The Jerky Index

At one company I worked for that I won’t name except to say it was Tumblr, benefits were generally pretty good. Outside of the executive level, benefits were certainly skewed toward the concerns of younger staff, but health and savings plans were sensible and reasonably comprehensive. Plus there was a free catered lunch every few days and a prodigious assortment of free snacks that only got more so over time.

There are a number of reasons this is common among tech companies large and small, to the point that the absence of snacks and other fun benefits can seem off-putting to potential hires. Tumblr HR once circulated a survey asking staff what their priorities were when it came to benefits, and the easy number one answer was maintaining a robust variety of snacks.

Tech snacks have a storied history in startup mythology. Product and VC person Hunter Walk seems like an OK guy on Twitter, not that I know him at all. Last week he posted this:

A pretty mild example of dorky startup hype, though I do like the decontextualized memetic possibilities of “Jerky won” (vanity license plate JERKY1). But since Walk used jerky beating out 401ks as an example of proper startup culture psychological orientation, I am going to come down on it like a ton of dried beef bricks.

Did the benefits of employees fueled by beef jerky outperform the tax benefit? I guess we’ll never know! But we do know that tech companies, especially those enjoying the perpetual adolescence provided by pretending to be a startup forever, are always happy to avoid human-related overhead that comes with, say, contractual obligations to financially service your employees over time. Those are red flags on your balance sheet for any potential investor or acquirer, second only to the morally repugnant stain of “headcount.”

The idea of letting employees choose between jerky and a 401k as proof of one’s libertarian dedication to personal freedom is ludicrous on its salty face. If you really believed that, then let each employee decide if they want jerky, or a 401k. But that math doesn’t work, since you have to pay for administration of a plan for everyone even if not everyone participates. Of course, if you don’t like eating your democratically determined quota of beef jerky either, I guess you just need to bet on yourself some other way.

Strangely enough this sort of all-in/all-out workplace choice is most often found when a company’s employees attempt to unionize, which is not the sort of group dynamic tech companies usually encourage in their staff.

If instead you wanted to propose an employee benefit choice that made actual sense, but could only offer all-in/all-out, perhaps you would, say, offer a 401k or a few office hours per month from a financial planner for those who preferred to create their own brave fiscal destiny. Or, say, company-supplied beef jerky versus company-supplied pita and hummus. False dichotomy? Surely you are not suggesting that jerky people can work alongside hummus people!

Walk explains later in the thread that they weren’t going to match 401k contributions anyway, so the resources in play were only “a few hundred dollars” per month that could have gone to administering a non-matching 401k plan, but instead went to the jerky line item. And of course the likelihood that any tech startup will be around long enough to generate much 401k interest income for participating employees is optimistic to say the least. Unless … the 401k is designed for portability? Sounds like someone is betting on the market. (That’s the investors’ job.)

When you offer employees a choice between sensible but boring financial vegetables, and infantilizing but amusing beef sticks, the likely response should not surprise. Look, I’m not some dour tweedy startup theologian here, I’m as much a child of appetite as anyone and I housed plenty of those free Tumblr snacks. That doesn’t mean execs should enjoy a satisfied moment of self-regard to polish up the Cool Startup plaque on their standing desk because they treated their nominally adult employees as lovable hungry babies. Especially if you also complain about the bratty entitled attitude of young staff in other areas of labor where their youthful exuberance is maybe not so cute to you.