with others.
Sodas are a correlating effect, not a causation effect. Steve says "The sodas were just the wake-up call." (his emphasis).
The problem is not that the sodas are no longer free, the problem is that the company starts treating its "most valuable asset - its employees" as just another cog in the machine. As such, the company has started to transition from being exceptional to being average, and its exceptional employees leave to find another company which is exceptional, completing the transition.
The point, as mentioned in the article, is not so much the (lack of) free soda, but what it is a leading indicator of. Once a company starts pinching pennies and ignoring the effect it has on moral then there is a good chance that worse is to come.
It's not about your compensation at all. The impact of free snacks is so tiny for the employers cost structure that the decision to offer them or not is completely unrelated to their ability (or willingness) to pay a fair salary.
Would you really prefer an extra $200 or so per year over free soda? I think you wouldn't even notice the difference in your bank balance.
Part of the problem is that, to replace $200 of company-paid snacks, an employer would need to pay me quite a bit more to purchase the same thing out of a vending machine.
I'd estimate the vending machine operating markup to be, conservatively, 25%. That makes my cash out of pocket $250. To get that amount of take-home, with 34.3% federal and state income taxes and 15.3% social security, my salary would have to go up $500.
Yes, I'd rather have the $500 increase, but an employer would be foolish for doing it this way.
The company has to succeed, my stock has to go up in value, and as the company grows in size it can get much better deals on things like health insurance than I can alone. $200/yr spent on soda doesn't benefit me in any way at all. I'll drink tapwater at work if I'm thirsty. Is startup culture really so averse to frugality and so blind to its benefits?
If a company is in such trouble that $200 per year and employee will make any sort of real difference, then they have much bigger problems. Not wasting money is one thing, pointless frugality for the point of frugality is something very different.
And really I think you're missing the point by focusing on the soda. If you want the company to grow then you have to keep the employees content and productive. A company full of disgruntled workers looking for a new job will not help your stock go up in value. If the price of that is $200 in soda for some people then that is money well invested, and a direct benefit to you.
You'll get no argument from me that a good investment is money well spent, whether it's free soda or a company fleet of Lamborghinis.
But what problem is the CFO in the article trying to solve? The author claims the startup is "fairly successful" but it's already a few years old, just breaking even, and still heavily dependent on financing. His true measure of success seems to hinge on the fact that the company continues to exist in a bad economy. Meanwhile, the CFO needs to address "Sarbanes Oxley compliance, a new accounting system, beef up IT and security, Section 409A (valuation) compliance, etc." This sounds like an important phase in the company's growth, and she's trying to find ways to pay for it. In the context of the article, this isn't an arbitrary decision that disregards morale, productivity or even QA. It's a growing pain essential to establishing the company's success. IOW, they do have much bigger problems.
There's no question that preventing disgruntlement during these stages is an HR challenge that needs to be handled delicately. But I think the need can be communicated effectively without losing valuable employees. The fact that it wasn't is the real failure in the article.
Despite upvoting you for your clear argument - I disagree. The top engineers are the lifeblood of the company, and to make trivial cost cutting measures ($10k really is nothing) that risk their retention is incredibly stupid.
Decrees from the top that disregard the input of and value of the employees are the issue here, not how those decrees are handed down. I can't think of any way that HR could say "no more free soda" without it sounding like the stupid cost-cutting measure that it is.
The elimination of free soda has nothing to do with frugality in the face of financial distress. Quite the opposite, the article begins telling the story of how well they were doing (considering current economic downturn).
The whole point of the article is that this cost reduction measure is really a political declaration of the new CFO. The engineers probably heard this message as... "You filthy lazy monkeys, leave the soda and go back to your TV-typewriters". The article position is that this bold declaration is bad business practice and that the new CFO should have shut up and implement more subtle and relevant changes, leaving the engineers to slowly realize for themselves that "things aint what used to be no more".
Said that, I agree that startup culture is riden with excesses. It is a whole live hard, die hard philosofy of compressing a decade of work into 2 or 3 years in exchange for big exit, screw life balance and all that. My opinion is that this is not a healthy way to live, but if you are into it you better get sure you are getting extraordinary compensation for your extraordinary effort. Working 80+ hrs per week for an average salary makes no sense at all.
The author didn't convince me that the company was successful or that the CFO's move was political, and even provides information that suggests the opposite (the company wasn't making a profit and the CFO needed to address critical areas that had been overlooked).
Your last paragraph is particularly relevant. Startups attract engineers who want to work in areas that interest them and in workplaces that are fun. But eventually someone has to do the work they didn't want to do, and the change in the environment seems unavoidable. Anyone attracted to startups would do well to heed your advice.
