Intel: Our finances are in the toilet, we're laying off 15K, but the free coffee is back! Struggling chip giant Intel has rescinded a cost-cutting plan to abolish free coffee and tea for its staff. Intel is on an spending-slashing crusade at the moment, with a plan to bin about 15,000 staff to help right its financials. Just last month, it laid off 2,000 staff (1,300 of them from its Hillsboro, Oregon site) and …
Drinks with caffeine (coffee, certain teas, guarana, certian fizzy drinks and energy drinks) are not only a perk, but by their very nature (with moderation) make workers "slightly" more productive.
A company would be dumb not to offer them...
Having said that, there is a huge difference between a free brewed coffee in a Mr. coffee with cow milk and a free "cafe espresso abarth with soy milk, extra foam, pumpkin spice and cinnamon", if you know what I mean...
¿Est-cé que vous avez besoin de un dessin?
Is not the same having simple tea and coffe (and caffeinated soft and energy drinks) in the office, as is having a small battaillon of baristas in the compannies canttens making sofisticated coffees and teas with lots of ingredients for free...
We figured that out, but "if you know what I mean" is always going to have the winking implication of something dubious, as if we all know that "cafe espresso abarth with soy milk, extra foam, pumpkin spice and cinnamon" is a nudge-nudge euphemism for coffee infused with cocaine or amphetamines to keep the workers productive. Or sexual favours, or something like that...
...if you know what I mean. ;-)
French with Spanish punctuation?
A link to a picture (or drawing) would be nice as I could be curious to see how pumpkin spice (which is?) is involved in coffee.
For me coffee is like beer is to a German, coffee beans*, roasted, ground plus hot water. (Traditional beer or ale making is not too dissimilar, I understand.)
<sub>* preferably not previously passed through the gastrointestinal tract of indochinese monkeys.</sub>
Just check out Starbucks.
I thought we were talking about coffee? Never had anything resembling coffee at BuckStar. Just charcoal water with very little flavour (and most of their stuff is rammed with sugar which is not exactly a positive for a long-term T2 diabetic!).
The only coffee I've had that is worse is from McDonalds.
For me coffee is like beer is to a German, coffee beans*, roasted, ground plus hot water
I've got to be in a specific mood to drink espresso.. my normal is a long coffee (two shots - essentially a dopio espresso) followed by a flat white on top. Got enough milk to soften the coffee, but not enough to give a big BG spike. Sometimes I add a bit of sugar free syrup, sometimes I don't..
Works for me. I gave up on the macho "I drink my coffee black me" stuff ages ago.
Tea and coffee act very differently here.
Tea has compounds that are sedatives, and multiple stimulants. In consequence, tea produces a calm, relaxed, but highly active mind, and this will last for quite some time. Tea also has compounds that protect the brain.
Coffee also had multiple stimulants, but does not have any sedating effect. In consequence, you've a lot more energy and focus, but the effect is spikier with more drive and less calm. Coffee protects the heart in spades.
It's not really rational to try and "optimise" tea and coffee use, so providing both makes a lot of sense, but in the end both have a strong value for engineers.
Tea and coffee act very differently here.
Tea leaves actually contain more caffeine w/w than coffee beans.
Tea (black) leaves 22-28 mg of caffeine per 1 gram
Coffee beans: Arabica 10-12 mg of caffeine per 1 gram, Robusta 20-22 mg of caffeine per 1 gram.
The much smaller mass of tea typically used to prepare a beverage and the extraction (in)efficiency means much lower dose of caffeine than usually found in an equivalent coffee beverage.
Tea has compounds that are sedatives, and multiple stimulants.
Hmmm.. theobromine.. (which is why dogs shouldn't have too much tea - they don't metabolise it so it can build up in their system and poison them if given too much).
Coffee also had multiple stimulants, but does not have any sedating effect. In consequence, you've a lot more energy and focus, but the effect is spikier with more drive and less calm. Coffee protects the heart in spades.
I'm one of the people that seems to metabolise caffeine quite quickly - I have have an espresso at 9pm and still sleep quite soundly. As to the heart stuff - I told my GP how much coffee I was drinking and, rather than telling me to stop, he laughed and said "no such thing as too much proper coffee".
