Proscribed fun is hard. I can think of about 20 great engineers who would be turned off by a scotch library and free trips to the driving range (is it software for country clubs?) Substitute any of foosball, ping-pong, beer kegs, red-bull, razor scooters and whatnot. You're only going to please half the people, half the time, and probably the wrong people, because who really ever liked razor scooters and nerf guns, anyway?
Career and skill development is a perk that is really overlooked. It's a start to offer unlimited Amazon books. However, companies could go much further and offer seminars and full blown courses. It doesn't even have to be expensive corporate training. You could pay a grad student to teach a full blown machine learning course for less than half the cost of a weekend long training seminar.
We would generally be happy to consider sending people to a class. But I don't think we're too different from a lot of companies with HN presences in that we're staffed mostly with people who enjoy figuring things out for themselves. It's hard for me to think of a class that's so clearly valuable to our team that it would make sense sending people to.
One thing we try to do is to run internal classes. We had one on C programming that I need to get back up and running; we have a long-running one with cryptography.
Businesses routinely do the equivalent of paying a grad student to teach machine learning; they just don't call it that. In the real world that's called consulting.
None of those cost money yet so few workplaces value them since disrespect, micromanagement, and industrial era style division of labor are addictions of the corporate management crowd. It's gospel to Ivy League educated and Old Money.
As a separate issue, "As startups, we can't really offer top-dollar salaries to our employees." is complete nonsense. First of all, "we don't pay top dollar" is doublespeak for "We pay below market rate." Nothing says "We don't respect you." as much as that does. If you can't at the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent you require you shouldn't be in business. End of story.
This is not a helpful comment. It only sounds like one. In fact: since nobody on HN would sponsor a "respect-free" or "autonomy-free" or "control-free" work environment, it actually doesn't say anything at all.
This is frustrating because there are probably a million things we could do for (e.g.) Matasano team members without having to restructure the business, and I'd love some more ideas.
We are exploring an alternate mode of vacation (one might say, the French model, although not because it is not national) -- in which the company essentially shuts down august till labor day, on top of a couple weeks of ordinary flexible paid time off. We hope that this will enable people to take real vacations (without worries that something really important is happening around the lab), and the lab isn't hamstrung when missing someone important. Plus, a month of free time allows people to take a serious sabbatical and do something really substantial outside of work.
Those we around a month of productivity, we think that people will end up being more than 10% more productive/happy/creativity, and the people we can attract may be 10% better suited to our work. We think it's a perk hardly any other american company can match; great hackers value their time.
More than any of these, philosophically, we want to allow our colleagues to experience the world. We want them to experience freedom.
Forced vacation isn't freedom. If August isn't a convenient time to take a vacation, and the employee would rather work, let them work and take that chunk of time off at some other point. If taking that time off another time during the year is unacceptable, then your policy simply isn't fair to all your employees.
Where I work even the national holidays are floating holidays, so if I want to work on Christmas that isn't a day off for me, and I can trade that for a day off for any other day of the year.
Especially for travel, it's way cheaper to do so for off-peak seasons, so forcing August or the last week of December etc. when just makes for more expensive vacations. This is one reason why I think the "French model" kind of sucks.
This works for some businesses and not for others. Most successful YC companies, for instance, cannot simply shut down for the entire month of August. In others, teams are so tightly coupled that the business wants vacations as synchronized as possible. It all depends.
The important thing to remember is that there is almost always some degree of freedom withheld by vacation policies. It's not especially productive to reason about vacations as if absolute freedom of scheduling is a sacred principle. Some businesses can come closer to others in providing freedom, and if that freedom is especially valuable to you, you should adjust your compensation expectations accordingly.
But remember the iron law of supply and demand. If a company provides a benefit (say, "months of paid vacation any time of the year on no notice"), and the market values that benefit, candidates will factor that into their compensation negotiation and the salary the company needs to pay for a given level of quality will decrease. In other words: you're paying for the vacation policy one way or the other.
(This is a subtext to the constant jealous comparisons between European and American vacation policies that tends to bug me.)
Most successful YC companies, for instance, cannot simply shut down for the entire month of August. In others, teams are so tightly coupled that the business wants vacations as synchronized as possible. It all depends.