"Given all that could go wrong in this economy, they were doing well. Their business had just crossed cash flow breakeven, had grown past 50 employees, just raised a substantive follow-on round of financing and had recently hired a Chief Financial Officer. It was an impressive performance."
The relevant pieces of information here are:
1. (Marginally) Cash flow positive: Even though the company may still be underwater, they are not adding to debt anymore. For a young company this is a nice place to be. Nobody expects you to be generating lots of money, but you are moving in the right direction and there is no immediate need to cut cost in order to survive.
2. Grown past 50 employees. Again, this mean they are in the right track. The fact that they are adding headcount means they are not stagnating, but growing. Besides, if they are cash flow positive, it is sustainable growth, not the crazy pump and dump trick of the dot com era.
3. Just raised a substantive follow-on round. This means they were not in immediate financial distress. They have a healthy operation and investors give them more money to keep making the right strategic decisions. No need to go cannibal here.
The political declaration stuff is my personal interpretation of the incident. It says nowhere that the CFO implied or suggested that they should put those techies on their place. It is my personal belief that some key people may have feel that way, and that it was a blunder to risking that mis-communication to happen in the first place.
Organizational culture is a delicate thing to mess with. And if you analyze the profile of people in the startup community (risk tolerant, idealism, and yes... hubris), it is a no-brainer that your local ubergeek is not going to take it like the average cube drone would.
I think part of what would irritate me here is not just that they've taken away free soda, but they're now actively charging me for it. I wonder if it would've come across better if there just wasn't any soda offered in the office anymore.
Maybe it's totally illogical, but I'd be more irritated with the idea that the company not only took away this perk, but is now trying to make a profit off of it.
No, that (removing soda as an option) wouldn't go over well at all. Forget the idea of being offended, the practical matter is that soda is no longer an option... or at least a convenient option. You may as well take away the coffee as see how that goes over.
I've worked at two startups while they slowly took away the free stuff. It sucks, but it's a phase that successful (okay, and not-so-successful, in their death throes) companies eventually need to go through.
Also, thank you for removing the apostrophe, icey. gnashes teeth at stray apostrophes
This, by the way, is the very definition of bikeshedding. Everyone knows about soda; everyone has bought it before. So cutting out soda is something that the entire executive team feels competent to discuss -- unlike, say, the efficiency of the QA department's staffing schedule, or climate control zones, or the use of electricity for lighting offices at 3am, or the difficult politics of downsizing particular business units. Soda is a simple theatrical stunt for making the CFO look good. It's a good show.
Of course, as Steve points out, it sends a very clear message to the people who've been drinking those sodas: Your work is no longer considered an investment in the future. Now you're a cost center.
Unfortunately, shows are just that. Pure signaling. If you cut $10k for snacks but the executive keeps his $30k company car lease, what have you just told the engineers who made the company possible in the first place? To them its about respect. Its worth more than money to most of these types, and when it dries up, they're gone.
Most "I will work harder" types at startups just kind of know when the pigs are trading them to the glue factory for a case of whiskey.
A quick calculation says that $10k for 50 employees is roughly $16 per person and month. Less than one percent of the salary cost. If the margins in the company are so thin that this expense matters, they've definitely got bigger problems.
Everywhere I've worked that's not a startup, I've had to pay for all my stuff. The startups I worked for, as they became non-startups, started ditching perks like beer:30 Fridays, catered on-site lunches, free soda and the like. One took off and is wildly successful these days, the other became a non-startup by becoming a non-company.
It's my personal observation. Of course, it's probably different here on the prairie (Kansas City) than it is in The Valley. Maybe the Oracles, ciscos, Googles and Yahoos of the world still provide plenty of goodies for free out there.
I agree with many others in this thread that expenses are expenses. $16 per person per month is $10k at 50 employees. What about the 18-kilohuman corporation I work for right now? $16 per head per month turns into a $3.5M line item per year at that point. When does free soda become impractical?
Also, the original article posits that it's more a symptom of the culture change than anything. Having to rifle through your pockets to score that Mountain Dew that used to fall out of the machine with only a button-press is often the first tangible effect of that culture change.
It's all relative. If MegaCorp is making $1 billion revenue and spending $3.5 mil on sodas, that is just 0.35%. To break it down, if you are making $100k a year, then that would be equivalent to you spending $350 on soda...or about 1 per day.
It's almost nothing and it's definitely not something to try to spend time cutting.
In a startup, every expense is potentially a total loss, whether it's for a computer, a soda or a consulting fee. But when a business establishes a revenue stream that is insufficient to cover expenses and generate a profit, it has to differentiate between essentials and luxuries. Free soda will always be considered a luxury, whether or not it is a cost effective employee incentive.
