It’s like your friend group and time choosing a place to eat. It’s not your friends, it’s the law of averages.
But also, when I tell one of my reports to spec and order himself a PC, there should be several controls in place.
Firstly, I should give clear enough instructions that they know whether they should be spending around $600, $1500, or $6000.
Second, although my reports can freely spend ~$100 no questions asked, expenses in the $1000+ region should require my approval.
Thirdly, there is monitoring of where money is going; spending where the paperwork isn't in order gets flagged and checked. If someone with access to the company amazon account gets an above-ground pool shipped to their home, you can bet there will be questions to be answered.
Alex St. John Microsoft Windows 95 era, created directX annnnd also built an alien spaceship.
I dimly recalled it as a friend in the games division telling me about some someone getting 5 and a 1 review scores in close succession.
Facts i could find (yes i asked an llm)
5.0 review: Moderately supported. St. John himself hosted a copy of his Jan 10, 1996 Microsoft performance review on his blog (the file listing still exists in archives). It reportedly shows a 5.0 rating, which in that era was the rare top-box mark. Fired a year later: Factual. In an open letter (published via GameSpot) he states he was escorted out of Microsoft on June 24, 1997, about 18 months after the 5.0 review. Judgment Day II alien spaceship party: Well documented as a plan. St. John’s own account (quoted in Neowin, Gizmodo, and others) describes an H.R. Giger–designed alien-ship interior in an Alameda air hangar, complete with X-Files cast involvement and a Gates “head reveal” gag. Sunk cost before cancellation: Supported. St. John says the shutdown came “a couple of weeks” before the 1996 event date, after ~$4.3M had already been spent/committed (≈$1.2M MS budget + ≈$1.1M sponsors + additional sunk costs). Independent summaries repeat this figure (“in excess of $4 million”).
So: 5.0 review — moderate evidence Fired 1997 — factual Alien spaceship build planned — factual ≈$4M sunk costs — supported by St. John’s own retrospective and secondary reporting
Nor how either translates to being a bad hire.
I paid a premium for my home height-adjustable desk because the frame and top are made in America, the veneer is much thicker than competitors, the motors and worm gears are reliable, and the same company makes coordinating office furniture.
The same company sells cheap imported desks too. Since my work area is next to the dining table in my open-plan apartment, I considered the better looks worth the extra money.
If someone's unstable motorized desk tips over and injures someone at the office, it's a big problem for the company.
A cheap desk might have more electrical problems. Potential fire risk.
Facilities has to manage furniture. If furniture is a random collection of different cheap desks people bought over the years they can't plan space without measuring them all. If something breaks they have to learn how to repair each unique desk.
Buying the cheapest motorized desk risks more time lost to fixing or replacing it. Saving a couple hundred dollars but then having the engineer lose part of a day to moving to a new desk and running new cables every 6 months while having facilities deal with disposal and installation of a new desk is not a good trade.
peanuts compared to their 500k TC
I do think a lot of this comment section is assuming $500K TC employees at employers with infinite cash to spend, though.
Exactly. I personally have never been in a meeting which I thought was absolutely necessary. Except maybe new fire regs.
Two, several tens of thousands are in the 5%-10% range. Hardly "peanuts". But I suppose you'll be happy to hear "no raise for you, that's just peanuts compared to your TC", right?
Ehh. Neither of these are soft fraud. The former is outright law-breaking, the latter…is fine. They stayed till they were supposed to.
This is the soft fraud mentality: If a company offers meal delivery for people who are working late who need to eat at the office and then people start staying late (without working) and then taking the food home to eat, that’s not consistent with the policies.
It was supposed to be a consolation if someone had to (or wanted to, as occurred with a lot of our people who liked to sleep in) stay late to work. It was getting used instead for people to avoid paying out of pocket for their own dinners even though they weren’t doing any more work.
Which is why we can’t have nice things: People see these policies as an opportunity to exploit them rather than use them as intended.
