IT Workers To Get Fewer Perks, No Free Coffee 620
dasButcher writes "While the economy is showing signs of recovery and tech stocks posted double- and triple-digit gains in 2009, IT workers are facing a less hospitable workplace in the coming year. Many employers say they're going to continue trimming budgets, particularly in human resources. Rather than giving up head count, they're planning to trim 401k contributions, eliminate bonuses, curtail travel and, dare we say, shut off the free coffee (it wasn't that good anyway)."
No bonuses? (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't received a bonus in about two years. It was a $1000 check. And the only reason I got that little gift is that I MADE money for my company. One of the perks of being a contractor for a small company. Of course, that contract ended, so I went to work for a larger IT company, and haven't received a bonus since. Working directly for a company is nice, but contracting pays better.
that has been going for a long time (Score:2, Interesting)
Perk decrease has been going for a long time since dotbomb. In my previous company they used to have all kinds of free snacks (bagels, jams, cream cheese, fruits, salads) and happy hour with free hot food every Friday, then one sunny day it all ended abruptly, only caffeinated coffee remained (that reminded me of the practice of banana companies of the XIX century that encouraged workers to chew coca leaves).
I work for government now and we do not have any free food at all. Good thing is that people can bring all kind of personal electric equipment like toasters, microwave ovens, fridges. We have kitchens on each floor where all this stuff is stored. I personally have a tea maker, an espresso maker and a coffee grinder in my office.
It's better this way, guys.
Fine, but I want more vacation (Score:5, Interesting)
You're lucky - everyone else has been there (Score:4, Interesting)
We've long had a person head up a 'coffee club', collecting from the java
junkies on the floor every month. Enough money was left to have a group lunch
at month-end. AFAICT the coffee machine was there long before, industrial type
-- 2 open carafes with an orange one for decaf, you probably saw one in a
diner somewhere -- not the 10 or 12 cup coffeemakers you get from Costco.
401K? Long gone from the employer's side, we're waiting for the first
anniversary announcement, if they will reinstate their contribution. I feel
less of a team player if they did not.
Yup, not just in IT. This was the travel industry. Welcome to the club, gents.
Re:Paging Mr. Vader - something slipping through (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like a great attitude for making yourself unhappy in your job and/or becoming unemployed.
I agree with you, employers can't enforce the enthusiasm and company loyalty that promotes better productivity, but they can certainly chip away at it by taking away things.
Re:No Coffee = No Code (Score:3, Interesting)
On the flipside, caffeine, in moderate doses, enhances mental focus, and for developers, that can be a real boon (I work just fine without caffeine, but if I have to buckle down for an intense coding session, a little caffeine and a pair of isolating headphones is, hands down, the best way for me to get in the flow and stay there for a prolonged period of time).
Re:the school district model (Score:5, Interesting)
Now if we can just get that one engineer whose job it saved to get everybody coffee . . .
A simple cost vs benefit analysis (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.amazon.com/VPR-Commercial-12-Cup-Pour-Over-Warmers/dp/B000BN7W84/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1262704523&sr=8-1 [amazon.com]
cheap coffee (weeks supply for 20 people) - $14.50
http://www.amazon.com/Folgers-Ground-Regular-PAG20015-Category/dp/B00006IDJO/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1262704605&sr=1-2 [amazon.com]
coffee filters (months supply for 20 people) - $5.23
http://www.amazon.com/BUNN-BCF250-Commercial-Coffee-Filters/dp/B0006VNO7Y/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=home-garden&qid=1262704669&sr=1-12 [amazon.com]
so for about 250 initially and a monthly recurring cost of about 50 bucks. hmmm, 20 sleepy employees who are sluggish and inattentive for several hours a day (lets say 2 hours, or 1/4 of their shift). now, per employee that's a monthly cost of $2.50 to not diminish that 1/4 of their shift.
how little would you have to be paying your employees to not think that's a good idea? pennies a day???
furthermore, this isn't much of a cost cutting measure. even if I have 10,000 people working for me, I'm only paying $2500 a month to give them coffee (excluding the cost of the machines, which last a decade) or $30,000 per year, which is nothing for a 10,000 employee company.
Putting on the dick moves (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a firm believer that if a business wants to show it cares, it'll say it with money. Because that's the only thing that matters to a business. if it's parting with cash in ways it does not absolutely have to, that says something. But barring that, there's cashless ways to show care. There's not much you can do if you're doing IT-as-a-service where you need to be available for fixed hours but if you're doing dev work that doesn't go on a fixed schedule, give flex time! You worked late during the week, take a half day Friday. Costs the company nothing, same amount of work is getting done. Need a dr's appointment? For the love of xod, we're not going to ding you four hours of vacation time for it.
I don't really get the silly stuff like pool tables and video games. That just seems like prolonging time spent at work and in a non-productive fashion. I would put more of a premium on getting the max amount of work done in the shortest possible time so people can go home. Quality of life is about having a life outside the office. In-house masseuses, catered lunches every day, that seems a little wasteful. But cutting 401k, cutting fucking coffee? Major dick moves.