Personally, I hate working in places with these kind of perks. I think they're abused by both management and employees. If your salary isn't enough to cover your personal needs, free soda doesn't solve the underlying problem.
If a company is not making profits, it will hardly make a difference whether or not they're giving away soda. The larger a company gets, the more inefficient it becomes. A single unproductive employee is a much larger money leak than free snacks.
Not spending on soda gives them what? 3 more hours of runway before going out of business?
The crucial point here is that every minute management and/or engineers are thinking about soda, is a minute wasted. A classical case of "penny-wise, pound foolish".
engineers are thinking about soda, is a minute wasted
This probably the most often forgotten argument in favor of freebie snacks: time/attention saving.
A good engineer can easily cost a company $1/minute (and be worth much more). Even if going out to ones car to grab some change takes 2 minutes, that $.50 soda just got a 400% markup. Actually having otherwise productive employees think about this as an issue is an even greater waste of talent.
In a large enough company, though, the ratio of dead weight to productive people, can be high enough that charging for soda isn't a false economy.
A former boss of mine once said that he wasn't buying us a coffee machine so that we'd have an excuse to get out of the building and go for a walk. So much good high-quality thinking is done when you're walking instead of sitting in front of a computer.
(It helped that there were three truly excellent cafes and a bunch of so-so ones within walking distance; this wouldn't work in, say, Silicon Valley.)
I'd say there are many places (downtown Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale) where this would work fine, even without a car.
Notwithstanding my original comment, I make a point of leaving for lunch, even if there's food paid for by the company, including if I partake of the food itself. The break is important.
However, for some things, like an occasional small snack or a bit of caffeine-sugar water, it would be both a waste of time and of money to go out. Arguably, fiddling with a "free" coffee machine is also time-wasting.
For some, the severity of the interruption is more significant than the length of time or quantity of money involved. The variance in working style makes any one-size-fits-all policy questionable.
If your former boss made it very easy to get reimbursed for those trips out for coffee, his reasoning would carry more weight.
We're talking about soda, but in a culture ingrained with perks, there's no limit to waste, especially as you move up the ladder. In hard times, it sucks to see your boss fly first class instead of coach, take a limo instead of a cab, consider illegal parking tickets a necessary business expense, and all other kinds of excesses. If the business can't afford luxuries, things like free soda can be just one symptom of a far greater problem. In good times, go ahead and splurge. But even then it can create compensation inequities due to abuse and feelings of entitlement.
"The larger a company gets, the more inefficient it becomes."
Do you have evidence for this assertion? I thought it was fairly well established that most large companies in mature industries are usually quite efficient due to various economies of scale.
Economic theory claims that the size of companies are set by the point when the overhead of internal mismanagement equals the overhead of constant negotiations between independent units. Therefore larger companies are internally less efficient than small companies, but exist because they represent a more efficient way of doing business.
(That said, large companies have a tendency to remain more efficient than the alternative by putting up artificial barriers to entry. For example the difficulty of negotiating access to patents makes large companies more efficient than possible competition, but the extra efficiency is due to solving an artificial problem.)
We don't get free anything where I work, and I'm fine with that. My company's job is to make more money, not baby me with things that I'm perfectly capable of paying for on my salary.
There's no free coffee? Every place that I've ever worked had free coffee. From the crappiest of the low-level jobs to the awesome job that I have now.
I'm not just talking IT firms though. I've never worked any job where there wasn't free coffee. Even the retail jobs had free coffee. It was definitely really really cheap stuff, but it was still there.
I've worked in a wholesale nursery where I was in the middle of the paddock all day. Obviously there wasn't coffee there. But yes - most offices (and retail) have some form of coffee.
Nope. Most groups have their own coffee machines and stock their own coffee.
I work at an aircraft company. While I'm a salaried employee, the effects of the union being present at this site hit everyone. It's nice in some cases (benefits), but often it really screws us (hard to lose ineffective employees, no little 'fringe' benefits, etc). I'd be surprised if most companies w/ union involvement are much different.
State Academia here - No free coffee. We sorta have a informal 'coffee club' in our office. You bring in a round of homebrew and make it when there isn't any in the pot. You also hate on the people who make weak coffee.
Sorry, I've never seen a "need" here. Google gives free lunch, massages, has exercise equipment rooms, the works that they'll never charge employees for.
No, this is too much tunnel-vision focus on the bottom line without even a simple thought of the people.
Why does any company need to go through this phase? It's such a small cost relative to any pretty much any other expense that a business might have.
I know this is just an anecdote, but I worked for a non-profit for a number of years that had free soda fountains for employee use. It was a nice touch, and didn't cost them very much at all to maintain versus all the other costs of keeping the organization running.