Note that employers do this as well. A classic one is a manager setting a deadline that requires extreme crunches by employees. They're not necessarily compensating anyone more for that. Are the managers within their rights? Technically. The employees could quit. But they're shaving hours, days, and years off of employees without paying for it.
If a company policy says you can expense meals when taking clients out, but sales people started expensing their lunches when eating alone, it’s clearly expense fraud. I think this is obvious to everyone.
Yet when engineers are allowed to expense meals when they’re working late and eating at the office, but people who are neither working late nor eating at the office start expensing their meals, that’s expense fraud.
These things are really not gray area. It seems more obvious when we talk about sales people abusing budgets, but there’s a blind spot when we start talking about engineers doing it.
Engineers are very highly paid. Many are paid more than $100/hr if you break it down. If a salaried engineer paid the equivalent of $100/hr stays late doing anything, expenses a $25 meal, and during the time they stay late you get the equivalent of 20 minutes of work out of them- including in intangibles like team bonding via just chatting with coworkers or chatting about some bug- then the company comes out ahead.
That you present the above as considered "expense fraud" is fundamentally a penny-wise, pound-foolish way to look at running a company. Like you say, it's not really a gray area. It's a feature not a bug.
Luckily that comes down to the policy of the individual company and is not enforced by law. I am personally happy to pay engineers more so they can buy this sort of thing themselves and we dont open the company to this sort of abuse. Then its a known cost and the engineers can decide from themselves if they want to spend that $30 on a meal or something else.
It can be a win for both sides for the employees to work an extra 30-90 minutes and have some team bonding and to feel like they’re getting a good deal. (Source: I did this for years at a place that comp’d dinner if you worked more than 8 hours AND past 6 PM; we’d usually get more than half the team staying for the “free” food.)
I have worked in places where the exact opposite of what you describe happens. As OP says, people just stop working at 6 and just start reading reddit or scrolling their phones. No team bonding and chat because everyone is wiped out from a hard day. Just people hanging around, grabbing their food when it arrives, and leaving.
We too had more than half the team staying for the “free” food, but they definitely didnt do much work whilst they were there.
I'm making the case that mandatory unpaid overtime is effectively wage theft. It is legal in the US because half of jobs there are "exempt" from the usual overtime protections. There's no ethical reason for that, just political ones.
At any rate, I think people who want to crack down on meal expenses out of a sense of justice should get at least as annoyed by employers taking advantage of their employees in technically allowed ways.
This isn’t about fraud anymore. It’s about how suspiciously managers want to view their employees. That’s a separate issue (but not one directed at employees).
This is why I call it the soft fraud mentality: When people see some fraudulent spending and decide that it’s fine because they don’t think the policy is important.
Managers didn’t care. It didn’t come out of their budget.
It was the executives who couldn’t ignore all of the people hanging out in the common areas waiting for food to show up and then leaving with it all together, all at once. Then nothing changed after the emails reminding them of the purpose of the policy.
When you look at the large line item cost of daily food delivery and then notice it’s not being used as intended, it gets cut.
As you mentioned, setting policy that isn’t abused is hard. But abuse isn’t fraud—it’s abuse—and abuse is its own rabbit hole that covers a lot of these maladaptive behaviors you are describing.
I call the meal expense abuse “soft fraud” because people kind of know it’s fraud, but they think it’s small enough that it shouldn’t matter. Like the “eh that’s fine” commenter above: They acknowledged that it’s fraud, but also believe it’s fine because it’s not a major fraud.
If someone spends their employer’s money for personal benefit in a way that is not consistent with the policies, that is legally considered expense fraud.
There was a case local to me where someone had a company credit card and was authorized to use it for filling up the gas tank of the company vehicle. They started getting in the habit of filling up their personal vehicle’s gas tank with the card, believing that it wasn’t a big deal. Over the years their expenses weren’t matching the miles on the company vehicle and someone caught on. It went to court and the person was liable for fraud, even though the total dollar amount was low five figures IIRC. The employee tried to argue that they used the personal vehicle for work occasionally too, but personal mileage was expensed separately so using the card to fill up the whole tank was not consistent with policy.