Employers are doing it because it's an employer's market out there. But rest assured, these employers will reap what they sow. The best employees are always the most mobile employees. If your best feel dicked over or if there's even the slightest concern about company stability, they will be out the door in a heartbeat. And it's now accepted in IT culture that you will NEVER make more money at the same employer. The only way to raise your pay is to move to another organization because your current one will never justify paying more for the person they already have, no matter if you're learning new skills, taking on more work, or improving the bottom line.
Re:Paging Mr. Vader - something slipping through (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the situation I'm in right now. Our bonuses have been cut 3 years consecutively now. We've always paid for our own coffee. As for travel, they understand that if they don't pay the costs, we aren't going. Only because it'd be illegal for them to do so.
Yeah, the biggest part of it is that the company is EXPANDING. We've opened 6 new locations last year. Easy to buy property in these hard times. But they just can't seem to afford bonuses this Christmas.
But they know that if I were to walk out, it'd be tough to find a job.
Re:It's An Employer's Market (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, companies buy website templates for sixty bucks non-exclusive (three grand exclusive) and they're sitting in a server room at a place called Dreamhost or Hostgator.
Getting hacked regularly by some turd who wants to take over the server to make into a warez repository, spam relay, look around for credit card records, or replace all the images with "I kno u dont want 2 see thiz but herez tha ded iraqi babies tha ebil US killz."
The content is maintained via a CMS run by the Marketing secretary.
Who barely knows how to spell, let alone write, and thus the site looks incredibly unprofessional. But hey, you get what you pay for. And the exec who set it up this way got a blowjob from the Marketing Boobs...er Secretary.
Employers and employees are using Gmail and other cloud-based e-mail systems because the lines between personal and work IT space have become so blurred.
Which works great right until either their net connection goes down, or Gmail has an outage, or AT&T's crappy network is shitting again, and they're bugging the IT guy to "FIX MY GMAIL ON MY IPHONE FIX MY GMAIL ON MY IPHONE FIX MY GMAIL ON MY IPHONE."
Nobody needs help printing anymore, because an entire generation has been raised on the Internet and personal computer systems
Right up until they jam the printer, or come up with a document with nonstandard margins, or do 1001 other things that the lusers always do.
The level of competence in the average office is still right about zero. The difference today is that rather than having respect for the skills of those who can actually handle technology, the lusers have been told they have the right to treat IT staff as somewhere between the House N****r and Corporate Slave. Think about it. Would you stand over the guy fixing your car yelling "FIX IT FASTER I WANT IT NOW FIX IT FIX IT"? No? IT staff get that crap all day long. They are stuck in the no-win scenario wherein if required preventative maintenance means taking something offline for a couple hours, they are yelled at, but if they don't do the preventative maintenance, they get yelled at for not doing it when the system REALLY goes tits-up. They get nickeled and dimed for wanting to implement real security precautions such as proper firewalling and password security, but then blamed for "not doing enough" when Ditzy McSluttyboobs the secretary goes download-happy and unleashes half a dozen worms inside the corporate network.
And increasingly, they're supposed to be "supporting" systems spread over so many locations and they're only given proper admin control over their own locality, meaning that they get yelled at for telling someone that the problem is at Site #3, and yes, it's being worked on, and no, they don't have the access to fix it directly here at Site #2, and then Dipshit McBrainlesssuit sends an email to his bosses about how things are "always down" and "these guys aren't doing their jobs" in order to try to "force" the poor IT guy to "work faster" on something that isn't even under his control.
Re:the school district model (Score:4, Interesting)
I tend to agree. When the economy goes south, and you either stop giving raises, or start giving paycuts, sometimes the best way to keep employees happy is with relatively minor perks like these. I worked for a company where there was a hiring and raise freeze during a merger. No one was happy. They expaned the free coffee into free hot cocoa as well. It was a minor thing, but the gesture seemed to make people happy.
Coffee? Give me my damn heat back. (Score:2, Interesting)
We lost free coffee a very long time ago, along with 401k contributions, bonuses, etc. On the cutting block this year besides staff and salary? HEAT. Originally each department was able to manage their own temperature within a 4-5 degree range. That's been taken away and the entire temperature for the company has dropped to the point where virtually everyone is wearing a jacket or thick sweaters in each of the departments. There's a good number of people across the hall wearing fingerless gloves. It's one thing to not be able to work efficiently by not having that caffeine kick, but shivering and not feeling your fingers is a real productivity stopper, let a lone the looming paycut.
Re:Paging Mr. Vader - something slipping through (Score:5, Interesting)
My last company was "employee owned", which meant the executives had all the stock and were able to give themselves dividends whenever they felt like it.
In 2007, the company posted a record year, despite being in the newspaper industry. Staffing levels were decreased, no one got raises, but the executives paid themselves nicely.
In 2008, they practically matched 2007 for profits despite being in the newspaper industry. They started massive layoffs and pay cuts around the board, but the executives matched their 2007 dividends.
In 2009, I and most of the IT staff finally walked.
