-That- was the problem. Not people like me who might grab a can of Talking Rain as we left the office for the commute home.
So when the smuggling ""problem"" amounted to thousands of dollars a week of goods going missing from one building/floor alone, then yes, they drew attention to it.
As for his other points:
- Microsoft has its own inhouse printing departments. It was hardly a project in itself to arrange for a small plastic sign to be made and glued.
- Yes, Catering has people whose salaried, 40 hour a week job is to handle the logistics of food ordering, and predict supply and demand. People like this are needed when you have upwards of 50,000 people working in your facility.
- a $100,000/year theft problem is worthy of most people's attention. If you're stealing multiple commercial fridges-worth of soda a week, it's not even that you're taking it home - you're almost certainly reselling it. So it's not even a perk, it's a commercial gain. Maybe I should have been raiding the Office Supplies and selling them, a la Dilbert.
2. Sack perpetrators.
3. Put a notice on the drinks machine that, through use of polite informality, makes it clear what was going on and that it would be appreciated if people didn't take the mickey. ("Inform, don't instruct" should be a rule of management.)
Identify the perpetrators but don't sack them immediately. Investigate them thoroughly. Assuming they're well paid, resorting to carting off a fridge full of soda every week is a disturbing way to behave and I'd want to understand their motivation and identify if they behaved this way in other areas of their work-life. They likely thought (1) they'd not get caught or(/and) (2) the value of the theft was so low that they'd likely not get in trouble. I'd be concerned most about the "I won't get caught" people at any company that a large part of their profits are from selling closed-source software. Sharing loads of source code might also be seen as something they'd think they wouldn't get caught doing. I'd still be concerned about anyone with the moral flexibility to brazenly steal large quantities of even inexpensive items and expect, if caught, to get away with it. At a minimum, that's not the kind of culture you want to spreading and it probably speaks to their intelligence slightly.
Generally, people hate "passive-aggressive notes". At a previous someone placed a note on the sink asking everyone to clean up the microwave after using it. Someone had heated up pasta and left the tomato sauce all over the interior. I took the note down and kindly asked the person responsible to be more careful in the future. It was equally effective, but without pointing the finger at every person on the floor. In the case of the soda, skip any note and let the word spread through informal lateral communication ("gossip" channels are rarely used effectively by management).
Funny, no one has ever put up a sign to tell me not to tear down the signs.
I've learned that passive aggressive can work both ways. ;-)
Identifying them for further investigation will generally turn up more ethical and performance issues, safely justifying reassignment or outplacement.
No, it wasn't. The problem was that you had people working at RedWest who would steal suitcases full of sodas.
That would be ridiculous right you could be thinking, programming and improving the product to get a better bonus in the end rather than sell soda off of craigslist or ebay.
But you see that is how they think about it. You are stealing it and could be doing <insert the worst possible thing>. That is what management might come to conclusion about.
Another perspective + a story. (Warning: getting a bit prejudiced here). I have heard of foreign H-1B workers (won't name a country will stop at a vague level of prejudice) stuff their backpacks with soda. Stay late, look around, see if anyone is looking start shoving soda cans to fill the backpack up as much as they can carry.
It wasn't that management was upset, you see, it was other co-workers that were disturbed by that. Why? Because they realize they are working with "that" person. That would be disturbing to me. Is the company not paying them enough. Are they a kleptomaniac. Did they grow up poor and learned to steal food. What else are they stealing? Are they sabotaging our product? Do I want them around? Questions like that.
They complain. How does management react. Well they could lay off so and so. But heck he is chugging along programming and we got him on H-1B sponsorship. Laying him off because of a soda issue is worse than just making everyone pay for soda and, in return we get to save couple of thousand dollars a year.
That is how I heard about* (from another party, so this might have been made up, I don't know, take it for what it is worth).
Putting a sign up in the kitchen is always the wrong solution.
And I don't think what you said was prejudiced either.
Don't feel ashamed, this level of cheapness has nothing to do with your nationality.
My dad was a physician, born and raised in the US. He earned a good living, worked very hard (he never had fewer than 2 jobs the whole 3 decades I knew him), and saved money religiously. And he was very frugal as well: he never went into debt for anything, drove cars till well after they fell apart, had clothing that I know was older than I which he wore till the day he died.