We're certainly in the latter category, so this is an important distinction. I do think groups in product organizations have this freedom where operational groups don't, though something similar may be possible there.
But remember the iron law of supply and demand. If a company provides a benefit (say, "months of paid vacation any time of the year on no notice"), and the market values that benefit, candidates will factor that into their compensation negotiation and the salary the company needs to pay for a given level of quality will decrease. In other words: you're paying for the vacation policy one way or the other.
I don't really think that talent is best thought of as an efficient market. People are empirically quite limited in their ability to perceive ahead of time the situations in which they will be the happiest or most productive, and salaries seem to be primarily determined by societal norms.
For us, the decision mostly hinges upon whether or not our employees will actually be happier, more creative, and ultimately more productive under the new model. The policy might sway a few candidates that would otherwise look elsewhere, and it might retain several candidates confronted with lucrative alternative offers, but ultimately it's how it will effect the team's spirit that really matters.
I'm not sure it takes an efficient market for candidates to be able to do a simple math problem. The company that offers 4 weeks vacation a year pays a $90k salaried employee the equivalent of $51.10/hr; the company that offers 6 weeks vacation pays $53.50/hr, or 5% more.
Comp clearly isn't the only reason people pick jobs, but it's a big reason.
There's a "quality of vacation" point you're making, but generally I think the real issue there is that employees are pushovers, and ask permission to use all their vacation time all at once, instead of just informing their employer that they're going to take July off.
Myself I pretty much don't do jack shit in any given hour of the year, so I guess companies that would hire me at those rates are getting ripped off since they aren't getting anything for their money.
On the other hand, over the period of a year, I am amazingly productive and product thousands of times more value than the typical engineer.
Interestingly, the less down time during that year, the fewer incredibly valuable things I make.
It's a bit frustrating to see very insightful contributions like my comment here downvoted. Downvotes isn't meant to be for good points. Let me make it more explicit though for people who have difficulty understanding things.
ENGINEERS THAT CREATE THE THINGS YOU SELL DO NOT CONTRIBUTE BY THE HOUR. THEY CONTRIBUTE BY THE QUARTER, THE YEAR AND THE DECADE. HOURLY WAGE CALCULATIONS ARE THE WRONG WAY TO CALCULATE HOW MUCH THEY ARE PAID BECAUSE THEIR FUNDAMENTAL UNIT OF TIME ISN'T THE HOUR. WERNER VON BRAUN DIDN'T DO ANYTHING NOTICEABLE IN ANY GIVEN HOUR OF DESIGN WORK.
What does this mean in practice to the MBA set? It means that measuring engineering work as cost per hour means there is something seriously wrong with your company because you don't understand the fundamental nature of the work.
Question: have you experienced both models, or are you just guessing? This isn't meant to condescend -- I'm just truly curious.
The trouble is twofold -- two or three weeks of paid time off, while standard, isn't enough for people to have significantly different experiences in their lives. Furthermore, if the business is still running, then many people will have to continue to work through their vacation. (as is currently happening for me, as we speak).
Question: If forced vacation isn't freedom, are weekends freedom?
Weekends are forced vacation too. It'd be great if companies adopted a "floating weekends" policy too, for the same reasons I outlined, but no company I've come across seems to do so, officially (you do see unofficially here and there bosses who recognize an employee working the weekend and allow them to take a couple days off later, and simply not reporting the vacation).
As to your first question, yes I've experienced both. Not month long shutdowns, but week long ones, but it's the same thing: if it's not convenient for you to take a vacation during that time, it's pretty much a waste and it sucks. If your spouse doesn't get 4 weeks off on August, are you going to go on a 4 week vacation then? Probably not. But then you'll resent the people who do actually take that 4 weeks off to go somewhere. It's bad for morale.
I agree that a solid 4 week vacation is enriching, but just declaring an arbitrary 4 week shutdown is a cop out. Fix the structural problems that require every one to be in the office at once, and then give everyone that much vacation time to be used when they like it. I'm not saying that this is easy to fix, but if you really believe in giving people time to have significantly different experiences in their lives, this is what you'd have to work at.
I am afraid, though, that I can't imagine how our company can work effectively without at least some people in the physical lab at the same time. I will meditate on this.
In the meantime, I will think about how to give people an alternative plan of time off while still being effective.