I think people get in trouble when they start bending the rules of the expense policy thinking it’s no big deal. The late night meal policy confounds a lot of people because they project their own thoughts about what they think the policy should be, not what the policy actually is.
If you start trying to tease apart the motivations people have even if they are following those rules, you are going to end up more paranoid than Stalin.
> So if you are astonished that people optimize for their financial gain, that’s concerning.
I’m not “surprised” nor “astonished” nor do you need to be “concerned” for me. That’s unnecessarily condescending.
I’m simply explaining how these generous policies come to and end through abuse.
You are making a point in favor of these policies: Many will see an opportunity for abuse and take it, so employers become more strict.
The idea that a company offering food in some capacity can be seen as generous is, at best, confusing and possibly naïve. A company does this because it expects such a policy will extract more work for less pay. There is no benevolence in the relationship between a company and an individual — only pure, raw self-interest.
In my opinion, the best solution is not to offer benefits at all, but simply to overpay everyone. That’s far more effective, since individuals then spend their own money as they choose, and thus take appropriate care of it.
Yes, but some also have a moral conscience and were brought up to not take more than they need.
If you are not one of these types of people, then not taking complete over advantage of an offer like free meals probably seems like an alien concept.
I try to hire more people like this, it makes for a much stronger workforce when people are not all out to get whatever they can for themselves and look out for each others interests more.
If an employee or team is not putting in the effort desired, that's a separate issue and there are other administrative processes for dealing with that.
A better option is for leadership to enforce culture by reinforcing expectations and removing offending employees if need be to make sure that the culture remains intact. This is a time sync, without a doubt. For leadership to take this on it has to believe that the unmeasurable benefit of a good company culture outweighs the drag on leadership's efficiency.
Company culture is will always be actively eroded in any company and part of the job of leadership is to enforce culture so that it can be a defining factor in the company's success for as long as possible.
I don't know what the hell you mean by the term unreasonable. Are you under the impression that investment banking analysts do not think they will have to work late before they take the role?
I've been at startups where there's sometimes late night food served.
I've never been at a startup where there was an epidemic about lying about stolen hardware.
Staying just late enough to order dinner on the company, and theft by the employee of computer hardware plus lying about it, are not in the same category and do not happen with equal frequency. I cannot believe the parent comment presented these as the same, and is being taken seriously.
You can steal $2000 by lying about a stolen laptop or lying about working late. The latter method just takes a few months.
> people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.
That doesn't sound like actually working late?
(I still agree with you, though, that this isn't the equivalent of stealing a laptop, even if you do it enough to take home $2,000 worth of dinner.)
Well, it was stolen. The only lie is by whom.
Negotiate for better conditions. If agreement cannot be reached, find another job.
none of it is good lol
gp was talking about salaried employees which is legally exempt from overtime pay. There is no rigid 40-hour ceiling for salary pay.
Salary compensation is typical for white-collar employees such as analysts in investment banking and private equity, associates at law firms, developers at tech startups, etc.
> legally required maximum working hours
Neither of these apply in the context of full-time salaried US investment banking jobs that the parent comment is referring to.
People work these jobs and hours because the compensation and career advancement can be extremely lucrative.
People who worry about things like limiting their work hours do not take these jobs.
Not an expert here, but from what I heard, that would be a bargain for a good office chair. And having a good chair or not - you literally feel the difference.
Honestly, they aren't any better than my ikea office chair I stole from my first house when I was a student (and that's been with me for the last 15 years). It has probably costed less than 100 €/$.
Ikea stuff is really underrated in this sense.
(I'm not saying you're wrong. I think the real solution is that people should take better care of their physical selves. Certainly there are also people with particular conditions and do need the more ergonomic setup, but I expect that's a small percentage of the total.)
A chair isn't any answer to poor posture. The answer is exercising your core muscles, being aware of your posture, and constantly correcting it.