Because the managers all learned in MBA school that results are measurable,
Removing sodas saves a measurable few $K/year, and the only downside is the unmeasurable loss of all your good people.
It's the same with banning personal web use, flexi-time etc - the downside isn't measured, therefore there is no downside.
For about the same price as the quarter eating vending machine, a 7-11 style soda dispenser could probably have been installed and the price per soda would probably have been around 2 cents each for a big gulp size. It is very cost effective, much better than bottles or cans. It might have been viewed as a step up in benefits vs. a takeaway. Pennywise, pound-foolish.
Having worked on and off in restaurants over the years, you have to clean these things nightly - and thoroughly - or else they get disgusting very quickly. That's the biggest problem with most of this kind of thing, espresso machines too. We have a single-serve automatic coffee maker right now that's not supposed to require regular cleaning, it's a little better about it but it can still get really gross.
The second statement is referring to the four times Steve saw this happen in the past, in other companies. If his prediction is correct, the company whose board he sat in on last week will start seeing an exodus soon.
I would agree completely with you, if the next sentence was "In a similar situation at a different company, no one on the board..." But without such a line, I read that as commentary based on previous experiences, followed by a continuation of the main story.
(I assumed that "the board" in the next sentence referred to the board in the first part, which lead to the continuation. This is re-enforced by using "This company" and "the company" which would imply that the author was referring to the only company introduced)
I went through this transition once. Initially, sodas were to be .50$, but that caused an uproar and price was quickly reduced to .25$, where it remains today. It's one thing for sodas to not be free; it's another for them to be a profit center.
Significant: hundreds of posts on this topic. Obviously the social situation is vitally important. Corporate drones will never get it, so one solution is to never hire them. Look at W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc, they do (used to do?) it right.
Absolutely. Another symptom is machine naming. When people who will never themselves log into them tell you to dump whatever whimsical themes you had and call your boxes according to an official convention, you gotta wonder what value they're adding to the organization.
I've seen this happen once, and I can almost understand why it did. In this case there was a rather severe production problem that had potential long term revenue effects for the company.
In the course of the after-action report some screen dumps were shown to the executives in which the "whimsical" server names appeared.They were (understandably) in a rather agitated and non-whimsical mood, and incorrectly (in my opinion) correlated the seriousness of the problem which the perceived lack of seriousness of the naming scheme.
They could not see that the naming scheme was not whimsical - it was in fact quite methodical and conveyed more meaning to the engineers who lived with the machines everyday than the strict, sanitized names we eventually ended up with.
Given that you've anonymized the company, can you share the theme from which the 'whimsical' names were drawn?
(I'm curious as to what seemed so out-of-place in a serious action report. Mythological gods seem like they'd be OK... but maybe Seven Dwarves or Deadly Sins or Slang Drug Terms would be embarrassing?)
It was too long ago to remember what the specific name was that triggered the reaction, but I believe one cluster was named after characters from the X-Men comics, and another used Tolkien characters. There were others as well that I can't remember, but none were particularly controversial or objectionable, so far as I know.
Yup. It's amazing how uptight some suits can get about cartoon names and other whimsical machine names. At my work I had some lab servers named after Pixar characters. I got seriously chewed out by one C-level exec about the inappropriateness of the hostname "elastigirl". :-(
Even if you want "safe" sanitized names though, I can't understand why people create these elaborate multi-part naming conventions for servers. Seriously, if the hostname is harder to remember and type than the IP address, YOUR NAMING CONVENTION IS BROKEN!
... and this is why I absolutely oppose letting non-engineering-background people run a company. You really have to have been in the trenches yourself to be qualified to manage those who are.
This was a failure on the part of the executives in doing their jobs. It doesn't take an engineer to recognize that they needn't be concerned with machine names (unless the names were so bad that public disclosure would result in a PR nightmare).
Good point - though I was specifically thinking about tech startups/companies in general. I've long since given up on working for companies whose bread and butter does not revolve around my work (e.g. IT departments at non-tech companies)... it's a recipe for abuse precisely for the reasons as mentioned above.
Yeah, I absolutely would never take a job at a huge company whose core wasn't tech. On the other hand though, I think most tech startups are chasing the hard money. I'd be very keen on joining an early stage "traditional" business in an established market and use technology to gain a competitive advantage. The trick would be that the founders would have to either include me (tough because I don't have any experience or contacts in any of these industries) or they would have to recognize the value I bring with proper incentives (tough because traditional business people who understand the effect of user experience on sales will probably go to an overpriced agency because it's a lot easier and reliable than finding real talent to bring in-house).