"If you can't at the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent you require you shouldn't be in business. End of story."
One of the key pillars of the startup ecosystem is that you can offer someone equity in exchange for significantly "below market rate" wages. In some or even many cases, this will be below the "the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent ... require[d]."
If you view that as a sign of disrespect, then you should probably only ever work for 1)bootstrapped businesses that are pretty far along the bootstrap curve or 2) venture-funded businesses that have significant funding. That's a totally viable approach to working for a startup, and I respect you for refusing to work under less than a given rate.
But I don't think it's fair for you to impose your minimum wage upon others. Some people are willing to work for more nascent businesses in exchange for more upside. That should be their right too.
I haven't a clue why this is being downvoted, unless the point you are making is too obvious. Perhaps the parent was only describing startups that neither give employees equity nor pay them at market rates?
I am not a fan of company-sponsored lunch; it sends a message that you're expected to be working constantly. Many of the big finance companies do it, and the employees are clear about why.
Books are so cheap relative to FTE cost, I don't know why you'd even come up with a "training policy" for them. We just give everyone an Amazon account and say "go to town". You buy a book, it's yours; the only rule is, don't buy books for your friends on our dime. :)
I think you raise a good point about company lunches. It depends on if it's "grab some food on us and go eat at your desk," or "put out tables and sit beside people you don't know" kind of lunch.
My company had an official holiday -- Company Founding Day -- adjacent to a national holiday every year, turning a 3 day weekend into a 4 day weekend, and required anyone wanting to work on Company Founding Day to get signed permission from the CEO. (Of a 1,000+ employee megacorp.) When customers/vendors complained about a particular employee's inavailability for their needs, everyone could just say "Sir, I'm sorry, there is nothing I can do. It is Company Founding Day."
That costs rounding error next to an employee. Fog Creek-style catered lunches are rather substantially more expensive, but having done them, I think the social benefits to them are pretty awesome. (Company-sponsored dinner, on the other hand, would scare the heck out of me.)
We did a "company offsite" instead of an extra holiday; we spent the morning building Arduino robots†, and the afternoon at Three Floyds. I'm sure there's someone here ready to say "that's not a benefit! just give me the freedom to choose what i do that day myslef"[sic]. Oh well. I'm guessing I'm not too unhappy about missing the opportunity to work with the kind of people who would complain about stuff like that.
† More accurately, the rest of the team made robots while I went and rented a huge van.
Depending on your business and your employees? Equipment.
I recently worked at a TV station and regularly asked my boss if I could do things like borrow a camera on a weekend, or installed a single game for some of us to play after hours when no one was working.
The answer was always "no". That was unfortunate. The camera I kinda get; it could break. But using my computer at work, when no one else is? Seemed relatively harmless.
One of the most awful forensic engagements (that didn't involve the threat of bodily harm) I ever worked was for a company who called me in to image the drives for an entire video production department.
Apparently, they discovered that one of their employees, in his spare time, had used one of the editing stations to edit video for his church. When they disciplined him about it, he stated that "everyone else was doing the same thing", which made them panic and decide to treat the whole department as a forensic incident.
I can't think of a more innocuous use of resources than "editing church video in my spare time", but they were all freaked out about it. You'd be surprised what companies worry about.
I had the envious task of imaging ~ 35 workstations (and 2 big-ass RAID arrays) in the middle of the night before employees were supposed to be back in the office the next morning.
I guess the thrust of my argument is that... Employees are trusted with those resources while under employer supervision. ("Supervision"; not that their bosses are over their shoulders, or in some cases even know how to operate it themselves.) But the second that the intent is not approved of, suddenly that employee is suspected of having destroyed everything with an errant keystroke. It's funny, is all.
My boss at my previous employer somehow managed to convince the higher-ups that we needed a lab full of about 20 ridiculously well-spec'd desktops with high-end video cards (and this was well before you could argue for their use in things like CUDA).
They were probably worried that some other employee was making sexually explicit videos, or even worse, videos of child sexual abuse. If that was happening, it might come out eventually. If it came out that the company was also aware that employees were making personal videos, then that's potentially bad PR for them.
Which, to me, is an insane concern. Who wouldn't understand, in the rare instance of such abuse, "we trust our employees to conduct themselves in an appropriate manner. This person misused our trust, etc."