One of his great loves, though, was to steal things from the hospitals he worked at. Anything that wasn't bolted down - office supplies, filing cabinets, tables, chairs, desk lamps. At one point, he was bringing home hard boiled eggs that he pocketed in the staff room, because obviously we couldn't afford food. Several times when we were doing remodeling at home, I got to keep a lookout for security while we snuck bags of construction waste into the dumpsters at work.
Now, you didn't know the guy so it might not be obvious, but this was all about not spending a cent more than he had to. So, don't feel ashamed because some of your fellow country men are taking soda from work.
I find it seriously backwards that no one had the spine to walk up to the person, talk with him about courtesy, cultural norms, and basically use "implied shame" to do the rest. If the behavior continued, a more direct approach "I saw you take the sodas last night" could also suffice.
I mean, why would putting a suitcase full of sodas == sabotaging product? It's pathological behavior in the over-abundance environment, but seriously?
Is Redmond a foreign country or something?
Not so much in Seattle, but in MTV people seemed to raid the MKs on their way out of the office. It felt like some sort of communal effort to ensure that the next day's stock would all be fresh.
I started as a Noogler in 2009 and my original cubemate was a pre-IPO Googler who started around 2002. I asked him what some of the biggest changes have been since he started, and he said that there was less of a feeling of community and more of one of entitlement. The snacks in the microkitchen was a specific example he used, that in the beginning everyone understood they were for office use only but around 2006-2007 he started to see people stockpiling them.
More generally - the perks you get as a Googler are not because you were so awesome that Google decided to hire you. They're there to build a sense of community and common purpose. General guideline for when something's okay: Are you in this together with your coworkers, or are you in it alone?
| Smuggling? Really?
If someone is rolling out suitcases full of soda, it might not warrant removing the free soda perk, but it definitely warrants calling attention to it, and finding out who is doing it (and possibly giving them the boot).
But I guess they did have a big theft problem N years ago that justifies this behavior. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this would be a real problem.
For what it's worth, I bring in my own leaves to the office.
Chai is an Indian flavor, I can get something decent at the local Indian restraunts, but that's it.
Would you take home a bunch of sodas if you were going to have a party that weekend?
What if your party guests were exclusively other employees?
What if your party guests were partially other employees, their families, and some unrelated families?
Would you drink an employer-provided soda at home if you weren't thinking about work?
What if you were at the office and not thinking about work?
I could, but I wouldn't. Too much work, and I'm paid well enough that it's easier just to buy soda.
No.
Yes, I do it all the time.
Yes, I do it all the time.
It is true that no matter how much you pay a person, they can still be cheap and "exploit" a resource. I don't think it's important enough to worry about on the whole.
If it's a private party, I'd look into purchasing cheap soda via the job's supplier, they're usually cheaper than grocery stores.
It's a software company, after all, not a grocery store.
These kinds of perks always seem to get ruined by that one idiot who goes overboard.
It's irrational, but so is most management in practice.
(1) Will it cause a substantial loss/burden if everyone did what I'm doing. Everyone taking a case of soda home regularly would be a pretty huge burden. Everyone taking a can or two home every once in a while would not. You can apply that to pens, a pad of post-it notes, etc.
(2) Would I be embarrassed if someone saw me taking this item home and knew it was for my personal use. Generally, if you feel like you have to hide that behavior, that's a good point to stop and ask "why". You may not always come back with "I shouldn't do it" but you probably will most of the time.
(3) Assuming the first two aren't true, would my usage of the item embarrass my employer to their customers. This probably doesn't apply to the soda thief but does apply to a lot of other decisions of this nature. The best example I can think is "I ran out of paper, so I'll just use company letterhead to advocate people attend the annual KKK rally at city hall". I'm sure there's less extreme examples, but absurdity goes a long way toward making a point.
As for office supplies which are used for work at home, I'm guessing you mean more than just pens and paper. If the total take is over $20, I'd probably ask permission, but I've never been in this situation. My office supply is my laptop and these were officially given to me for work (and must be returned when I'm done working there), everything else I already have at home.
(I tend to be picky enough about pens/pencils/computers/etc. that I just bring my own from home to work in most cases)
Look at why it is provided. It's not a prize or a bonus. It is to keep you happy and productive while you work. The company feels that is worth the cost. Where in there does someone drinking soda on the way home figure? It doesn't.
If I were the person providing the free soda I would be upset at being taken advantage of.
Finishing your soda on the way home, sure. Grabbing an unopened one and walking out the door... that seems to me to be a good place to draw a line.