I do enjoy a good cup of tea as well as coffee. Different times, different drinks.
a free "cafe espresso abarth with soy milk, extra foam, pumpkin spice and cinnamon", if you know what I mean
Personally, I make my own [1] and, in the days I have to go into the office, make sure to take a *big* almost-a-flask in with me..
[1] Bought a bean-to-cup machine during lockdown 1. Got some stats out of it a week or so ago - in 4 years it's done over 20,000 shots of coffee.. That includes some downtime when I had to replace the steamer - the old one had cracked round the water pipe so using the milk frother or cleaning the milk nozzle peed water all over the worktop.. I had a choice - spend £600 quid for a new machine of ~£50 for the spare part and tools needed to replace it. £50 later (and a day or so) I had a fully-working coffee machine again.
NetApp has these machines the size of dorm fridges, one per floor / break room. It has two hoppers on top (for regular & decaf espresso beans) and the inside is a fridge that holds two gallons of milk. The thing will make you a real cappuccino, fresh, to order, anytime.
Also each one takes 20+ minutes of maintenance per day.
"No real Italian coffee drinker would even consider ordering a cappuccino after 11am..."
Yeah I realised this pretty quick when working in Rome by the looks I got from the locals.
The other "fun" aspect of being a cappuccino drinker was whenever the local customer engineers would say "let's have a coffee break" we'd trek down to the rec-room, they'd all order espressos and by the time I'd received my cappuccino, let alone even thought about drinking it, they'd already finished their espressos (downed them in one like a shot) and were ready to head back to the Data Centre.
Nope. The coffee onsite at Hillsboro - HF and JF campuses - was always rather good, in my personal experience.
Mind you, the height of pettiness I saw during my career was how coffee onsite at the UK site was free for full-time employees - but green-badges (ie contractors) had to pay 10-50p for a cup, and use an identical machine next to the free one. Talk about coffee apartheid. And yes, I’m aware that this was more to do with HMRC tax rules for contractors, rather than Intel’s own doing.
Yup, it appears the youth will never have that sound of scalding brown liquid splattering into a plastic mug so thin and uninsulated you've long since developed a 'coffee hand' to carry it with.
Also... despite it being shit, those machines didn't want you to taste the sweetness so you invariably had to squeeze the coffee mug to 1/50th of it's initial diameter to release it from the automatons grasp.
Again the 'coffee hand' is used for this.
It's okay though, the resulting half a cup of rapidly cooling sludge, slowly infusing with PET and flecked with the dying remains of whatever poor liquid had been freeze dried to make it, was quite the metaphor for life in the UK in the 80s.
Fuck you KLIX.
"It's okay though, the resulting half a cup of rapidly cooling sludge, slowly infusing with PET and flecked with the dying remains of whatever poor liquid had been freeze dried to make it, was quite the metaphor for life in the UK in the 80s."
Back in the late 80s/early 90s while a junior developer at an English Software House the vending machine coffee was indeed horrible horrible stuff. However one time seeing the engineer restocking the machine we noticed the coffee was actually an ok/reasonabily good brand........we figured out the problem was the powered milk used. From then on we all selected black coffee and people took turns to buy fresh milk on their way into the office. With real milk the coffee was quite drinkable.
Have you considered writing? You just brought me back to most of my 20s and 30s. Bizzaro-world situations like having a self grinding espresso machine, but then using (heat pasturized full fat powdered cow) to make the froth… it literally pushed me to drinking my coffee black.
At another business place, the head backend programmer and I both used to keep 20 pound sacks of our companies blend of beans (purloined on delivery) under our desk because when they took too long to re-order we didn’t want to run out of coffee, it turned out that a few months before I left the company they switched to prepackaged beans, and the extra 40 pounds of coffee then came in handy.
At this same company, since we both knew we had a supply of beans, he switched out the coffee with decaf into one of the regular bags one weekend, and watched the office slowly go nuts through Wednesday, before he confessed to me what he had done and explaining he’d been making drip coffee with his stash at his desk. I’m fairly certain this was responsible for some conflict in the program management office, and a few feisty emails.