I thought it was insane rather than to deal with issues like that on a case by case basis, they decided to just fire ~ 30 people. But then again, I'm not a corporate muckety-muck, so what do I know.
No is the only sensible answer to both of those questions, purely for liability reasons.
If the camera gets damaged while you're out doing a personal project, is it still covered by the station's insurance? Quite possibly not if it's not being used for work purposes.
If you download a game it turns out to have a virus in it, where does the liability for that fall?
If he'd said no to things like "Would the company pay for a Wii for the team to use in it's off hours", or something like that and he said no, then it might seem more churlish - but your request just don't seem like ones he can easily say yes to to begin with.
I understood my employer's concerns. I hold no ill will for those answers. But I do think that, with the appropriate legwork, those suggestions can give rise to exactly what the OP is asking for.
There's a good chance that the company has access to hardware/software of various types that his employees don't. And there's a chance his employees would like to use it. Would it be covered by insurance if something went wrong? Definitely something to check on. But that phone call is likely free for him, and a potential higher premium may not be too much higher. It's just an idea to consider.
And things like hosting a PC game for people can be very safe. Certainly no less safe than installing a web browser on a PC. It just takes a little legwork to make sure it's trustworthy (like any software you install) and finding a game people like. I suggest it because I find it analogous to going to the driving range. "It's Friday afternoon and there aren't any vital issues. Let's get in a couple of rounds of XYZ and head out."
Free soda, coffee, tea. (I'm a little negative on free snacks, but if that works for you, okay).
Subsidize access to things like the ACM portal, or other subscription journals. Buy technical books for people.
A shooting range in the basement. ("Let's go think about this problem over a few rounds" has a different flavor). While zoning and other laws would make this impractical, some of the groups I've been in have had "range days," and they've all been a lot of fun, even -- or maybe especially -- for the newbies.
Having said that my personal favorites are unlimited free books a la Matasano, and flexible work environment (working from office or remotely are interchangeable), and flexible vacation policy (several recent HN posts on this).
Completely distributed teams like SpiderOak are pretty awesome, so set up your company to work like that as the default, and have an office people can work/meet in when they want or need, but connect to the servers the same way whether in or out of the office (a universal API, so to speak).
Let me work when I'm most productive, be it 6am to 3 in the afternoon, or noon to midnight, or whatever. Trust in my incentive to care about the company's success (and by extension my own cashflow). I don't even mind a pager in setups like that, as long as it's used for emergencies only and not abused.
Let people choose what tools they use to get the job done. It really sucks to be forced to use inferior tools/software/hardware/etc at work than what you have become accustomed to using in more progressive environments.
I would have couches and sleep/napping areas--a lot of them.
I think the best and most essential things to quality of life are: air, water/food/drink, exercise, sleep. I find that there is an unsurprising correlation that when I am healthy and fit, I am also able to perform my best at the computer.
Do you take the same attitude with people with cultural dietary restrictions, like Kosher or Halal? What about physical dietary restrictions like allergies, or Diabetes?
Recognizing everyone has their own patterns and giving them the autonomy to maximize work given their own patterns is certainly important. Of course step 0 of this prescription is hiring someone who is trustworthy and self-aware.
I completely agree, and that is why we will have a completely web based system so that I can hire contractors all over the U.S. and let my normally onsite employees work from home a day or two a week. Instead of me saying, "Work at home tomorrow", they will choose the day and I will OK it. Obtaining input from employees makes them feel valued and important. Besides, I trust that they will know when it's OK to work at home.
I also plan to ASK each person what a good reward would be (everybody is different), and make sure to thank them. I understand that it's their job, but it goes a long way to boosting everyone's morale and productivity by saying you appreciate them.
A friend's boss wanted to buy her a small token of appreciation for successfully completing a huge project, and my friend jokingly said she wanted a Hummer. The boss bought her one - a diecast collectible H2, and 6 years later my friend still says that was the best gift she's ever gotten :)
Career and skill development is a perk that is really overlooked. It's a start to offer unlimited Amazon books. However, companies could go much further and offer seminars and full blown courses. It doesn't even have to be expensive corporate training. You could pay a grad student to teach a full blown machine learning course for less than half the cost of a weekend long training seminar.