Sometimes I wonder about people who are born and bred as future "management material". Do these people have more experience in thinking than someone who writes programs all day, mentally modeling the potential effect of every new line of code? Or someone who works all day crafting a piece of machinery, or sculpting statues, transforming a blank block of material into something useful and beautiful?
Somehow I just don't have that much respect for people who've gotten where they are by duping professors and wowing everyone with some impressive degree or family pedigree. It's not the same.
For any manager to be worth their salt to me, they have to demonstrate that they've had a lot of good old-fashioned practice in thinking. And the management fast-track just doesn't portend that to me. And I think that's why most companies > 50 employees slowly crumble as their engineers and other thinkers are crowded out by MBAs.
Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained.
Your own personal laptop is a different matter.
Moreover, if you want personality, just set up your ~/.ssh/config to retain the legacy name for yourself, e.g. "ssh middleearthname" to connect to server001.foo.com
The names aren't random, tho'. The people using the machines every day know that (for example) all the database servers are named after planets, all the web servers are elements of the periodic table, all the development boxes are Muppets characters, etc. It costs nothing and makes your engineers happy. Plus it is intuitive, mistakes of the kind of being logged into the wrong box never happen.
I personally have very nearly experienced a disaster because the official naming convention had only one character difference between production and UAT...
Anyway, you've missed my point a bit. It doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things what the boxes are called. It DOES matter than your company is employing people to impose pointless, trivial changes and policies on people with real work to do.
> The people using the machines every day know that (for example) all the database servers are named after planets, all the web servers are elements of the periodic table
So, what type of machine is "mercury"?
I've never seen a theme-based naming scheme that didn't eventually run into ambiguities like this.
The way it should be is hybrid. For machine management purposes, each machine should be named for the datacenter and rack it's in. For example, dcaa11 is the eleventh machine in rack aa in datacenter dc. But there's also the issue of how to know which machine is running what. For that, we need to remember there can be more than one name for the same thing. The mysql machine should register itself with DNS when it starts up as 0.mysql.datacenter_name.prod.yourdomain.com. The second one should be 1.mysql, etc. Now you have a system where memnonic names and manageable names can coexist.
It's not hard to have DNS CNAME and TXT records for machines, so that you can have both a naming theme for certain classes of servers, as well as descriptive names that indicate function, location, etc.
The way I handle the problem is pretty simple. Functionality gets a subnet 'name' under the root, and there are TXT records and aliases within that to handle description. So, if you have a datacenter in Sacramento, your DB and web machines would be named and alised:
For ambiguous names (like 'mercury' existing in both { planets } and { elements }), only one copy of that name can exist on the network. The people who work with that machine will know it's theirs, and for everybody else, there's CNAME and TXT records for when they're not sure.
Named for the rack it's in??? Oh my god that's stupid! So you seriously thing it's a good idea to have to rename the server if you shuffle around some data center space!?!?
Honestly, the muppets/elements/planets works really well...until there's some turnover. Then the new sysadmin thinks the three stooges should be the db servers and capital cities should be the web servers. Then you end up having conversations like: "Hey, can you move some data up to larry, moe, and saturn? We're building on hydrogen, oxygen, and sacramento."
The confusion this causes for new hires and non-natives is real, albeit somewhat comical.
edit: ServerXX is no better-the names should give a clue to what function they perform (i.e. IRV-FNP01 = located in irvine, file and print server, 01 [oldest server])
I much rather prefer managing names rather than codes/numbers. One major reason is that often in a standardized system, the least significant bits are on the right, and at least in Windows often a longer name will be truncated in a display. I don't need many characters to tell one dwarf from another, but to tell names of the type XXYYYNNNNN0-12 from XXYYYNNNNN0-13 is a huge pain sometimes.
The big win, though, for a more clinical naming is that shared context/training can be easier, and in a larger org the standardization of course makes things a lot easier to deal with. But of course, standardization can be done with the more whimsical names. And a lot of the time the naming scheme that is drawn up by committee takes just as long to learn as the more fun ones (mostly because they need to be abbreviated a bunch).
I suppose the one thing you can say for formal naming systems that is fairly inarguable is that once you understand the rules, you can look at an unfamiliar machine name and know instantly what it does. For machines named after fictional characters that's only true if you read/watch the same books/shows as the people doing the naming.
> The people using the machines every day know that (for example) all the database servers are named after planets, all the web servers are elements of the periodic table, all the development boxes are Muppets characters, etc.
I have nothing against naming things in such a manner (my computers at home are cartoon characters), but the problem is that it doesn't scale. The company I work for is under 10 years old, and while a bit too old to still be called a startup, we already have more print servers than there are planets, let alone DB, dev, QA, and web servers. The last couple start-ups I had also had hundreds of boxes, and I'd go insane if "db-35" was actually named "WASP-18b" and I had to remember a list of 50-ish planets.
