In a post quite a while back, Saturn Smith wrote, “But I really like my current job -- it sometimes comes with free coffee!”
![[orange juice]](/files/pd-orange-juice-box1237797422.gif)
Well, ok, it's a small point. But it reminded me of something, and I made a note to write about it. Then tonight another thing came up that reminded me again, so I'm finally doing that.
At startup companies, there is almost always free soda or juice or other food because employees are paid salary and, while they often work long hours anyway, they tend to work longer hours if they're not hungry. It's expensive to hire extra employees but comparatively cheap to get employees to stay extra time.
It seems like an expense, but it's one of the cheapest things you can do to buy extra productivity. Consider that if you can get each of 8 programmers to stay one extra hour, you're buying a full-time person, and yet you're spending much less than you'd pay in salary for such a person. So it's more like an investment than an expense; it pays immediate dividends.
Eventually, though, a company hires an accountant (usually we say “bean counter”) who tries to tighten up “unnecessary” expenses, and when that happens the free soda is always axed because the accountant probably doesn't see the extra productivity in any tangible form.
I and some of my friends often half-joke among ourselves that when the free soda goes, the company is dead. There are several reasons for holding this view: One is that the company is just making itself less efficient. Another is that it makes the employment less hospitable and makes it less likely that good people would work there. Soda and juice is not, after all, a million dollar bonus; it's easily affordable and easily provable to be cost-effective. Still another is that it's a signal that decisions are moving from a view of the system that his holistic to one that is divided among functionaries who are often more interested in managing their own little power base than finding out what the real purpose of something was in the system as a whole.
In fact, just to link back to another of my recent posts where we were struggling to find an appropriate metric for maximum company size, perhaps a good metric would be “when the free juice goes away.” It's probably the canary in the coal mine for other stupid decisions to follow.
In a post Sunday night, McGarrett50 wrote about a 60 Minutes interview of Obama:
“The last irony cannot be lost on people here at OS. In part 2 of the interview, Kroft and Obama walk the White House grounds. Obama makes jokes about how his kids have the ‘Rolls-Royce’ swing-sets as somehow provided by the White House staff, presumably paid for by us taxpayers?? And, he talks about how First Lady Michelle Obama and the White House chefs (plural) are planting a vegetable garden.
“So... A man oblivious to how a fancy swing-set got provided to his kids (possibly at taxpayer expense) and who has multiple chefs planting a garden is the moral authority on whether other citizens make too much money and need to be taxed more.”
A swingset is more expensive than juice, but is several orders of magnitude smaller in expense than a million dollar bonus. Moreover, a swingset is not something in which the public has no interest. Yes, he could buy it, and I'd be fine with that. But what is the cost to the United States of him buying it? You're assuming it's free if he pays for it. I don't agree.
At the rate the US is bleeding money just now, any delay in anything that can be done costs a truckload of money; it costs money for him to cough, much less take time out for more substantial matters. It is a false economy to think that having him spend more time doing family things will use taxpayer money better.
Our President is now seriously overloaded in terms of time. He has an extraordinary number of things to think about, and he can only delegate some of them. No matter how many advisors he has, some things are things he has to personally know. That means he needs to be at his intellectual best all the time. He needs to be fed. He needs to have time to see his wife and kids. He needs to not have to spend that little bit of family time shopping or worrying does he have the right item, the one he wants to pay for. The nation has an interest in him believing that these things simply don't matter, so that he has maximum time free to do his work, which is really not a very 8 hour a day thing. He's the President all the time.
He'll be, if we're lucky, a president for 8 years. In many ways, never getting to spend quality time with his family, always being interrupted. His kids will be almost grownups by time he's out of office; that's a big sacrifice to make. We provide him already with a furnished house. It isn't going to break the bank to get him a swing set; indeed, it may break all banks, quite literally, if we ask him to take time out to buy his own swing set.
And as for multiple chefs, same issue: He also needs to be 100% healthy all the time, not to mention entertaining for many people. Even if there are off nights where he isn't, I'm sure other nights he is. It goes with the territory and it seems to me money very well spent.
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Comments
And you're right about the juice factor. monkey fingered.