As an example, I asked my employer if I could borrow my steel toed boots meant for site visits to use during some work outside to help a friend for a weekend. I told them if I damaged them I would gladly pay to replace them. My boss told me that they would lose much more value from me missing work injured than those boots would cost to replace, so not to worry about it and then gave me a fatherly lecture about being safe using a chainsaw before digging out safety glasses to send with me.
It's hard to make a bright line for abuse, but for a general rule I won't take anything or take advantage of anything I wouldn't pay for myself without asking ahead of time.
Personally I stick to water because HFCS is bad for you.
My beverage of choice is Ito-En bottled green tea. I'd prefer if it came in glass vs. plastic bottles, though, and it is $1/bottle even at Costco, so at home or office I tend to just make my own using either matcha teabags (also from costco) or looseleaf green tea.
Going back to the topic of expense to the company - healthier foods are also generally more expensive than junk food. But if you think it's worthwhile to keep employees at optimal performance, it's a small price to pay...
| HFCS is bad for you.
Really, this attitude is precisely the problem. You're looking at this as a confrontation from the start. Perks like this only work if they're offered and accepted in good faith. If you don't trust your employer to interpret your soda consumption charitably, your employer is getting no benefit from offering it.
Basically, if you want your employer to offer snacks and soda, be grateful about it and don't look for trouble.
Well, if they're spending millions on it in general then many employees taking 1 or 2 home every day is actually probably a much greater financial 'burden' on them than a handful of employees taking entire flats every now and then.
And you also don't tend to put up signs like that unless your goal is to change everyone's behaviour.
Yes, "you" do. You specificaly may not do that, probably most people around here will not do that, but lots and lots of people do, enough so that most signs are put down by this kind of people.
It is kind of staggering to think of 90,000 employees times 2 sodas every workday.
Those 90,000 employees cost about $45M a day to employ, $35k on drinks is meaningless. Especially against the PR disaster of a thread full of potential employees hearing you hide the soda at night.
But, as someone said, if someone is stealing from you and views it that way you should deal with them personally, directly, and immediately. Passive-aggressively hiding soda is only going to make them switch to office supplies, if you're lucky.
This was over ten years ago now, I have no idea what the state of soda smuggling is today.
It's the same with any perk. Flexible schedules are nice, but not if people don't work at all. An equipment budget is nice, but not if people use it to buy stuff for their friends.
If my teammates were dishonest like this, I'd feel uncomfortable working with them. But in any case, I much prefer that those individuals be confronted than that the perk be taken away from everyone.
The point here, which you missed, is that all these perks only work if everyone plays by a sane set of rules and doesn't try to stretch things to their advantage. Having free soda is fine. Playing games with what you're allowed to get away with wrecks things for all of us even if you never get punished.
Whiners ruin it for everyone.
I would guess it's got more to do with size than anything else.
When you're in a startup with 50 people and you know the guy who orders the office groceries by name, very few people would start taking home crates of soda. Such an act would have observable consequences (no soda for your team-mates, or office grocery bill goes up very noticeably and you feel like you're ripping off everyone else).
If you work in an office building of 5,000 people, taking home crates of soda doesn't have observable consequences in the same way. Perhaps the office grocery bill goes up 0.5% or one of your teammates has to walk 20 yards to the next fridge over to grab a soda, but from your perspective the effects are marginally indistinguishable from 0. It becomes "wrong" in abstract principle rather than "wrong" in observable effects.
Interesting theory but the major flaw I see is that the Employee Is Not Always Right. Often times, you get someone who is just a Jerk. Such people often think along the lines of, "Free soda is a perk, there is no explicit rule limiting the amount of soda I can use so I am within my rights to take as much as I can carry."
I've encountered people before whose feeling is "if there's no written rule against it, I'm entitled to do it." Is the best solution to the "soda problem" just to fire those people and be done with it? I'm sure they take liberties with more than just sodas.
As all things, it depends on the type of position. In a hospital, it's probably not common for surgeons to be hauling Pepsi out to their car every day. In a call center, you'll probably get close to 80% of people that would abuse such a privilege based on my first-hand experience.
>Is the best solution to the "soda problem" just to fire those people and be done with it? I'm sure they take liberties with more than just sodas.
I think this is an excellent point. I think that personality defects like abusing privileges is one of many variables to consider in hiring, promoting and firing. As you said, if someone is spending their time scheming on saving a few dollars per week then they have serious moral as well as priorities issues.
