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IT Workers To Get Fewer Perks, No Free Coffee
dasButcher writes "While the economy is showing signs of recovery and tech stocks posted double- and triple-digit gains in 2009, IT workers are facing a less hospitable workplace in the coming year. Many employers say they're going to continue trimming budgets, particularly in human resources. Rather than giving up head count, they're planning to trim 401k contributions, eliminate bonuses, curtail travel and, dare we say, shut off the free coffee (it wasn't that good anyway)."
Every job is different. Every career is different. Things ebb and flow. For a long time, IT workers were spoiled primadonna. Now they're just another cost center. Guess what, the economy is jacked up. Budget cuts have to happen. IT is a necessity, but so is efficiency, cost control, etc. Welcome to the real world you big f'ing crybabies.
The more you screw your employees, the more they will find ways to screw you. Turn off Gmail and Slashdot? Fine, I'll take a once-an-hour smoke break. Hack my 401k? I'll sit and stare at the ceiling. Bust by balls about travel costs? See if I don't have a "family thing" next time and can't go. People will take what they feel (rightly or wrongly) is their due, whether you give it to them or not.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Anywhere that would cut out coffee from the budget is quite frankly insane. It's a minuscule expense compared to the HR budget and improves productivity dramatically when people would otherwise be flagging (early mornings for night owls, afternoons for early birds).
The ability to provide free, legal performance enhancing drugs is one of the few negligible-cost productivity boost techniques available. You'd have to be both petty and highly incompetent as a manager to do away with it.
Yeah, we've gotta be more concerned about feeding that CEO machine...
Nasty instant Coffee?
That's nothing. Where I work, we have go outside, and chew the leaves and beans off coffee bushes ourselves.
Lucky sod! Your coffee's fresher than everyone's!
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
I would sacrifice all of those perks for more paid time off. HP offers new employees something like 12 days PTO and then it schedules 10 days of forced shutdowns per year to get accumulated PTO off the books. This means any new employee gets 2, count them, 2 days to schedule at their own convenience. That's deeply disrespectful. (I don't work at HP but I have friends that do).
We've long had a person head up a 'coffee club', collecting from the java
junkies on the floor every month. Enough money was left to have a group lunch
at month-end. AFAICT the coffee machine was there long before, industrial type
-- 2 open carafes with an orange one for decaf, you probably saw one in a
diner somewhere -- not the 10 or 12 cup coffeemakers you get from Costco.
401K? Long gone from the employer's side, we're waiting for the first
anniversary announcement, if they will reinstate their contribution. I feel
less of a team player if they did not.
Yup, not just in IT. This was the travel industry. Welcome to the club, gents.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Wait: we don't get pensions anymore. 401k contributions ARE our retirement plans. Cutting 401k is the same as saying "we care about you SO little, that we hope you die hungry and cold in your old age."
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Some company perks that I just don't want and will never use:
- I don't want a company celphone. I have my own phone, I don't want to have to keep track of business and private calls, I don't want my boss to get a list of all the calls I make in a month, and I don't want to have to carry around two phones. The company phone is lying in the closet, unused, the subscription fee is being paid for nothing.
- I don't want a company laptop. I don't need one for my work (customers *naturally* never allow machines on their network that they didn't provide themselves). For private use, it's useless. It does not have the specs I would have chosen for my own laptop, and I'm not free to modify it or change the software on it. It's been lying in the closet, unused. It's worse than useless, as I can't justify buying one for myself as long as I "have a perfectly ok laptop gathering dust in the closet".
- Company presentations preceeded by Paintball or Casino: please keep it serious and treat me like an adult. I don't come to the office to play games with colleagues, just give the presentation.
- Free coffee: I don't care. It's nice if it's there, but it's such a minor issue that if they want to save the shockingly huge amount of money that goes into rent and support of these machines, by all means do so, I'm not going to work less hard if I have to buy my own drinks.
Twenty years ago, companies jumped-up IT guys and made them "Web Masters" -- coders, server maintainers, content creators and (in their own minds) designers -- giving them six figure salaries. Every company, no matter how small, felt it needed to have a "server room" and maintain their e-mail service locally. The Marketing secretary always needed help figuring out how to print her boss's agenda out of Lotus Organizer.
Times changed.
