Truth or origin of the "removing watercooler decreased productivity" anecdote

Does anyone know the origin of the anecdote where a major company did an efficiency study and determined that programmers wasted time at the water-cooler? They removed the watercooler, and productivity decreased because staff weren’t communicating.

I can’t find the right search terms on the usual urban legends archives or google. Watercooler talk is now so much part of company jargon that the story is swamped in other uses of the term.

I have never heard this anecdote, but I can give you a counter-narrative. I have a friend whose son, having been laid off by another software company got hired by Apple. I asked the father what he is working and the father said he didn’t know. Apple has a policy he described as, “You talk, you walk”. I gather you are permitted to discuss your work with people working on the same program, but forbiddent to do so with anyone else, even people working on related things. Apple doesn’t seem to be doing very badly. The situation is the exact opposite at Microsoft, incidentally. People talk freely about what they’re doing.

Urban legend.

Programmers don’t drink water, they drink caffeine-loaded sodas. And they don’t hang around water coolers; they hide out in their own little cubicles.

I don’t know anything about that urban legend, but at my last company they took the water away to save money, and suddenly every.single.meeting involved people complaining about the water being gone. To the point where I made a joking comment on my facebook page about my new company having water. . .and my old boss emailed me with, “You had to get them started again! I’m going to start buying water out of my own pocket just to get them to shut up. We’ve lost Lake Tahoe’s worth of productivity on this topic.”

I believe they’re a “highly collaborative” operation, which means ideas are freely passed around *inside *the company. They are also highly secretive externally, and take great lengths to keep new developments secret. That’s where “You talk, you walk” comes in.

The industrial espionage and “what’s the next big thing?” people are often left to sniffing around at component suppliers and speculating on the significance of a load of some sort of widget to the Apple laptop factory, or whatever.

Oh, as far as removing little perks like free coffee or water coolers, yes, I’ve seen it time and time again. The drinks go away, and there’s an immediate surge in bitching and moaning, which takes time away from work, not to mention making overall morale plummet.

Then, once people get over the initial shock, what was a two minute break to stretch the legs and grab a cup of coffee becomes twenty minutes to leave the building, walk to the corner and get in line at Starbucks. People being the social creatures they are, the first person wanting coffee will say “I’m going to get a mocha. Wanna join me?” and the next thing you know, two people join them, and you have suddenly lost one full hour’s productivity with three peole out of the building for twenty minutes.