In my experience of large and wealthy tech companies at their main campuses, the supplies are somewhere from good to excellent. It's a cheap way of getting people to like the offices and want to stay there, and if people never leave the offices to get their caffeine, they work more. It's not just coffee that this applies to. I have not worked at Intel, but I expect they are not different on this.
Smaller companies take a very different approach to nearly everything office-related.
Downvoted because of the "smaller companies" bit.
Because they're varied, but I've seen small companies with absolutely top-notch coffee and equipment, and it doesn't even cost them much, because if there's a good coffee maker the employees will happily rotate maintaining it. And then there are the stocked bars and beer taps that I've seen at law offices and small ad agencies.
Which is still a different approach, and perhaps a saner one. The major difference between large companies and small ones is not that large companies bother having good office spaces and small ones don't, but that large companies can amortize their spending on a good office across lots of people and small ones can't, thus have to prioritize more.
There's also a difference between industries, so just because a large tech company bothers to have those facilities doesn't mean a large company in a different industry will, or even that a different tech company will choose to. Companies in the same industry tend to be more similar because people are making direct comparisons and because most people who get to make those decisions for one company have worked in another one in the same industry. A similar thing explains the things you've seen in the law offices and ad agencies, because those tend to be places were the people are paid relatively well and where there are visitors who will appreciate a nicely appointed office.
When I made my statement, I did not mean that small companies always do it badly, but that there tends to be a lot more variation. When the idea of buying an expensive coffee machine comes along, some small companies will do it and ask the employees to supply and maintain it, some other companies will buy it and deal with the cost by not providing something else, and some will try to work without it which is how you get the coffee of worse quality. Big companies in an industry where everyone else has the machine are likely to buy the machine and add the maintenance effort to existing maintenance workers. The budgeting can be much easier for them.
>The major difference between large companies and small ones is not that large companies bother having good office spaces and small ones don't
Large companies have fancy office buildings, cos ego + $ = architects
But smaller companies generally have nicer office conditions.
If I need to keep 4-5 programmers happy it makes sense to have motorised standing desks and $10K espresso machines while a company with 50K employees doesn't
>If I need to keep 4-5 programmers happy it makes sense to have motorised standing desks and $10K espresso machines
I presume they aren't working from home...
Just going through this with a client, took them to Ikea, they very quickly realised manual standing desks just weren't practical. But also if you were providing standing desks in the office, you may well be also having to provide suitable and thus equivalent furniture for employees home office.
Fortunately, coffee is Nespresso pods...
>Isn't that a form of cruel and unusual punishment?
Definitely, given their (the company and employees) green credentials...
However, as the office tends to only be used a couple of times a week, they are a compromise, as anything not sealed would go stale before getting used up.
I remember a friend in Germany who had a Nespresso machine at home telling me about them - Nespresso had a store on the most expensive shopping street in his city (one of the most, if not the most, expensive shopping streets in Germany), he went in to get some pods and the store had one of those "take a number and wait to be called" systems. Whilst waiting there were staff trying to sell him various new flavours of pod, once he was called up to the counter the guy there pulled up his purchase records and said "oh, your machine doesn't seem to have been descaled recently" and tried to sell him a descaling kit.
It all sounded like legalised "mugging" to me.
if people never leave the offices to get their caffeine, they work more.
Probably wrong there too. Work more, but better or smarter? I suspect not.
When faced a difficult or complex situation which almost always needs two steps back and a bit of critical analysis, I have invariably found getting out the office and building into the fresh air for a bit of exercise and refreshment clears the cobwebs and often provides a fresh insight.
You don't have to rush off to Damascus for enlightenment, a stroll to a nearby café is often sufficient.
That's probably true. I've seen from experience that taking breaks can help find good answers to lots of questions. However, from a company's perspective, there are three categories of time savings that, even if they understand this effect, still exist:
1. A lot of people will get some caffeine close to the start of the day. Most of them are not yet trying to find a solution to something; it's just their starting routine. Any time saved by not having them leave for somewhere else results in an earlier start to work.