"we already have more print servers than there are planets"
If you had a Pluto before the IAU changed its classification from planet to "ball of rock" you have a nice excuse to use whatever spherical lumps of rock you feel like.
It may not solve your problem forever, but, then, you can expand the naming to "potato-shaped lumps of stuff". That should give you some mileage.
Hmmm. It's a lot easier to automatically manage boxes named "server001" than a list of random names that constantly has to be maintained.
I bet you could save $10,000 a year by eliminating the arbitrary names and calling them ServerXXX.
Sorry for the attempt at a witty reply. Let's start again. Agreed, there are efficiencies. The point of the article is that when you institute changes like this, you may create unintended consequences like a mass exodus of people who liked working for a company where the servers were named after Muppet characters and associate "Server042" with a company where professional managers demand cover sheets for their TPS reports.
Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company?
I think automation is key to any startup that wants to punch above its weight. I kind of think that insisting on "venus" and "mercury" for server names is like calling your variables fgyt, asdf, and ytrh in a for loop. Naming is important and needs to be done with care for reuse and readability by people.
Am quite surprised that people see this as linked to sodas and drinks. Those sodas are cheap productivity wins. So is systematic/meaningful naming.
(Perhaps this is the open vs. free software debate. The open source POV is that free sodas are good because they increase productivity, in ways that are not obvious in the short term but no less real. If they decreased productivity that'd be a different matter. The free software guys are more ideological about things. )
> Before making such a change, ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing good for the company?
If you knew what the consequences were going to be then they wouldn't be unanticipated, but if you didn't know then you couldn't accurately answer the question.
Aren't you just asking people to 'know the unknown unknowns' and never make poor decisions?
Wouldn't it be a more realistic suggestion to ask them to ask "Was this good for the company and if not, should we revert to how it was before?"
Actually, I quoted that line because I believe that while resignations are an unintended consequence, they are easily forseen by any manager who stops trying to achieve local maxima and thinks of global maxima. While the quote is funny in the context of the movie, it's a perfectly sensible question to ask on a regular basis: It's a way of reminding yourself to step back and think big picture.
Which is what disturbs me about the story. A CFO is paid to think big picture, to confer with the CTO about morale, and so forth. In a well-run company I would expect a middle manager to suggest quashing free drinks and the CFO to demur after conferring with colleagues.
Given the story as told, I wonder if an Engineering-Business war was breaking out and if the CFO new exactly what was going to happen.
It is very rare for any individual to completely reverse their previous decision, especially when the results of that decision are subjective, delayed and hard to measure.
By the time management realises that soda should have been free, the opinions of the top engineers have irreversibly changed.
In the movie, the PHBs hold a meeting in which they solemnly instruct all their employees to ask "Is what I'm doing good for the company?" before they do anything.
The audience rolls its eyes in sympathy, for the reasons you've pointed out here.
You don't roll your eyes at Office Space because you think "oh no, how will the employees know about the unintended consequences?! What a silly request."
You sigh and roll your eyes because it's a patronising request which stamps the bosses authority and makes it clear that the boss thinks all the employees are a bit slow. (Or perhaps because you think it should be up to the boss to decide what's good for the company then organise the employees to do it, and by asking the employees to do that he's trying to avoid work by pushing his job onto the employees while still keeping his position and salary).
The parent post I was responding to was suggesting "try to see the unexpected consequences" and I was countering "that's like trying to find all the bugs - you'll never know when you've finished; more helpful would be managerial humility and willingness to notice negative results and revert the changes".
I think it's dependent on the situation. I enjoy the charm of machines named "frodo" and whatnot, but when I first arrived at my current company, the totally arbitrary naming conventions was highly confusing because we had three environments (dev/stage/prod) and several databases and other classes of server per environment. Now we have a standardized naming convention with names like "dev-foo01", "stage-bar02", "prod-baz01" etc.. (were foo/bar/baz denote the purpose of the machine) and it's much easier to deal with.
The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random. There is often structure and information embedded in the naming scheme, even when it might not be obvious to an outsider. Having someone come in and replace all of that with server001-server999 will often remove information.
The thing that more often than not that list of 'random' names isn't random.
Exactly. For instance, my firewall is called "charon". Personification is a good thing and should be encouraged. It's easier to visualize things that way. From an inside-out perspective (people such as accountants who see everything but, for the most part, do not understand it), naming servers like $function_$row_$rack_$slot or whatever else makes sense...it will simplify things.
The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective.
