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 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Deutsch [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gydig Software "This, my friend, is a pint." "It comes in pints?!? I'm getting one!!" - Lord of the Rings ----------------------------------------------------------------------