Although, if it takes a million dollar bonus to make an employee happy, fire him/her and put in a free cafeteria, with free booze between 8:oo and 10:00 PM.
Take care of your employees happiness, and they'll take care of your bottom line.
COS, right. Swing sets for someone doing a world of good are in the noise compared to megabonuses for doing nothing by people who brought us a world of pain.
Red, good advice.
vonnia, you wrote, “lthough, if it takes a million dollar bonus to make an employee happy, fire him/her ...” I was trying to find a pithy way to add this sentiment at the end and I couldn't find it, so I just took it out to not distract. Thanks for a nice summary of the contrast.
But as Kent so superbly has written here - give President Obama a break. Lets stop be critical of these small distracting snaps and lets get behind him in solving the critical issues that effect everyday people!
Rated
Why?
Most dedicated professionals produce remarkable results precisely because of a profound focus which puts their work above family concerns. The notion that the most important jobber in the world should spend time with wifey and kiddies is utterly bourgeois. But then, so is Obama, at his best.
Maybe he was spending time around the home hearth when someone should have been choosing suitable gifts for Brown and when someone should have been teaching young Geithner how to supervise a due diligence operation before investing billions of taxpayer bucks on an ailing insurance company.
I really think that Michelle and the kids are being amply attended to given their present digs and staff. Why not let Daddy take care of business?
Well stated as usual.
I agree with you on this. It's one of the main reasons the president should always have a driver, a helicopter, etc. -- the value of his time is such that I don't want him building a swing set on his own, worrying about what's for dinner, or having to pull out a map to get to his next meeting.
As W. Edwards Deming said, "the most important numbers are unknown and unknowable." And as Eilyahu Goldratt proved in his "theory of constraints" traditional cost accounting leads companies to make all sorts of bad decisions.
I see this in particular during layoffs. I used to work in a small systems group in a hospital logistics department. There were only a few of us, but we created systems and reports that literally no other hospital in the country had. And we actually made the organization far more money than what we were paid. One coworker created a system that brought in $250K in additional patient supply revenue through better pricing controls. He got the axe. I did an audit of all the systems that generated patient supply revenue, found and fixed some problems, and that one fix brought in an additional $100K annually in revenue. One week after the audit was completed I got laid off. . . . The whole group was laid off except for one guy, so all development stopped, and nothing but maintenance happened. But somewhere in the bowels of the organization some accountant was no doubt congratulated for having "saved money."
But what is really entertaining is the same people complaining about the Obama's putting a swingset on the White House ground are the people who were complaining about Barak daring to leave the White House and go on The Tonight Show during a crisis! Personally I have come to the conclusion that the conservative element has turned into a bunch of 7th grade girls who weren't elected queen of the winter ball so they are going to gripe about every little nitpicky item that comes up regardless of it's importance.
FOR CHRIST'S FUCKING SAKE , it's is a contraction of it is; its is a possessive adjective. This is not rocket science kids. If someone can't get their intellectual chops around this mystery, for God's sake play somewhere else!
Ive worked in large oil and insurance companies all my life. Ive seen this play too many times. The juice goes after one of those closed door meetings - "workouts" some companies like to call them. Thats the time to collect your company pens and freshen the resume.
To the second part, anyone begrudging a president the chance to see his children playing outside his office windows, when he is wrestling with whether or not to send someone elses children into harms way is a fool.
Also, re: the personal chefs and White House food bills...unless the meal is an official diplomatic function, the President receives and pays a bill every month for this. (Apparently Rosalyn Carter was downright shocked at the bills and cooked in the kitchen in the private quarters herself a few nights a week to save money.)
So, even if it WERE paid for with tax dollars--which it wasn't--the swingset in question cost $3500. That's chump change compared to what extra Secret Service detail at a public playground would cost.
Plus, the children of ordinary D.C. taxpayers can use the public playgrounds whenever they like, and not be pushed off them for security reasons when Sasha and Malia want to play.
I think your original premise is a good one here. I don’t have much to say about Obama’s children’s swing set, which I see as entirely unimportant. So I hope you don’t mind that I head into what may be totally unintended areas with my comment, but which seem related to the idea that there are bigger issues at hand.
