But, what if we just bought more snacks?

A story of frugality, running faster than the guy running from the bear, and open ended questions

"In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” - Desiderius Erasmus

“In the land of the frugal, the team with the free snack closet reigns supreme.” - Tito Hubert

Silly Story Trigger warning

Likely this will come across as a very silly story. Though, a small contingent of folks I’ve worked with claim that my actions at the end of this tale were my strongest contribution to Amazon’s ad-tech juggernaut (with at most 60% sarcasm). Though now that I think of it, since in that period we put up an incremental three commas on the scoreboard maybe they’re just trolling me.

I still think it’s a fun story with value. Throughout my career I’ve worked on how to affect change when I don’t agree with something. I’ve learned over time that framing a problem in others worlds’, asking open ended questions, and using both to build vision helps a lot. It also hurts a lot less than banging my head into the wall.

This is a time where asking a single ended question worked a thousand times better than saying what initially popped into my head. '‘Well that’s the dumbest freaking thing I think I’ve ever heard. Why would we do that?”

But first, an overly long setup... 😉

Snack wealth is not distributed uniformly in big tech

Amazon is famous for Frugality as one of the official leadership principles. There’s of course a longer story about doing more with less that completely makes sense. But it also gets translated in practice into choices on where to spend as little money as possible. One can judge - but if you went through some existential crises early in your formative years, drove a low margin retail business, and believed in lower prices as part of a growth flywheel … then you might behave in the same way. This isn’t really a story about judging the leadership principle. But to understand the tale having a sense of what this frugality meant is helpful.

Most places of business have at least a break room for employees. At other places I’d worked more not often there was some low value perk around. Maybe saltines, maybe junk food from Costco and/or soda sold at cost. As big tech grew, a perk of having a mini-kitchen stocked with more became pretty common. Whether it was drinks + cereal + hard boiled eggs/cheese as a baseline, or the full deluxe version at the Facebook’s of the world, companies seemed to feel the expenses were worth it.

Amazon … not so much. There was free drip coffee available¹ and at some point a public facing free banana stand². If you wanted fancier coffee or a snack, there was usually a marked up concession in the building to take your hard earned money. Free though - nope.

Smart folks brought in some snacks to avoid being fleeced, and some teams had their own quirky approaches to dealing with coding induced munchies - most famously (to my knowledge) one with a breakfast cereal “bar.”³

Always be closing, with snacks

Sometime in my last two years of Amazon our VP had an inspired idea. Spend some portion of the budget and buy snacks for the team. It seems pretty obvious I’m sure - but it truly was pretty unusual at the time. This was in the ads group which was just minting money - so maybe there was a little bit more discretionary money in the budget. Not sure how she pulled it off TBH. But always appreciated it.

This was Amazon - where leftovers in the kitchen would be consumed instantly - as if we only hired staff who were part hyenas. Therefore, the snacks had to be secured in one of those locking cabinets that you use for high value items like staplers or extra ammunition or whatever. The EA team was tasked with keeping it stocked and they did an impressive job - even if I’m not sure if anyone every really ate the Kale chips. There always seemed to be a lot of Kale chips⁴.

BTW - we realized and informed our VP that the snack closet was a huge recruiting secret weapon⁵. Back then before today’s dark days getting a new developer to join your team was not easy. Mass poaching recruiting from other Amazon teams was the norm. You’d get together with folks for a chat over coffee⁶ and try to wow them with the cool people and work they could be doing. They were going to make the same money regardless of which team - so the marketplace was one of enjoyability and coolness.⁷

I can’t recall who figured this out first - but it became apparent that walking a candidate past the open snack closet and causally mentioning it was free increased candidate conversion. Much as in the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is king - if no one has any snacks then the team with any snacks appears special. Dare I say enlightened.

To be fair - having some basic nibbles so that engineers don’t have to break flow often could be argued just on the financial merits. But I suspect that most engineers who saw the cornucopia took it as a sign that this org cared about people more than most.

Either way - that closet was our top closer. Other orgs might bring in some fancy SVP to convince the new engineer how much they were wanted/needed. But we saw the results between big shots flybys and our Snickers collections - and we liked our odds.⁸

SHTF - Snacks Hit the Fan

One day our entire org received a horrifying email. An email day that might have lived in infamy. The much discussed “allowable snack use case email”!!!!!

Now this is an email that I wish I had saved. It would be fun to have. And I’d also be able to check how much I’m blowing the email out of proportion. I loved the EA team that sent it - and I fully understand the reasons for it. Sometimes when there’s a lot going on, and you don’t have 100% of the information of the value of something (such as our closing rate for hiring) things look different. That said - at the time the notice landed with my dev teams with a dull thud. As if the heaviest stone you could find was wrapped up with Dilbert cartoons featuring the pointy haired manager gone amock⁹.

Since I don’t have the email I’ll try to recap the main points. This might not really be what it said precisely - but the interpretation is pretty accurate in how it was perceived broadly;

• We are glad you liked the snack closet.

• People are eating too many snacks.

• Please do not eat a snack under the basic circumstances of “I am hungry and want a snack.”

• Only take snacks if you are truly hungry, have no time to go buy your own snack, and meet one or more of these other key snack eligibility criteria.

• Take only one regardless.

• Have a nice day¹⁰.

