Free lunch
Last few months,I have noticed very strange thing in San Francisco.I personally called it the “Fear of missing the free lunch” and I have to admit that this makes me sick. Let me first explain to you what I’ve encoutered.
I’ve been living in SF for several years and I have never experienced such childlike behavior amongts my peers. It appears to me, that number one theme during interviews and employment is a free food, especially the “free lunch”. I have heard from several friends that they have changed theis jobs BECAUSE the new company offered better and free food. I have experienced employees complaining about lack of “free food” and I have overheared serious discussion about the disastrous quality of filet mignon at “unnamed social network company’s” cafeteria. FUCKING filet mignon quality. I still can’t believe it really happened — I met two engineers who were making $140k a year each and were considering quitting their jobs because of a quality of steaks? That’s a huge fucking red flag right there…
Is the “free food” really the thing right now? Are we really in that point when employees care more about having free lunch than people they are working with every day and products they are suppose to deliver? Where is the “I’m changing the world” attitude? “Not without a free lunch” probably would be today’s answer.
Recently, there has been discussions about changes in starups funding ecosystem and about “the new normal”[1] and I think that it is excelent. Now is the time to start focusing on startup’s expenses which I believe are totally out of hand. Let’s exclude the R&D costs, because these are important and focus more on these “perks”. When I was asking about perks several founders in SF. They all were responding with answers similar to: “We need perks otherwise people will /leave/feel unhappy/complain/underperform” and the main question remined on the table — “Are you really want to work with people who care more about free food than about the profit of your company”? Just go and look on Glassdoor reviews — perks are being one of the most mentioned things in employee’s reviews for former YC companies. Is that really the new normal?
Absolutely not!Startups, especially funded startups, need to start focusing on reducing their costs. There is no way we can afford to hire people who are demanding “high society” perks when you have zero revenue and $2M in funding. There is now way serving free lunch, no matter how much it costs to you, before you bring first dollars from your customers and there is definitely nothing like a “unlimited holidays”. Afther the 2k8 crisis, we have experienced one of the biggest economical growths in modern history and it is important to see into the future, where costs of IT comapnies will be extraordinary important.
I love SV and the ecosystem here, but if somethings is wrong here — it is this attitude to thoughtlessly spent money on people who don’t care about things they are doing. Startups are not Google’s, Facebook’s or Yahoo’s who can afford to spent countless ad’s money on perks. “No profit, no perks”, that should be the new normal…
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/20/is-the-new-normal-really-new/