This is a variation on "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", a disappointingly common point of view within the tech and startup communities.
I use this statement somewhat regularly, though the simplicity of the statement makes it confusing.
Acceptable: My son and I were at a grocery store. He started complaining about his stomach and had thrown up several hours prior. I knew the bathroom at this store was located in an employees-only area. I also knew that one of the managers was a jerk. I could take him to the toilet to discretely regurgitate or ask the manager, risk getting turned down (or just in the time it would take, risk not making it in time) or just walk right past the sign and prevent him from projectile vomiting in the aisle. That was the first phrase I thought of, and I bolted.
On the flip side, if I'm on a White House tour and am told that I must stay with the tour group at all times, I'll be sticking with the tour group at all times, thanks.
In the context of tech companies, I recall a talk Scott Hanselman gave (very paraphrased) where he said he decided one night to just setup a site for Visual Studio fan art (I think he used Tumblr) which he later shared with his boss and was received very positively. He knew if he had proposed the idea that fifteen departments, thousands of dollars and several weeks would be involved (should we really use Tumblr? would corporate branding be upset? Don't forget to run it by legal! What if someone makes porn of it!). Corporate policy (asking permission) wasn't followed, but the result was infinitely better than if the process was followed and I, personally, loved the site.
I'll admit, though, that the line between overstepping with this thinking and doing something very wrong can be very, very, hazy and can land you in serious trouble (often legally).
Whats worrying is that people are using that as an excuse to "get things done" that shouldn't ever have been started in the first place. The permission givers are more often than not there for a reason, and more often then not they are saying no for a reason.
Compliance is amazingly important because getting it wrong can virtually end your company, yet developers get annoyed when the project they are on is delayed as PCI compliance is checked.. etc. The moment they take the "ask forgiveness" approach they put the company at risk of a serious fine, or worse, company limiting restrictions. [Check Path out for an example].
To everybody that has used this mantra: If you don't understand exactly why you are being blocked by the "permission givers" then don't assume that they will freely give forgiveness when you royally screw something up.
As long as you're not being a dick, forgiveness beats permission any day.
Its one thing when its "Tony is out of town, I will borrow his lawn mower and ask for permission later." Its completely different when you don't understand the implications of the thing you are doing.
I have been the "permission granter" thousands of times where permission couldn't be granted due to everything from in feasibility of the request [There are not that many widgets to give], prioritization [its not worth taking from the main product to feet your pet project], compliance [doing what you want will get us fined], to flat out legality.
Developers with this attitude RARELY understand the implications, even in a company of 20 people. They assume that they are getting things done but really they are just moving the problem to a team further down the stack.
Within a company, going around a permission giver is almost always a good way to be labeled a "dick" by the people cleaning up after you.
A person who always follows the "ask permission" strategy ends up with an ingrained unconscious belief that most things they could do are ultimately bad ideas. They end up limiting themselves and only taking actions that are safe, uncontroversial, and unlikely to result in a "no".
A person who always follows the "ask forgiveness" strategy will end up getting slapped down a few times and occasionally get a reputation as a dick and have to find new people to work with. But over time, he'll learn a good intuitive sense of both what the limits are (because he's broken them so many times) and why the limits are there (because he's seen the consequences of breaking them).
All this means that eventually, the person who asked forgiveness a whole lot eventually ends up being the "permission granter". Eventually he ends up taking an opportunity that the "ask permission" folks deemed was too risky and it works out, and people remember the one huge success more than the dozens of minor messes.
So while you may be justified in labeling the "ask forgiveness" guy a dick, that won't stop him from replacing you. Life is sometimes unfair, and assholes sometimes win.
Perhaps I'm an optimist.
Asking permission is a way of hedging against your own judgment. In other words, it's a great thing to do when you're genuinely not sure. But if you are right, you don't get results as efficiently, since you have to let everyone bikeshed first. Maybe you don't even get results at all.
It's really simple. Don't open with what you want to do, open with what you'd like to get, and make sure that you're mentioning 2 or 3 things you're willing to give up. Don't say "I want to write a complex mobile app for the delivery department", say "I need a $200k to hire 2 programmers, buy 30 different phones, and 6 months of nothing on my plate, you got 15 minutes ?".
Obviously, you do this once every 6 months or so at most, preferably less, and follow through.