Just like with "policing", I'd only focus on uncovering and dealing with abusers after the fact, not on everyone — giving most people "benefits" that instead makes them feel valued.
So, if other engineers get their equipment for $6k (beefed-up laptop, 32" or 30" 5k widescreen screen, ergonomic chair, standing desk — in theory amortized over 3-10 years, but really, on the retention period which is usually <3 years in software), we are talking about an increase of $200 on that.
Maybe not peanuts, but the cost of administration to oversee spending and the cost to employees to provide proof and follow due process (in their hourly rate for time used) will quickly add up and usually negate any "savings" from stopping abuse altogether — since now everybody needs to shoulder the cost.
Any type of cap based on average means that those who needed something more special-cased (more powerful machine, more RAM vs CPU/storage, more expensive ergonomic setup due to their anatomy [eg. significantly taller than average]...) can't really get it anymore.
Obviously, having no cap and requiring manager approval is usually enough to get rid of almost all abuse, though it is sometimes important to be able to predict expenses throughout the year.
Essentially, you pay a lot for fancy design.
1. My brothers (I have a number of them) mostly work in construction somehow. It feels most of them drive a VW Transporter, a large pickup or something, each carrying at least $30 000 in equipment.
Seeing people I work with get laptops that use multiple minutes to connect to a postgres database that I connect to in seconds feels really stupid. (I'm old enough that I get what I need, they usually rather pay for a decent laptop rather than start a hiring process.)
2. My previous employer did something really smart:
They used to have a policy that you got a basic laptop and an inexpensive phone, but you could ask for more if you needed. Which of course meant some people got nothing and some people got custom keyboards and what not.
That was replaced with a $1000 budget on your first day an $800 every year that was meant to cover phones and everything you needed. You could alsp borrow from next year. So if someone felt they needed the newest iPhone or Samsung? Fine, save up one year(or borrow from next year) and you have it.
Others like me who don't care that much about phones could get a reasonably priced one + a gpod monitor for my upstairs office at home + some more gear.
And now the rules are the same for everyone so even I get (I feel I'm hopeless when it comes to arguing my case with IT, but now it was a simple: do you have money for it? yes/no)
Yeah, it's hard to convey to people who've never been responsible for setting (or proposing) policy that it's not a game of optimizing the average result, but of minimizing the worst-case result.
You and I and most people are not out to arbitrage the company's resources but you and I and most people are also not the reason policy exists.
It was depressing to run into that reality myself as policy controls really do interfere sometimes in allowing people to access benefits the organization wants them to have, but the alternative is that the entire budget for perks ends up in the hands of a very few people until the benefit goes away completely.
Plus, not to mention the return on investment you get from retaining the talent and the value they add to your product and organization.
If you walk into a mechanic shop, just the Snap On primary tool kit is like 50k.
It always amazes me that companies go cheap on basic tools for their employees, yet waste millions in pointless endeavors.
Then some period of time later they start looking at spending in detail and can’t believe how much is being spent by the 25% or so who abuse the possibly. Then the controls come.
> There is abuse. But that abuse is really capped out at a few thousand in laptops, monitors and workstations, even with high-end specs,
You would think, but in the age of $6,000 fully specced MacBook Pros, $2,000 monitors, $3,000 standing desks, $1500 iPads with $100 Apple pencils and $300 keyboard cases, $1,000 chairs, SaaS licenses that add up, and (if allowed) food delivery services for “special circumstances” that turns into a regular occurrence it was common to see individuals incurring expenses in the tens of thousands range. It’s hard to believe if you’re a person who moderates their own expenditures.
Some people see a company policy as something meant to be exploited until a hidden limit is reached.
There also starts to be some soft fraud at scales higher than you’d imagine: When someone could get a new laptop without questions, old ones started “getting stolen” at a much higher rate. When we offered food delivery for staying late, a lot of people started staying just late enough for the food delivery to arrive while scrolling on their phones and then walking out the door with their meal.