Think about it like this: you have things in your kitchen, right? Say you have a toaster, a refrigerator, a mixer, and a microwave. You would NEVER call them things like "appliance_counter1_left", "appliance_floor_right" etc. This would be confusing. It is for this reason that humans give things names; toaster, refrigerator, and mixer are all names, they're just very common ones.
If you worked managing a supermarket you would call them City17_shop5_aisle4_refridgerator2.
> The problem is that it simplifies things from an inventory perspective, not from a "I'm trying to visualize this so that it all works" perspective.
That depends - I'd much rather a firewall rule that told me that Glasgow Database Server 2 can talk to London Mail Server 3 for SMTP traffic than one that told me MissPiggy can talk to Kermit for χάρτης traffic.
Especially when it's not a system I deal with every day and I haven't cached the name/function mappings in my head.
On the other hand, the UK postal system works well with a mixture of numeric sequences (house and flat numbers), cutesy names (road names, city names) and arbitrary government assigned gibberish (Post Codes).
It depends on the number of machines. When I have 3 or 4 they get names (currently using Firefly characters), but when I have say 20 or more they get numbers. Or they get both so that my scripts are easier to write. For me it also depends on function. If its just another app server cloned from the master, it gets a number -- it has no personality. But if it is a backup server, mail server, dev or test system it gets a name.
How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "server001" vs. "server002" or "server003", etc.? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that?
How the heck are you supposed to remember what is running on "Feynman" vs. "Fermi" or "Farnsworth"? Why not just stick to IP addresses if you're going to do that? And what do you call the next server?
By contrast, "hq-web-001" is an early webserver at head quarters, while "br1-sql-020" is a later database server at branch office 1, and the next server name is the next in the appropriate sequence.
"Feynmann", "Fermi" and "Farnsworth" are much better than "server001", "server002" and "server003" but are arguably a step behind "hq-web-001" and "br1-sql-020". I work for a company where most of the servers are just numbered and it's can be rather confusing.
How is managing boxes named server001 easier than giving the servers, oh, I don't know.... actual NAMES! Are you seriously gonna tell me you manage the boxes with scripts that iterate through the numeric portion of the server names?!? Because if that's the case, your problems are WAAAYYY bigger than just naming convention problems.
Names like server001 are great and fine for a cluster of more or less identical, interchangable machines (Beowolf cluster, cluster of VMware hosts, etc.). But it sucks ass for most other circumstances. Seriously. Try having discussions about a project involving a dozen servers (out of hundreds in the company mind you), each with names like server3056, server3087, server3109. It sucks, because 5 minutes after talking about it you find yourself wondering: Hmmm... was I supposed to reboot 3087? or 3078? :-)
Now everyone can connect to a machine with a memorable name, AND you can loop through all the dbservers if you need to, AND anyone who doesn't understand the system can look in one place to grok it.
The problem is that you're not a sysadmin. I'm going to assume that you are a programmer since you are assuming this is simply a programming problem.
I am a sysadmin, and I can tell you that I outgrew cute server names many years ago because they hurt more than they could ever help. Reading this thread, it is painfully obvious to me that most people here have not been meaningfully exposed to large server installations. The last time I had servers with cute names, there were 12 machines total. Since then, I've worked in environments with hundreds and thousands of hosts.
Even past a couple dozen servers, cute names become a liability and a significant distraction. Divining purpose, location, and other meaning by looking at a cute name when you have 30 servers is difficult and unnecessary. Applying the 3am standard (can a sleep deprived sysadmin do this task with minimal error at 3am?) cute names actually become rather cruel. The answer is to build an inventory system that lets the sysadmin map cute names to functional information. Or simply build that functional information in to the naming scheme.
So sorry guys. As a professional sysadmin and fellow engineer I appreciate that you are looking out for what you perceive to be our sysadmin needs, but cute names are one thing we don't want or need. Unless perhaps you can come up with a justification for renaming the functions and classes in your code with cute names...
I like having my servers named things like HQDC01 instead of something like MrSpock or Samantha, but I do know others who prescribe to the Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (Full Metal Jacket) style of server naming--"Tonight, you p*kes will sleep with your servers. You will give your server a girl's name. Because this is the only...etc...".
The HQ is for Headquarters, DC for Domain Controller, 01. HQDS01 for Headquarters Development Server 01, etc... It's an MCSE best practices naming convention to locate and indentify servers.
Yup. And then you are forced to move the physical location of the server to some remote data center. But because your infrastructure is tightly coupled to the specific machine name you can't change it, so now the name is misleading.
