g'day,
Scott Lawrence wrote:
...
In addition, I still find it amazing that people are justifying costs due to
the number of breakfasts and cookies being served. The word 'ludicrous' is
overused on this list, but I think I've found a situation it applies to -
please, ask yourself whether the cookies are really needed. :-)
Actually, I think the cookies and coffee are probably a major net
productivity gain for the group, because they make it possible for
people to congregate locally between meetings rather than scatter to
find their fixes.
It's a very common perk here in Silicon Valley to provide employees with
free coffee/tea/soft drinks. The cost of this can run to several
dollars/day per person. For a company as large as Cisco (40,000 at its
peak, in the 2x,000 range now) this works out to millions of
dollars/year. Now, you might think that cutting out the free drinks
would be a slam-dunk no-brainer for the accountants but people still
give free drinks to their staff. Now, this is *not* just because people
would be unhappy. Unhappy was when we had to lay off thousands of
employees a year ago. People are less insistent on their perks this
year, so why do companies still think it worth paying for "free" drinks?
Let's consider another set of numbers.
The averaged loaded cost of an engineer in Silicon Valley is something
on the order of $200,000/year (that's salary, plus all costs to put that
employee to work, pay for the health insurance, laptop, travel, etc).
The senior folks who go to the the IETF probably average out to a bit
more than that. *That* number works out to something very close to
$120/hour, assuming 210 work days/year, and an 8 hour day (yeah, I know,
you work more than 8 hours a day - humour me here).
Now, if each time I give you a 35 cent soda, I can get another 15
minutes of work out of you, then the net profit on that soda to me as an
employer is something like $30-0.35 = $29.65. In effect, my employees
are paying *me* for the soft drinks. Thanks, folks.
And *that's* why it pays to issue cookies and drinks at the IETF. Each
time you *don't* have to go stand in line at the coffee shop to spend $2
for a soft drink, or gosh forbid $6.00 for a latte with extra foam and a
cookie, the collective wisdom of the IETF benefits from another 15
minutes of your time and you metaphorically pocket $30. Do that three
times a day for a week and you've paid for your IETF meeting fee...
When I was attending the IETF meetings, some of the best work was
definitely done while scarfing down a coffee and pastry (Hi Steve!). Do
the math on how many collective hours of work this works out to in a
year:
O(1000 people/meeting) x O(3 break/day) O(15 minute/break)
x 5 days x 3 meetings/year
Yup, that's over 10,000 hours/year of work done in exchange for those
cookies. Now, there's some "bio-overhead" in that number, but the
benefits are real enough that I'd vote to keep paying for the cookies...
- peterd
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Peter Deutsch peterd(_at_)gydig(_dot_)com
Gydig Software
"This, my friend, is a pint."
"It comes in pints?!? I'm getting one!!"
- Lord of the Rings
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