Now, companies buy website templates for sixty bucks non-exclusive (three grand exclusive) and they're sitting in a server room at a place called Dreamhost or Hostgator. The content is maintained via a CMS run by the Marketing secretary. Employers and employees are using Gmail and other cloud-based e-mail systems because the lines between personal and work IT space have become so blurred. Nobody needs help printing anymore, because an entire generation has been raised on the Internet and personal computer systems.
People will take what they feel (rightly or wrongly) is their due, whether you give it to them or not.
And employers will replace them with 20-something go-getters with better attitudes and more up-to-date skills, and at half the salary.
If you need it to function, you have a problem and should cut back or quit.
I need oxygen to function, but I'm worried about cutting back or quitting. I'm told the withdrawal symptoms are pretty bad.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
You can always fit a small refrigerator inside of a std. rack (lay a couple of 2x4's across the bottom to hold it up, and make sure the rack doors are on it, front and back). Put your own coffee maker on top of it, and you're set. Tape a few Dell server front panels to the inside of the rack door while you're at it. If you're really into disguises, wire up a few LED's to those panels.
Now if only there was a way to squeeze a big-screen TV in there... and no, not sideways.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
IMHO, getting rid of free coffee is a huge mistake. In the scheme of things it's a tiny expense and you're going to lose far more in terms of people bickering about the coffee fund, people running out "on break" to buy coffee, and the basic office environment.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
At the company where I work, they cut off the free coffee last summer, for a cost savings of $80,000 a year. Not exactly a tiny expense, basically one engineer's job.
Now if we can just get that one engineer whose job it saved to get everybody coffee . . .
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
Nope, not a burger joint within two miles of here even if they did.
Do you get your bridge for free, perchance? Does it have a good goat throughput?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Back in the olden days of Computers...like 10 years ago...I was one of the many who was against unionization of IT workers. Now, having been badly treated by both small companies, and one of the largest single-digit level manufacturers of computers, I see that I was wrong. Today's 'sweatshops' are in computer assembly factories, and in call centers. They both use Skinner like systems with seemingly random rewards and punishments to keep people in line.
These days, digging ditches is a more profitable and satisfying job...fully unionized, with guaranteed vacation and benefits, and a grievance system that actually works!
ttyl ...note, I don't dig ditches.
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
I'm a firm believer that if a business wants to show it cares, it'll say it with money. Because that's the only thing that matters to a business. if it's parting with cash in ways it does not absolutely have to, that says something. But barring that, there's cashless ways to show care. There's not much you can do if you're doing IT-as-a-service where you need to be available for fixed hours but if you're doing dev work that doesn't go on a fixed schedule, give flex time! You worked late during the week, take a half day Friday. Costs the company nothing, same amount of work is getting done. Need a dr's appointment? For the love of xod, we're not going to ding you four hours of vacation time for it.
I don't really get the silly stuff like pool tables and video games. That just seems like prolonging time spent at work and in a non-productive fashion. I would put more of a premium on getting the max amount of work done in the shortest possible time so people can go home. Quality of life is about having a life outside the office. In-house masseuses, catered lunches every day, that seems a little wasteful. But cutting 401k, cutting fucking coffee? Major dick moves.
Employers are doing it because it's an employer's market out there. But rest assured, these employers will reap what they sow. The best employees are always the most mobile employees. If your best feel dicked over or if there's even the slightest concern about company stability, they will be out the door in a heartbeat. And it's now accepted in IT culture that you will NEVER make more money at the same employer. The only way to raise your pay is to move to another organization because your current one will never justify paying more for the person they already have, no matter if you're learning new skills, taking on more work, or improving the bottom line.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
My guess though is that if you're spending $80k per year on coffee, then it's for a hell of a lot of people, and that $80k expense (and a single job) IS tiny on that scale. If an $80k expenditure costs a job but improves morale of a few thousand employees enough to make up for it in productivity gains, then it's the right thing to do.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
A cow is a machine that converts grass to milk.
A programmer is a machine that converts coffee to code.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I tend to agree. When the economy goes south, and you either stop giving raises, or start giving paycuts, sometimes the best way to keep employees happy is with relatively minor perks like these. I worked for a company where there was a hiring and raise freeze during a merger. No one was happy. They expaned the free coffee into free hot cocoa as well. It was a minor thing, but the gesture seemed to make people happy.
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we mixed a little dirt in a cup of cold water and called it instant. If you wanted creamer, you added drop or two of Liquid Paper. Tasted like shit, but the extra chemicals and minerals kept you going.