Some care required. Four years ago we coined some names for internal use that we knew no one would ever see. Now they've leaked out into places where some customers can see them and the entire code-base really ought to be cleaned for consistency. Currently we have visible names and hidden names, and remembering the dichotomy is proving difficult. We're cleaning as we go, but we are all wishing we'd been a bit less whimsical.
I understand the appeal, but I disagree. Even at my most whimsical, I'd rather have the name a of a machine really be tied to some actual information about the machine. You don't have to use muppet names to indicate that something is a development database server, for example.
Having only ever worked for one small company, it's really hard for me to imagine this actually happening.
Hell, from most of the stories I've heard from people working for bigger places, people who don't log into the machines frequently don't even know that the machines have names.
i used to work for a company where i wrote critical pieces of their software infrastructure. it's a series of interconnected apps which i named after marsupials. i have now left, and they are in the process of giving the apps boring names that more directly indicate what they do.
Well, to be fair, that sounds fairly logical. If I get hired in your place, I don't want to have to figure out that I have to run Possum before I can run Koala, and if I'm going to be running Kangaroo I have to explicitly specify the target port or whatever.
The CFO failed to anticipate that humans are irrational, and that people will read all sorts of things into the loss of free sodas. It's not just an economic transaction.
I thought the sales point of "business" types was that they were good at managing the irrationality of humans.
Do you think the CFO who proposed this dismal change regrets it? She raised her standing with her peer group by proposing a popular cost-cutting measure, and they probably blame the engineers for the outcome, not her. They may even be glad to be rid of the engineers who wouldn't adjust well to big-company culture. Big-company culture is a culture of mediocrity and interchangeability, and the guys on top like it that way. They want all the initiative and excellence to be on their level of the company, so everything that happens in the company is due to their control. Google is exceptional in even trying to avoid that fate.
I doubt it. Few people are going to mention the sodas during exit interviews. In fact, I think very few people are even aware that the sodas might be a trigger for their decision, since it's not about the sodas, but the show of loyalty.
It's not irrational to recognize that the kind of thinking that would eliminate free soda on the basis of narrow cost-benefit analysis is also the kind of thinking that would transform their beloved startup into a stultifying corporate bureaucracy.
Is it really irrationality? If you are taking away a benefit, that is like a salary cut on something you were getting tax free.
The reality is that it is revealing of a CFO attitude, let's take away as much as we can from the employees to help the bottom line. CFO's should first focus on growing revenue, not cutting benefits.
This is why, when any new idea is proposed, it is important to look into the downsides. Every idea, no matter how great you think it is, has a negative side. People making important decisions at companies should always try to come up with the unforeseen consequences and compare it to the benefits.
Based on what he says, end of the free sodas is a lagging indicator that is significant only for the reason that it serves as a "wake up call" for the "heads-down" talent. Unless the talent is entirely clueless (which makes you wonder about the "superstar" qualification), at some point they will realize that they are no longer a good fit for the company and will leave.
So it seems the moral of the story is that hold off on sending overt signals to your employees until you have prepared for their (inevitable) exodus.
We all like free stuff, but there is no demonstration that the company was actually harmed by saving the money on free drinks. Did having the early engineers move on have a significant negative impact? Apparently not, or it would have been mentioned in the article. . .
After all, you could hire them back if you offered them enough, and you'd do that if they were essential.
Maybe it was in fact better to replace them with people happier working in a medium sized company.
Having workers move on always has a cost, generally called retention costs/turnover costs. The employer has to go through the hiring process again. The position may remain unfilled until that's done, meaning your team is short on personnel. You have to train the new person, even a skilled hire needs to learn the particulars of your business. (That's one reason why employers look at how long you were at previous jobs, to avoid that turnover.) Depending on the position, the company could lose 1x to 1.5x the employee's yearly salary, sometimes more.
And if you're trying to "hire them back if you offered them enough", that rather negates the point of trying to save money by eliminating soda, doesn't it?
> After all, you could hire them back if you offered them enough
This is typical HR thinking, and is only valid for a certain demographic (i.e., the people on the mid-to-low end of the bell curve). In my experience the absolute top-level engineers cannot be retained with just money.
Let me put it this way - you're an ace engineer with oodles of experience. You are in high demand, and if you were unemployed, you probably would have recruiters banging your door down by week's end. These are the "top talent" that all companies claim they want to hire - and they will make top dollar regardless of where they go.
Having known some of these people, the motivator is not money, because money is not why they do this, and honestly they're swimming in it already. To hire these guys you need to do something more - a great working environment, a kickass team, a sane management structure, etc etc.
Yes, money will make a certain character swallow their pride/morals: a prostitute. Anybody with self-respect will have other reasons for taking a job. My old manager said "Nobody every quit over money". Well, he managed high-end Engineers, but you get the idea.
