When I walked in to the DoSomething.org offices for the first time, I took stock of the airy, fun loft office filled with Hello Kitty paraphernalia and Tron quotes, but still felt very hesitant to work as a CTO in the not-for-profit world. But then, passing through the kitchen, I saw the coffee gear.

An Aeropress, pourovers, two single-cup French presses, a good grinder, a Breville kettle, fresh beans, even a scale. My heart settled: This place had coffee geeks.

If you’re looking for an office Rosetta Stone, a way to assess company culture across industries, coffee is it. I learned this during my time at a big magazine publisher five years ago, where I’d worked as both application architect and advocate of drinkable java. The coffee was good enough at first: high-budget Keurig cups boasting a variety fair-trade coffees. But, a year into the job, management stopped supplying decent coffee, leaving us with a scant supply of lower-tier K Cups. Staff morale, especially among developers, plummeted. I reacted by dedicating a drawer of my desk to my own gear, including a Hario hand grinder and beans from Oren’s Daily Roast.

If you’re looking for an office Rosetta Stone, a way to assess company culture across industries, coffee is it.

Other employees noticed that I was brewing small batches of delicious coffee, and insisted on both an intro to my Aeropress and a sample of the results. I showed by example that good coffee is worth the time: even though this new routine took a few minutes longer, I was doing great work, and soon got a promotion and a raise.

At the same time, though, I made plans to leave. The coffee cutoff was a leading indicator of more bad decisions upper management was about to make: laying off important staff, gutting IT management, and leaving us who remained feeling that this ship was not only rudderless, but also sinking.

Even well-funded and stable companies show their hand with coffee. I winced recently when a friend and fellow tech manager spoke of staffing up for a major, two-year software project as her employer started requiring staff to bring their own K-cups for the Keurig machine. Good luck recruiting for that gig! She’s trying to compensate by buying the good coffee herself for the kitchen. This may endear her to her staff, but each bag she lugs in will only highlight the gap between the organization’s leadership and its employees.