If you post it, they will read.
More than ionized workers?
My kids think the day I came home with office furniture, boxes of office supplies, company teeshirts, and random promotional paraphenalia as one of the best days of Daddy's working life. It was like Christmas to the kids for each of them to get a lucite paperweight with our latest chip in it. Of course, unbeknownst to them, it was the day the company folded, and I was laid off. Still kinda cracks me up... it's all about how you look at things, as to whether they're they end of the world, or just a new world of adventure. :)
http://www.beanleafpress.com
I have always thought of programming as the art of converting caffeine into an executable. Coffee is part of the cost of doing business.
You might want to look at the math. If you, as an individual, drank $400 of coffee per year, that would lead to $80,000 of coffee per year covering over 200 employees. Or 100 employees who drink twice as much as you do. Or 50 employees who suffer severe shakes, headaches, and moments of telepathy. Or 25 employees who swim in tanks filled with the spice melange and wrap space-time so heighliner ships can reach their destinations. And that may be money well spent. Or 1 to 5 employees who were selling coffee to the other employees using company funds.
I found a quick quote that claimed "the general rule of thumb for office coffee service pricing is $60 to $120 per employee per year." So he's talking about a business with at least 667 employees and probably close to 1000.
So, if the average employee is 0.1% more productive with free coffee getting rid of the free coffee was a bad business decision and the Cxx (COO, CFO, whatever) who made that decision should be beaten to death with his own intestines or fired.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
I hear that Chinese HR managers are 20 times cheaper too.
My office has free coffee -- a dozen kinds of Keurig pods -- and a free soda fountain. We all got pretty miffed when they down-sized the free cups, but, meh.
It's about $25-50/week not spent at the overpriced retail joints. Figure 200 employees at ten minutes, once a day to run downstairs, that's 166 hours of lost productivity -- or somewhere between $5-10K PER WEEK. To the employees, that's about $250K of collective benefit. To the employer, it's about double that in productivity not lost to everyone schlepping downstairs for coffee and soda.
On the other hand, my mother's office eliminated their coffee service, one kind, giant urn of Yuban, claiming it was an unnecessary expense. That manager got a bonus for reducing overhead...
Hope this joke puts things into perspective for you.
A factory has a major problem that closed their manufacturing line. A consultant is brought in. The Consultant wanders around the factory floor, listening, poking. Finally, he takes out a small hammer and taps gently a few times on one particular piece of machinery. The factory line roars back to life, production once again in progress. The factory managers are ecstatic.
A week later, the factory recieves the invoice from The Consultant. The price was $900 for less than one hour of work. The factory's business people fumed and asked The Consultant for an explanation. The Consultant offered to send in an itemized invoice. The business people said, "yes, please do."
A second invoice arrived. It had two line items. Item 1 was, "Rectifying Problem with Hammer Hit....$1" Item 2 was, "Knowing Where to Hit the Hammer....$899"
... is a mixture of pure unsupported assertations, and anecdotes pretending to be data. Any evidence to show that "strikes hurt employees more through lost wages than they gain in negotiations"? In fact, there's a lot of history that shows that unions did, in fact, make lives better for not only their own workers, but for everyone - and not only in the form of wages, but also in things like medical benefits and safe working conditions. For example: the five day work week - brought to you by the AFL-CIO.
Enough with the union bashing, already. Read a little history of the labor movement, and then see what you think.
Unions work great in the rest of the world.
Americans seem to have to wrong idea about what Unions are about. It has become a lethal fight in a system that basically says: The worker has no rights.
In Holland unions work together and it is not unusual for the unions AND the employers to unite and tell the government to go screw it self. Like on wage freezes recently. The government said all wages (except its own oddly enough, an oversight I am sure) should be frozen and in some sectors employees and unions said that they had already sorted things out and wouldn't do it.
ideally, government, employers and unions/workers should all work together to create a working society with give and take and the realization that just because you are on opposites ends of the negotiation table, that doesn't mean you have to be enemies with no common goals.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
He pays dues. He gets no real benefit. And they tell him what he can and can't do.
Sounds like my home owner's association.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Wow, what timing. This morning when our company announced that it was canceling the coffee service to save money, I immediately asked what that savings would be. $200 a month was the answer, for our location which employs roughly 130 people. I was floored. If our financial situation is that serious, maybe I need to start looking for another job?
- Long time lurker, first time commenter.