Twitch did the free food and snacks thing. When acquired by Amazon, Twitch opened a Seattle office, on a floor of an existing Amazon building. We got to keep getting free food!
Every day around lunchtime, hungry Amazon workers from adjacent floors would quietly try to slip in to get a sandwich or a kebab or whatever, or would surreptitiously attempt to get a bag of chips.
Eventually the Twitch side started to complain: there was never enough food to go around at lunch time. If you were more than ten minutes late, all the food would be gone.
The Amazon management’s response? Lock off the Twitch floor so it required special badges for access. Let the Amazonians starve!
That is exactly what I expected to happen.
Re:Amazon's Silent Sacking
by Rebelgecko on Saturday December 30, 2023 @11:03PM
(#38821672)
TBH I expected that everyone would lose the free food
That will happen a bit later
True. The badness is almost always incremental.
The last thing most tech workers need is more chips.
Re:Amazon's Silent Sacking
by tonyedgecombe on Sunday December 31, 2023 @08:34AM
(#38823930)
Yeah, free food looks like a negative to me.
I remember the same thing with the door desks. I was impressed at the time (I was young): "Wow, this company not only uses Pine for email but they're smart enough to know that fancy desks aren't necessary." That was obviously a long time ago, but that attitude didn't last long, especially when I saw how absolutely venal the company was becoming.
I remember back in 2002 (?) when the 2-pizza team idea was introduced. My manager said he would find out how we could expense the pizza. It turns out that the pizza was merely theoretical: the team should be sized so that, if there were pizza, then 2 pizzas would be enough for the team. But that doesn't mean that pizza would ever be ordered or expensed.