I’m pretty sure that the day this email arrived was not our most productive. I’m not sure what the kids would say today¹¹ - but back then we might have said “folks were steamed.”

Update: The internet has found the Snack Closet Email!

Thanks to the diligent detective work kicked off by Tito Hubert and a digital packrat that I believe wishes to remain anonymous, the original email has been located.

I think FWIW my summary was reasonably accurate for so many years ago. 😉

Breathe … the benefit of ignoring that first instinct

It probably isn’t a surprise that I thought this was a pretty hair brained idea. One would have to be completely nuts to send this email! What kind of idiots would ask folks earning 6 figures to take slightly less snacks at the cost of productivity in one of the biggest cash machines in Amazon’s history!

Even worse - who would first get these people hooked on the snacks and then pull them away. Clearly someone who thought that whole speech by Bane in The Dark Night Rises was supposed to be inspirational. Also .. dammit! how am I going to hire anyone! And do I have to go back to selling stock low to pay for my Snickers!!!

Yeah - I might have been over invested in the situation. But for whatever reason I took a deep breath and thought what a useful response was.

A useful response was clearly to try to understand the constraint that was complicating our beloved snack closet. Label the conflict, and see if we could find a solution. Therefore to followup with true curiosity

me: “Hey, saw your note. Sounds like there was a problem with the snack closet?”

response: “Yeah, we had a budget from ____ for snacks and we shot through it in the first week or two of the quarter?”

me: “Oh, that’s a bummer. Seems like people love the snacks. But I see how that’s a problem.”

response: “yeah, we felt bad having to come up with a way to make the snacks last longer, fairly.”

me: “Hmmm. What do you think would happen if we just asked _____ for more money for the snacks? And just buy more snacks if it was OK.”

response: “good point - we’ll try that.”¹²

What happened next? I believe that curiosity was continued on the part of the EA team back toward our VP, an email in the spirit of Emily Littella was sent and great rejoicing followed. The new approach of “when we run out of snacks we buy more snacks” heralded a return to our golden age of recruiting.

Wait, what!!?

I know it all sounds a bit trivial. But there are a few really notable moments where I felt I had impact not because I was smarter or cleverer. But instead because I was curious, and asked questions to build vision. It’s a framework that works, even though this story is probably not quite the home run example I shared earlier about the Buyer Seller Messaging Service.

Though truth be told - there are worse things to be known for than someone who helped restock a beloved engineering institution helping drive up Amazon’s stock price.

Postscript

After working on this team I left Amazon and ended up for a minute at Facebook¹³. I got to witness a perfect example as to how a company with cash to burn that was willing to spend it in any way that increased tech focus. Our floor basically staffed two different teams. The other group had a weekly friday happy hour catered by Din Tai Fung. The EA I worked with covered both organizations and at some point she told me they’d run out of food because folks who were likely not clear whose happy hour it was came by and messed up the count. So I asked how she was going to handle it? She looked at me sort of like I had a third head and laughed - “well, I’m just going to buy more food.”

‘nuff said.

1. As long as someone on the team remembered to make it.

2. I’ve never really understood why Amazon started to give away bananas. I guess it looked like the signature company arrow, and maybe Jeff’s third cousin needed a more constant buyer of his produce? Anyway - it existed, and for a while there weren’t clear limits on the number of bananas leading to me once hearing some fellow taking 6 or so sharing loudly with no one in particular, “I’m gonna make me some smoothies!”

3. Picture boxes of cereal and milk in the fridge. Plus bowls I’m sure - I’m guessing the standard Amazon kitchen didn’t have bowls around.

4. Just to remark on how different again this was from Facebook. During my tenure at facebook a team published a (maybe tongue in cheek) study as to how the amount of different flavors of Hint water left in the fancy glass refrigerators could be used via ML and Computer Vision to pretty accurately tell what time of day it was. There were a LOT of flavors and some were not as popular as others. Imagine BTW my culture shock when I moved from Facebook to Convoy and only could choose from 2 types of iced coffee rather than roughly five.

5. Yes - we found it hugely amusing. But mostly in the “why didn’t we think of this sooner” sense.

6. Which of course you had to pay for out of your own pocket.

7. In tech of course coolness is closely related to tech street cred and future employability.

8. I’m taking some dramatic license. I’m pretty sure we didn’t actually have Snickers. Long story about using some upmarket snack service maybe because it was easier than buying cheaper stuff. Probably a great story - but I think eventually cost won our and we might have gotten more name brands. I’m a bit hazy on that part - probably because I was too busy scoffing free food.

9. Yeah - sorry, I know the Dilbert guy seems like he went nuts. But sometimes a reference is just too easy to ignore.

10. As opposed to the joke in Steve Yegge’s famous rant that I’m referencing - these people I’m 100% sure cared about your day. I suspect they did not feel great about sending this email.

11. I still can’t really get my 11 year old to properly explain Skibidi to me for example. She starts and then just starts cracking up.

12. I realize as I write this that it’s possible they got the same complaints and inputs from many people. I guess that’s aligned with the “success has many fathers, failure is an orphan” saying. Even if I’ve been deluding myself for years - still think it’s a good story. ;-)

13. I just worked on making sure advertiser’s didn’t have their content next to objectionable videos made by users. So I didn’t work in the divisions destroying democracy or whatever. ;-) But thanks for asking. :-)