Here are some examples of what lead to my response; I’m not picking on anyone in particular here, I’m not on the attack, just pulling out comments that struck me and seemingly reveal my point:
From your post:
“It's expensive to hire extra employees but comparatively cheap to get employees to stay extra time.”
“Consider that if you can get each of 8 programmers to stay one extra hour, you're buying a full-time person, and yet you're spending much less than you'd pay in salary for such a person. So it's more like an investment than an expense; it pays immediate dividends.”
(In actual practice, I’m not sure this comparison holds up, but that’s another discussion.)
“Eventually, though, a company hires an accountant (usually we say “bean counter”) who tries to tighten up “unnecessary” expenses …”
“It's probably the canary in the coal mine for other stupid decisions to follow.”
From the comments:
Kent: “My point here is that the juice thing is not just an indulgence, it's a business refinement that not everyone is experienced with, and that some misunderstand.”
Then this from one comment (vonnia, I’m not attacking you) written by vonnia:
“Unhappy employees are a drain on corporate profits.”
I see an overriding, seemingly contradictory theme that runs through this post and the comments. The overriding theme I see: the premise that profits and cutting costs is the primary goal, and yet this approach may also lead to “stupid decisions”, reduce employee output, become “a drain on corporate profits” thereby becoming counterproductive.
It’s a “catch 22”. This seems to me to be indicative of the inherent problem with America’s “corporate model”; the theory that profit margin is the ultimate goal and gauge of success and productivity.
My observation leads to several questions: What is the purpose of a corporation? What is the purpose of capitalism? What is the purpose of an economic system?
I like the following as an answer to those questions:
The purpose of capitalism is to harness private interests in service to the public interest.
I realize this is not exactly on the topic you’ve raised here; it is just what occurred to me as I was reading your post and the comments. But I did get the sense that you were alluding to this concept of “actual purpose” on some level.
RATED
I seem to remember reading an article some years ago in The New Yorker about Google. The article discussed the money Google spent on it's cafatiria, gyms, game rooms, child care, etc. Employees would happily work hours and hours of overtime.
I also believe the article mentioned Marc Cuban's turnaround of the Mavericks. He invested money in state of the art locker rooms, jets, etc. and sure enough he enticed people to play for him.
You're right, "free juice" is provable and beneficial. In regards to the President, well, it's a no brainer. I mean, I really don't want the President to not take that 3AM call because he's on the phone trying to get a plumber to fix the damn water heater. I assumed this was understood.
Maybe it's just a typo, as in this comment, which I read recently on another blog:
"From the mouthes of babes oftimes comes gems." And a gem is a gem no matter from whence it comes.
I'm sure that the writer knows that "from whence" is redundant and makes the second sentence scan badly, but it's a defensible usage, so that's okay. I also imagine the writer knows that the King James verse begins, "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings..." rather than "From..."; it's probably just a hiccup of memory. I might be less willing to cut the writer slack on the sound-it-out spelling of "mouthes", though, and from there we descend to the subject-verb disagreement of "gems" and "comes". Ugh. Still, we all make mistakes. I wouldn't be surprised to find a mistake in this comment I'm writing just now, for example.
Oh, and you forgot a comma in your second setence above, before "kids".
(Sorry for the off-topic comment. Well, no, that was insincere; I'm not, really.)
Even funnier that if half the people he is talking about left, the right wingers who share his views would be even more severely under-represented here on OS.
WTF can't people give this man a break and focus on pertinent stuff and not the inane? Bush played with billions a month with his war. He spent a lot of it on no bid contracts when soldiers were driving insufficiently armor plated Humvees. I wonder how Mr. McGarrett feels about that? That's a bit more important and expensive than a children's swing set. If I could afford it, I'd buy the Rolls Royce of swings sets for my son as well.
Rated for a voice of REASON
And for crying out loud, I am really getting angry now with all the ridiculous criticisms of Obama and his family and administration. There are serious problems that deserve attention. Forget the rest of it.
I am also tired of hearing the Obama administration take heat for things that were done or started under Bush. If my memory is not failing me, the AIG bailout began under Bush.