2. Some people don't frequently have to find solutions like this, and their time working may correlate more closely with productivity.
3. It means you don't have to locate your office near to a good source of whatever caffeinated drinks the employees prefer, which is not generally a challenge if it's in a dense urban center but can be more challenging if there isn't a decent one in convenient walking distance.
Companies who are thinking about this can easily put in something else that allows someone to take a short break while thinking of solutions, and if I (back as an employee) want to do so, I don't have to lump it into getting coffee. I can just take a walk and, if I want one, get one on my way back with the answer.
>It means you don't have to locate your office near to a good source of whatever caffeinated drinks the employees prefer
A small business on a local industrial estate solved this problem last year in an interesting way. They cleared part of their frontage, put in some seating and got a coffee and butty van to operate from it. Not only did they solve their problem, but it also gained custom from the steady supply of visitors to the motor factors, self-storage etc. neighbouring it.
they work more.
They are stuck at their desk bored to death. Not thinking about the problem, but painfully watching the clock and hoping the next time they get microsleep it will hit 4:45 so they can start packing up.
Most productive team I worked with, was spending most of the time outside.
I worked in an office where the company supplied the machine (a lovely high end Jura), but we were supposed to provide the Beans and Milk. I think the company paid for the cleaning supplies as well, but we had to clean it.
I never drank the coffee after the first month because my colleagues insisted on buying the cheapest, nastiest, Aldi-home brand coffee beans that they could find. It was awful. What a waste of a great machine...
In another office I worked for, we all put money into buy good quality beans for the machine. We would also take turns being the one to buy the beans, so we got some really cool stuff. It all went well until the one time a relatively new non-native speaker colleague was tasked with buying the beans. He ended up buying Decaf Coffee by mistake (still from a good brand, but DECAF!!!). I cannot remember experiencing a couple of days in an office anywhere, where there were so many arguments and disagreements then in those few days before someone went out and bought more proper coffee...
The Lesson learned was that Decaf is the devils juice! It makes people angry and fighty! :P
>because my colleagues insisted on buying the cheapest, nastiest, Aldi-home brand coffee beans...
It surprises me how many people, even though you can lead by example by having good coffee, will when tasked with going to the shop for tea and coffee (don't forget to get a receipt, so I can reimburse you) still buy the cheapest rather than the more expensive but same as the empty bag in the office ...
It is not necessarily the coffee.
I worked at a place with free coffee from a vending machine. You pressed a button and a little plastic cup would drop down to be filled with very hot water to create the alleged 'coffee' drink of your choice. It tasted foul. So foul in fact that a lot of people just brought in their own mugs, coffee and milk, like me. I used to take my mug home at weekends to give it a thorough wash, and one Monday morning realised I had left it at home. No problem, I would just use one of the free plastic cups with my own acceptable coffee.
Well, my coffee tasted just as foul as the free stuff. It was not the coffee, it was the plastic cups (I have no idea what vile chemicals were leeching into the water from those cups, or how poisonous / carcinogeny they were, and shudder to think). In fact they tasted just the same as coffee I once had on a British Rail (remember them) train when going to University once - so bad I did not have another cup for several years, when it tasted just as foul again.
So, before you blame the coffee, check the cup.
Not in my experience. Small company, Italian owner, Lavazza espresso machine. Also, lately, one of those Canadian-made computerised bean-to-cup machines. Coffee's good, but pass on the powdered "milk". No charge for any of it. Engineering area has a carafe size Bunn drip machine and packs of Peet's Major Dickason. Small fridge with Coke, Mountain Dew (ecch!), etc., and another with a keg of cold brew coffee for those who like their caffeine cold. All company provided at no cost to employees (and guests). The way it should be, IMHO.
I was very happy with the provided caffeine options. Of course, with COVID and WFH, there are a lot fwewer takers. I imagine the budget for these extras is a lot lower now.
I worked at a large multinational company in a 20-odd storey building, the staff were very multicultural. On each floor of the building the small kitchen had a reasonable coffee machine but most of the Italian staff didn't like the coffee used. One of the more enterprising guys ended up doing a deal with a Lavazza dealer for himself to get one of their machines for his floor of the building and to purchase their coffee pods on a regular basis. Over time "his" machines appeared on every floor and the other Italians were buying Lavazza pods from him - he ended up with his own "coffee empire" inside the building, I remember seeing him sometimes wheeling a stack of coffee boxes into the building.
Pfft. I was doing the work of any three other members of my team when I was there - weeks at a time of 3AM conference calls with other geos, mad scrambles at the last minute to get projects ready for execs who’d not bothered to plan properly, oh, and the perennial fun of having to do all the tear-down and packing up after a tradeshow finished, as the besuited Very Important(TM) salesweasels vanished off to the bar/airport. And did I mention that my reward for those weeks of late conference calls was to watch a useless colleague sweep up all the plaudits for it because he was chums with the division manager, as I was shortly thereafter laid off? Bitter, me? Naaah… :-/
You’re right, and I can only imagine how much worse it is now for those remaining.
Actually I don’t have to imagine; my sources on the inside tell me that morale is absolutely in the proverbial shitter and those who are still there are living day-to-day in fear of more layoffs :(
Great company to work for despite everything, but let’s just say that some of my coworkers were a reminder that it’s not just cream that floats to the top.
The ONLY way companies will stop laying people off is if employees STOP DOING THAT.
DO NOT do the work of three people. DO NOT do the work of two people. Do the same amount of work, and get your cow-orkers to do the same. And STFU about "but it won't get done". That's the point, it will not get done, it will pile up, deadlines will be missed, projects will fail. And then you as a group tell the company "Well, you don't have enough people."
Ideally, take this opportunity to formally form a union to handle the negotiating.
In short, don't work for free. If you do, this will be exploited while other people take the credit for 'efficiency'.
Eventually it falls below the critical minimum staff level and you start being told that you can't take leave when you want it as there are not enough staff.
This is definitely the point where you should bail out if you haven't done so already as the company goes into a death spiral.
Don't work for free.
"Or perhaps this is just a cheap way to make it seem like Intel is giving something back."
Intel says they spend $100 million PA on free and discounted food and drink then that's no exactly what i would call cheap. It could be used for pay the salary of 1/10th of the laid of work force if they were on an average of $65k a year.
"Intel says they spend $100 million PA on free and discounted food and drink then that's no exactly what i would call cheap"
Indeed, I did think the same thing, how the actual f*$k can you spend that amount per year ln subsidised food and drink, just what the hell are you supplying?
Oh no, hang on, maybe they include the 'free' bottles of the finest Grand Cru red wine (C-suite restaurant only), so yes, maybe, they can blow through that amount, best thing then is to stop the lower orders having their free $2 Starbucks-blend coffee. That'll fix the problem!
Twats!
Phrase it as asking a question, that's how everyone seems to do it these days anyway.
"Is Don Junior a drunkard? Many many fine people are asking that question, just the other day one of them came up to me and said Sir, you're a wonderful President, but your son, is he a drunk?"
Well, Intel employs something over 100k people. If we assume the average employee spends 200 days a year in the office, that works out at $5 per employee per day. Not a huge amount.
Speaking for myself, if the coffee was good, I'd be going through about four cups a day. They also mention food - I'm guessing vending machines? And then consider people working offsite and claiming expenses.
$100m p.a. sounds completely plausible to me.
The coffee at Intel was terrible quality. I'm not sure if returning it is a good thing or a dire punishment.
However the refectories were the worst - the ever-present stench was nauseating, the flies were terrible, and some of thefood was off (I got good poisoning more than once).
Frankly, Intel's quality of service did not impress in the slightest.
My chief complaints, though, were poor security (people jumped barriers regularly), poor attitude (box ticking mattered more than results), and very poor awareness (when walking into jobs, I should not have known vastly more than my supervisors, but almost always did).
That last one is, however, the most critical because poor awareness is behind most of the Intel bugs and behind the completely inept handling of the power voltage issue.
Intel has incredibly bright people. I would not fault a single person I worked with for their intelligence. They were all very very bright. But very very oblivious.
And the coffee fiasco demonstrates clearly that this is not limited to any one section of Intel.
>The coffee at Intel was terrible quality. I'm not sure if returning it is a good thing or a dire punishment.
Suspect with a company the size of Intel, office beverages have been outsourced, so after announcing the cost-cutting, someone informed the executives of terminating the beverage service contract. "returning" the service was a way of turning a poor decision into good news.
Are they flying it in from Harrods? That is no way to run a company.
They are in the poop because their management failed, so start the cuts there. Cut the idiot wages from the top 50% of positions, pay the lower 50% more. Employ competent people, not greedy ones. Only do stuff that makes money. Stop wasting money. Free trainers, FFS. Surely these people are paid enough to buy their own footwear. Most workers don't have a gym.
Concentrate on the same basics as small businesses do. You know, ones that go out of business if they don't make a profit. What sort of dull-witted shareholders allow people running companies that lose that much money to keep their jobs?
Way, way, back in the day we had "Tea Ladies". They were invariably pleasant middle-age women who knew who you were. At one public service place where I worked they would come around twice during the day; and whilst the tea or coffee was free, they would have a few sandwiches for sale. Regular punters could order their favourite snack, mine was a home made ham (off-the bone) roll/cob.
One of the ladies saved us a lot of money - She asked where our colleague was, as she had a cheese sandwich for him. We couldn't work out who she meant until she described him. He turned out to be an external service engineer for a "mission critical' piece of technical kit. The operator called him in regularly. As I recall (from the 1980s) he was charged out at £70 an hour to travel >100 miles in his Cortina, and then £120 an hour whilst on site. He was present so often the tea lady thought he worked there. We realized the kit was >8 years old and replaced it with a new model from a different supplier. Their engineer was only ever on site for one morning for the "annual check up".
The ladies were replaced by up-market "beverage machines". We sent a junior member of staff out to buy the sandwiches (What did that cost?). After a year the machines were deemed to complex and expensive by the bean counters (pun?), so they were replaced by the Klix type machines - Where the weak tea, chocolate, coffee, and chicken soup all tasted "almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea". I noticed when I visited the bean counters that they had their own kettle and used it to make a decent cup with "up-market" loose leaf tea. For health and safety reason, we were not allowed a kettle.
It's more like a scene out of Yes Minister IMO, especially as one of the conclusions to one of the episodes is a report to reduce the number of tea ladies because Hacker wants to reduce the size of the Civil Service and Humphrey puts it to him that that would take 6 months and an uplift of a couple of thousand staff.
"I can't think of anything that says "Going out of business" like getting rid of the coffee.”
Oh yes, indeed, and another sign is companies that have plants in the office, with a service contract for someone to come in once a week or so, water them, dead-head them, etc. When the plants start to look a bit neglected, time to get your CV / Resume up to date - it’s likely that you might well need it soon!
Bingo. I was going to say exactly this- it's long been recognised that when companies start penny-pinching on employee perks like that- ones they could previously take for granted- then it's a red flag that they're in trouble.
Granted, Intel's fancy coffee, baristas et al probably cost a lot more than a company that no longer wants to pay for instant coffee powder and a pint of milk every few days, but given that they're a nominally high-end employer that stands to gain from keeping their employees happy, productive and in the office, it's not like they were doing that purely out of the goodness of their heart in the first place.
Joking(...?) aside, I doubt there's a contractual obligation for them to provide all that stuff, but they likely understand all the above and what losing it signifies.
Indeed: from an accounting perspective such costs can almost always be offset against tax, either of the company or employees where they can be considered as their cash equivalent. So such "cost cutting" usually has no real benefit for a company but is a quick way of reducing headline budgets to make it look like the company is trying to control costs, but this is a different thing altogether.
At least in some parts, tea and coffee is a legal requirement.
Often in small places it's just a fridge, kettle and supplies.
There's some American style companies that supply their staff with food and beverages on the understanding that the staff stay in the office all day rather than pop off to the shops. Usually do soup, sandwiches and salads and they tend to have lunch together.
It's seen as a way to streamline communication and build company spirit/loyalty, and it's seen as lower cost and organic rather than spending time and money on seagull managers.
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