Re:Paging Mr. Vader - something slipping through (Score:5, Interesting)
I once worked running the IT dept. for a bank, and seriously, during a high-level meeting including the president, CFO, myself, and a bunch of VPs they sat and laughed while discussing, for 15 minutes, how they found even crappier plastic utensils that were super cheap (I calculated the savings which equaled $7.00 per month). The combined salary in that room for 15 minutes could have bought Oneida silverware for every kitchenette, and it ended with them stating: "haha, they are so weak and flimsy people will just stop using them and bring their own!" and had a good laugh.
I was probably never so disgusted with human beings as that moment.
I agree. Mostly. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm dramatically overpaid for what I do if you look at it from a day-to-day effort perspective. I do my work, but my dad is a heavy duty mechanic, and I'm a chair jockey. I make twice what he does, and he puts in an honest day's effort every single day. It's not fair.
But I'm a troubleshooter by nature, and every once in a while I pull a large rabbit out of the hat and save the day in a big way. I like to think that closes the gap between contribution and compensation a bit.
But I'm posting this from work...
Getting... Laid... off... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:the school district model (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm a CEO. Seriously - smallish company.
I gave several of my top performers substantial raises as of Jan 1st, and I insist on free coffee for all. Fresh ground beans, not pre-ground garbage.
Re: the school district model (Score:4, Interesting)
My office has free coffee -- a dozen kinds of Keurig pods -- and a free soda fountain. We all got pretty miffed when they down-sized the free cups, but, meh.
It's about $25-50/week not spent at the overpriced retail joints. Figure 200 employees at ten minutes, once a day to run downstairs, that's 166 hours of lost productivity -- or somewhere between $5-10K PER WEEK. To the employees, that's about $250K of collective benefit. To the employer, it's about double that in productivity not lost to everyone schlepping downstairs for coffee and soda.
On the other hand, my mother's office eliminated their coffee service, one kind, giant urn of Yuban, claiming it was an unnecessary expense. That manager got a bonus for reducing overhead...
Re:I agree. Mostly. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hope this joke puts things into perspective for you.
A factory has a major problem that closed their manufacturing line. A consultant is brought in. The Consultant wanders around the factory floor, listening, poking. Finally, he takes out a small hammer and taps gently a few times on one particular piece of machinery. The factory line roars back to life, production once again in progress. The factory managers are ecstatic.
A week later, the factory recieves the invoice from The Consultant. The price was $900 for less than one hour of work. The factory's business people fumed and asked The Consultant for an explanation. The Consultant offered to send in an itemized invoice. The business people said, "yes, please do."
A second invoice arrived. It had two line items. Item 1 was, "Rectifying Problem with Hammer Hit....$1" Item 2 was, "Knowing Where to Hit the Hammer....$899"
Re:the school district model (Score:3, Interesting)
I was part of a recent double merger (where two companies split a division off their parent companies to form a third "independent" company).
They flew damn near *all* the managers from one company over to see the other execs for a face to face.
One company in the US the other in Europe...
The airfare alone could have paid my wages, healthcare, perks, etc. for two full years. The per-diam and hotel costs could have paid an additional year and change of the same.
Forgive me for being a little bitter that they laid me off (one of only two developers for an in-house designed test system).
In a twist of justice by karma, there were two different HR groups who were handling the "getting rid of people we can lose" work. One was handing out golden handshakes to get people to retire early, the other got rid of redundancies. Now, you see I was the primary owner for lab maintenance (but there were others that could do that job), and I was the backup for about half a dozen other functions closely related to the lab I maintained. Software development was one of those backups when our primary dev was on holiday, or out sick, or simply overloaded with too much work at one time (we seemed to have a feast or famine cycle that no one could figure out how to smooth out).
The other dev took a golden handshake, while I was redundified. I picked up a job with the parent company, in a lab, doing much the same kind of development work as before I started maintenance, with a manager I worked with years before in yet another division of the same company. (Lesson kids: never *ever* burn bridges unless you have no choice. Swallowing some pride now can save your bacon big time later).
When they realized that both their devs had been let go they tried to call either of us back. The senior dev declined, and I offered to provide contract assistance at a nearly extortionist rate (easily 3x what they were paying me). It was pointed out to me that I was unlikely to get hired if asking that much money, to which I replied "who said I wanted to be hired?"
Yeah, so I should stop rambling now... but your flight thing kind of triggered me.
-nB
All you got to do is look outside the US (Score:5, Interesting)
Unions work great in the rest of the world.
Americans seem to have to wrong idea about what Unions are about. It has become a lethal fight in a system that basically says: The worker has no rights.
In Holland unions work together and it is not unusual for the unions AND the employers to unite and tell the government to go screw it self. Like on wage freezes recently. The government said all wages (except its own oddly enough, an oversight I am sure) should be frozen and in some sectors employees and unions said that they had already sorted things out and wouldn't do it.
ideally, government, employers and unions/workers should all work together to create a working society with give and take and the realization that just because you are on opposites ends of the negotiation table, that doesn't mean you have to be enemies with no common goals.
Re:For a group of alledgedly smart people (Score:3, Interesting)
Try and get your learn on [dailynewscentral.com] before making yourself sound like a jackass: