
Coffee and its Effects on Feature Creep (2011) - shadytrees
http://royrapoport.blogspot.com/2011/05/coffee-and-its-effects-on-feature-creep.html
======
pserwylo
I love this. Although it is a bit more advanced than what we had, we suffered
a similar problem:

On Friday when the boss shouted us pizza, we had a problem with everybody
trying to order various pizza's, various half pizza's, and various sized
pizzas over email. Then the orderer had to collate all of these into a
coherent order for the pizza shop.

In the end, we wrote a new module for our internal project management system
called "The Pizza Module".

The Pizza Module would be pre-populated with the menu of our favourite pizza
shop, so that you couldn't place an order for something that didn't exist. It
would then allow people to enter orders via intranet, and then resolve things
like four people ordering "half a mexicana" into two mexicana's. It also came
with the "fat graph" report, which always had the orderer with the fattest
amount (due to people who didn't have access to the intranet ordering through
him).

Finally, it was fitted with a feature that prevented ordering, unless your
timesheet was complete for the past two months. For a long time, it was very
successful, and worked perfectly as intended).

However, in the end, it broke down when we moved away from it as we shifted to
a different project management system. Nobody could be bothered writing a new
pizza module (or refactoring the old pizza module to work with various project
management systems), so we now use a collaborative Google doc with a table
that people can place orders in. This is a Bad Idea™, and is far more open to
gaming than the system described in the article. However, it is good for 5
minutes of entertainment on a Friday morning, watching people going back and
forth on the shared doc.

~~~
dusklight
Could you please elaborate on how people tried to game the system and what was
done to try to mitigate that?

~~~
pserwylo
Well, if I order a large Meat Lovers, it is far too easy for somebody else to
change it to half a small vegetarian. Then add 15 people, all wanting to screw
with eachother, and it is far too easy to stuff up the whole thing.

Perhaps "gaming the system" was not the right choice of words, but I wanted to
note that the author of the article seems to go to great lengths to stop this
sort of abuse.

------
dang
scott_s posted this a few weeks ago, so normally we would bury it as a dupe.
But it's so perfect for HN, and got so little of the attention it deserved,
that I'm going to leave it up.

On a trivial note, damned blogspot's auto-switching between .ca, .au, .in,
.co.uk, .com, and every other suffix under the sun is some of the most
annoying nonstandard bullshit I have to deal with on this site.

~~~
Jedd
Oh, is that what happened? I saw it as an .au (I'm in AU) but couldn't work
out what the heck RPI was (why do people still assume that their blog readers
are in the same region they are?). Happily the dodgy "May 16, 2011" subtitle
was a giveaway that it was somewhere in North America.

~~~
dang
Yeah, that's what happens. Blogspot, curse its name, detects which country
you're in, silently edits every URL accordingly, and redirects you to that.
Argh!

Maybe we'll change our code to make it always be blogspot.com.

p.s. I've added .au to the list :)

~~~
frik
There are also blogspot.de, .at, etc. ...Google's recent changes with the
redirect and the bad HTML5 template are quiet annoying.

Changing HN to always just display the .com version would be awesome.

~~~
michaelt
If you check the SSL certificate[1] you get quite the list:

 _.blogspot.ae_.blogspot.be _.blogspot.ca_.blogspot.ch
_.blogspot.co.at_.blogspot.co.il _.blogspot.co.nz_.blogspot.co.uk
_.blogspot.com.ar_.blogspot.com.au _.blogspot.com.br_.blogspot.com.es
_.blogspot.com.tr_.blogspot.cz _.blogspot.de_.blogspot.dk
_.blogspot.fi_.blogspot.fr _.blogspot.gr_.blogspot.hk
_.blogspot.hu_.blogspot.ie _.blogspot.in_.blogspot.it
_.blogspot.jp_.blogspot.kr _.blogspot.mx_.blogspot.nl
_.blogspot.no_.blogspot.pt _.blogspot.ro_.blogspot.ru
_.blogspot.se_.blogspot.sg _.blogspot.sk_.blogspot.tw

[1]
[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.blogspot....](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=www.blogspot.co.uk&s=74.125.30.191)

------
wahnfrieden
This sort of thing is why we had free lunch for employees, ordered via
Seamless out of a spreadsheet of your regular order per restaurant. It wasn't
a benefit - it was just a way to save the company time. It was costing more to
pay for people's time spent coordinating what to do for lunch on their own
than it did to just buy everyone lunch.

------
Kortaggio
Did you notice an expansion in the total money supply in your office due to
deposit multiplication?[1] I can conceive of a situation where three people
who wanted to prank you can game the TCNW statistics by circularly assigning
debt to each other. For example, Alice says she owes Bob $20 billion, Bob says
he owes Charlie $20 billion, and Charlie says he owes Alice $20 billion.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking#Exam...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking#Example_of_deposit_multiplication)

------
Systemic33
In Denmark, the biggest bank have made an app where you sign up with your bank
account and payment card. Then you can transfer money between friends
(sending, asking and splitting). And it only requires you to login with a PIN
code, and then you just use peoples mobile nr.

There's obviously limits on how much can be transferred, but it's ideal for
those small purchases.

