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Not covered in first answer: you could leave at 6, but if you stay till 7 there's a roast dinner. I suspect people who still work at Google are sometimes a little blind to their own behaviour.
Edit: it's not free but highly subsidized.
I feel as I would hate to work there. They are creating all these things to make it a 2nd home for people. They want people to be there a LONG time. I'm happy with 40hrs with some days remote and I don't think I could switch to googles approach.
Just because Google offers onsite laundry and serves three meals a day doesn't mean employees have to participate. But having them makes it a more appealing place to a broader range of potential candidates, and a friendlier place for employees, too.
The analysis becomes even more convoluted when "employees" encompasses everyone from engineer to janitor to executive.
I feel as I would hate to work there. They are creating all these things to make it a 2nd home for people. They want people to be there a LONG time. I'm happy with 40hrs with some days remote and I don't think I could switch to googles approach.
But you have no idea that you wouldn't be able to continue with your 40hrs and some days remote if you had a job at Google. There are lots of people who have a positive work/life balance at Google. Some take advantage of some perks, some others, and some don't use very many at all, but the fact is that there are many perks available catering to a huge spectrum of desires, whether that means fitness, food, social, cul…
Having worked at some of the FANGs, I can say that this effect of these perks on work/life decisions is very very small. Most people enjoy the perks and do what they were going to do anyway. Most of my teammates won't stay for free dinner because they'd rather spend time with their friends and families. Most people work from home all the ~once/week.
When work/life balance is bad, it's because of a desire to perform or managerial pressure; not because you get free food and an on-site dentist. Generally the perks are conveniences and genuinely nice to have, and if they are part of a sinister plot to exploit workers, they are pretty bad at it.
Not covered in first answer: you could leave at 6, but if you stay till 7 there's a roast dinner. I suspect people who still work at Google are sometimes a little blind to their own behaviour.
Young, brilliant programmers but still totally dependent on the approval of their peers - to the degree that they not only work very late to get food, they stay even longer to avoid someone judging them. I bet they even make excuses before leaving at 8 pm... Its really very sad that smart human beings act like that due purely to social pressure.
There seems to be a lot of effort to remove day to day time wasters in small things.
Then, if you think about it, having subpar teammates is also a waste of time. They are not only wasting their own time but also everybody elses. So making sure you don't let people with IQ less than certain threshold is also important for everybodys productivity.
Solving a problem once is extremely important. Instead of reinventing infrastructure for each and every project at the company as many companies do (mine, one of the largest banks in the world, in my team there are still people who are devoted to maintaining a handful of servers running Windows -- including completely custom everything from project structure, to build, to configuration mechanisms, everything reinvented for the project). Solving a problem once also means you can focus on a single problem because you are solving this problem for an entire company.
If you do Agile right you get to the part at the core of the process where you mercilessly optimize your process. I think most companies talk about Agile where Google is one of the very few that actually do it.
Some of the comments here suggest that the Google's perks are bad because they corrode work/life balance and encourage employees to stay longer. Having worked at some of the FANGs, I can say that this effect of these perks on work/life decisions is very very small. Most people enjoy the perks and do what they were going to do anyway. Most of my teammates won't stay for free dinner because they'd rather spend time wit…