It's amazing, especially in America, how mentioning dollar amounts focuses people on solving problems and looking at opportunities instead of looking for excuses. Finding excuses is universal in organizations, especially big ones, and the higher ups have as much trouble with it at the cleaning lady. Plus, the fact that you even know how much to ask and have a plan for the negotiation means you have built a business case (don't go in without one).
If your employees don't have the judgment to know when to ask for forgiveness rather than permission, fire them and hire people who do have good judgment. Don't use process to protect yourself from hiring bozos. Just don't hire bozos.
Much of the time you should ask forgiveness rather than permission, you're not really required to ask permission in the first place and you just end up creating useless bikeshedding discussions. If there's a process that requires you to ask permission, and the process is genuinely important, it's a different matter.
It's worth noting that the first person to say "it's easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission" was Grace Hopper, who not only wrote the first compiler, but served for four decades in the Navy. So you can accomplish a lot of things and still somehow not get fired from even stodgy bureaucratic institutions with this mentality.
I'm sorry you've had to work with a lot of dicks and bozos. I had a coworker like that once too. Had. I've used, and seen used, "forgiveness before permission" many times in my career and aside from that guy it always worked out.
Maybe. I have certainly had moments where this seemed appropriate. But everyone has flaws and blind spots. It's far too easy to be blind to your own mistakes and to rationalize unsavory behavior.
There's always an idiot who will do something that ruins things for others. In one case I was exposed to, it was an attorney making north of $150k stealing change from people's desks, and trying to frame the cleaning crew. In another, it was a person taking advantage of time & attendance rules. In another, it was a guy pilfering silverware from the lunchroom.
That sounds more like kleptomania, which is a mental disorder. It doesn't have anything to do with "being an asshole."
It could be racism, in the case that the cleaners are of an ethnicity the attorney despises.
It could be bullying, in the case that the people whose change he is stealing deliberately leave cash in their desks for paying vending machines, or because they know they are prone to leaving their wallets at home.
It could be that he was so well off that he couldn't see the problem with taking a few dollars from a desk to pay a parking meter or whatever; then became embarrassed when confronted.
Feelings of wealth vs poverty are not absolute. If the attorney has an expensive plastic surgery habit, all his friends are on $500K, and he can only afford two trips to Klosters this year because his yacht needs servicing; the money may have utility to him in an "every little helps" kind of way. He might feel that everyone else is better off than he is.
If this is a big office, you could probably make $100-$200 in a session of theft (I know there is normally at least £15 in desks in my office of 8 people). If his salary is paid into a joint account, and he wants to pay for something without the knowledge of his partner (e.g. charlie and hookers), then stealing cash might be the easiest way he can see to conceal this spending.
That is much better than punishing everyone for the crimes of one (or some).
The right thing to do is either to have a quiet, informal chat with the employee in question (if you know who they are) or to send a broader message with the appropriate chagrin ("We wish we didn't have to send this email, but...").
Playing devil's advocate, I know. Statistically, the guy carting cases of Coke out the back door is probably doing more than just that.
Maybe the company is afraid of a lawsuit?
I remember taking the campus bus there not long after it opened and it was a much different world. It was a very clear sign that MSFT had become a "big" company. Passing dozens of "Herbalife" signs on the way just reinforced that.
The biggest "cost" issue we had was a) don't print if you don't have to, and b) if you have to, use the back side of previously printed paper. That was more environmental-green vs financial-green, though.
Then I went to Amazon, and it was a whole new world of getting no perks whatsoever. Non-adjustable "desks", the slowest development machines possible, and a bunch of false economies around operations and infrastructure.
Or, to put it another way, every bizarre rule or sign usually has a story behind it.
We used to get Dove Bars and beers all the time. It felt like free food was on offer at least once a week, usually with a pretense of some small milestone to celebrate. Why did we cut stuff like this? (I know the boring fiscal reasons why. I’m asking the deeper why, as in, “Was it worth the savings? Is Microsoft better now that we’ve cut these costs?”)
One day, a sign appeared on a soda fridge in RedWest saying something to the effect of, “Did you know that drinks cost Microsoft [ed: millions of dollars] a year? Sodas are your perk at work. Don’t bring them home.” This depressed me on too many levels to enumerate, but I’ll toss out a few:
- Someone had enough time to get these signs professionally printed and affixed to our fridges.
- It was someone’s salaried, 40-hour-a-week job to do things like this.
- Someone thought soda smuggling was a big enough “problem” at Microsoft to draw attention to it.