It's available on iOS, Android and even Windows Phone. Link to Android
version:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.danskebank....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.danskebank.mobilepay)

Currently free to use, but in some years there's a minor percentage fee.

~~~
thejosh
Commonwealth Bank in Australia has a similar app - Kaching.

~~~
robzyb
I haven't used it. I haven't heard of anyone using it.

Et vous?

~~~
thejosh
Noone I know uses it either..

------
fennecfoxen
Debt tracking can also be done with Splitwise:
[https://www.splitwise.com/](https://www.splitwise.com/)

which is good for when you don't have cash money at the Redwood City taqueria.

~~~
adito
Wow, this is the exact app that I need at the moment. Thanks for pointing it
out. I dont know that there exist something like this.

------
MWil
I always enjoy good "gaming the system" reads. Nothing beats the story of
LucasArts' Habitat.

~~~
DangerousPie
Two links I found about this, for the interested:
[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-05-retrospective-h...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-05-retrospective-
habitat)
[http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Wo...](http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Virtual_Worlds/LucasfilmHabitat.html)

~~~
MWil
The second link is what I read first back in 2010. Found it through reading
another book called Virtual Justice which you can get in pdf format for free
(linked below). Apparently it was pre-LucasArts and still Lucasfilm.

[http://lastowka.rutgers.edu/virtual-
justice/](http://lastowka.rutgers.edu/virtual-justice/)

------
keithpeter
Excellent story. The comments from previous workmates give the sense that this
was a _nice_ place to work.

Here is a puzzle...

In my old pre-ubiquitous-computing physics lab we did something similar to the
system described in the OA with a large piece of graph paper and a collection
of coloured pens. It was called the Who Buys Next Chart.

We made our own coffee and tea, you understand. Axes were drawn with number of
cups made along the bottom and money up the side. A thick black line of
gradient equal to the average cost per cup was drawn(1). Each member had a
different colour pen.

When you made a drink you extended your line along an amount equal to the
number of drinks. When you bought something you extended your plot with a
vertical line equal to the amount you spent. Equitable contributions implied a
plot approaching the thick black line.

When we ran out of a crucial ingredient, the person whose plot had reached
furthest left below the line (i.e. who had made the most drinks but not bought
much) had to go and buy the stuff.

The system was gamed in various ways - or more accurately various strategies
evolved to avoid having to go out in the rain and various issues about
equitable contribution arose.

Can you spot some of the more obvious ones?

(1) The gradient was determined by the accumulated result from the previous
WBNC. This tradition had been in place for some years, and a large sheet of
graph paper lasted for a couple of months.

------
SamReidHughes
Instead of assigning person-to-person debt relationships, my company just
tracked the sum of each person's net debt on the whiteboard, with a circular
buffer log so we can go back and fix things in case the sum doesn't add up to
0. The trouble with that is when people are too lazy to update the sum, so
they end up hoarding a bunch of receipts and then update it way later.
Eventually some numbers got really big, so I put some offsets on the board so
that infrequent participants' contribution to the sum was zero. And then
people left the company with nonzero debts...

Another option that we've started doing is to just randomly assign the task of
paying for a meal, weighted by each person's proportion of the cost.

Once somebody has a debt to a coworker, though, the most efficient way of
paying it off is to bet double-or-nothing on a coin flip until the debt is
zero or the debtor is uncomfortable increasing it further.

~~~
michaelt
Couldn't the debtor just keep flipping the coin until they got zero?

~~~
SamReidHughes
Only as long as both people agree to keep flipping.

------
endlessvoid94
> yes, I implemented coffee drink definition ACLs

This is so excellent

~~~
kevsim
I know, this one line made my day

------
abalone
I stopped reading at "venti non-fat 180 degrees vanilla latte with two equals,
extra squirt of vanilla, and whipped cream".

That is not coffee.

~~~
benihana
Ha-ha! That guy likes coffee with a bunch of stuff to disguise the bitter
flavor. Anything he has to say is completely invalid and also my tastes are
better than his.

Isn't it awesome feeling superior to people ha-ha!

~~~
abalone
The irony of this is that while my post was a joke, yours is actually about
making yourself feel superior to people.

~~~
k__
Circle troll commenced?

------
adwf
One man's feature creep is another man's Agile iterative development. Started
with an MVP and iterated onwards :P

------
emmanueloga_
As fun as implementing Caffeinator might have been, this makes me wonder if
the simpler solution of buying a nice coffee machine could had solved the
issue in a much simpler way (and cheaper... developer time is expensive, and
more so on weekends! :)

------
brokentone
Best quote: "And that's how I set out to simplify ordering Starbucks and
created an internal banking system."

Very entertaining story, and I think it's less feature creep than building a
product that is valuable to you and your colleagues iteratively. I'd mark this
as a success.

------
merrua
Our office has free tea/coffee/milk.

------
benrhughes
We just have a company supplied expresso machine and try to convince the team
leader to put work lunches on his company credit card. Much simpler :-)

------
EGreg
I thought this would end up being the story of how Ripple came to be.

------
a8da6b0c91d
Credit card roulette is the only sane way to pay group tabs. It's also much
more fun.

~~~
greenyoda
A description of Credit Card Roulette can be found here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_roulette](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_roulette)

