Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's "free food" is not free

rachelbythebay.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 181 posts

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#41

Post by yummyfajitas »

temphn wrote: post #12

Has rachelbythebay ever written a post that is not about bashing Google as evil or all engineers as sexist? Notice what she does not mention: Google massively increased salaries during the same time period, including the 10% across the board bump.

Has rachelbythebay ever written a post that is not about bashing Google as evil or all engineers as sexist?

This is a pointless ad-hominem attack. Suppose, hypothetically, that rachelbythebay believes engineers are all sexist and google is evil. So what?

You could make your post clearer and more useful by removing the first sentence.

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#42

Post by sliverstorm »

wonnage wrote: post #25

I'm having a hard time sympathizing. At the end of her negotiation, this was the state of the world: the company didn't want to go any higher, and some handwaving about how much food was worth was enough to convince her to fold. Why bother calculating "effective salary"? Personally, anything that isn't cold, hard cash I view as tangential to my compensation. Even options are questionable - sometimes the salary hit ov…

She wanted to take the deal; she just needed them to give her a reason.

It seems disingenuous for her to complain about it later.

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#43

Post by sliverstorm »

ok_craig wrote: post #16
skore wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should read the article - the argument was that while yes, perks were offered as a reason to accept a smaller wage, they were then gradually eliminated without changing the wage.

What about that 10% raise the whole company got?

Everybody forgot about it.

Yea, I guess they won't be doing that again, for all it got 'em.

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#44

Post by jamesaguilar »

temphn wrote: post #12

Has rachelbythebay ever written a post that is not about bashing Google as evil or all engineers as sexist? Notice what she does not mention: Google massively increased salaries during the same time period, including the 10% across the board bump.

You could just look at her post history to find out. For example, the post immediately before this one.

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#45

Post by neilk »

copper wrote: post #38
neilk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't go so far as to call Google "evil" for reducing perks, but the microkitchens were a lot better before. They used to be overflowing with goodies, many perishable. After the bean-counter moment it was all dry cereal and prepackaged snacks. For me it was just a "shrug, whatever" moment. I realized that as a growing public company Google wanted to control costs more. And I might be weird, but excessive perks c…

I imagine her main gripe would be that the free food was treated as a component of her compensation, and then withdrawn for the perfectly rational (but unrelated) reason of cutting costs.If someone did that to my salary (and it's happened a few times, for various reasons), that would generate a certain amount of ill-will.

That was her fault. She acknowledges her naïveté in accepting this as part of her salary negotiation, but strangely clings to her outrage as well.

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#46

Post by ajays »

Google is located in an area where there aren't many restaurants close by. By offering on-site lunches, they keep the employees on campus. So instead of wasting, say, 1.5 hours getting to MtView, hunting for parking, waiting at a restaurant, eating, getting back into your car, etc., the employees just walk over to the cafe, still in work mode; or even better, take the lunch back to their offices.

Even if Google gets 1 hour of work per employee per day out of this arrangement, the lunch more than pays for itself.

So people shouldn't naively think that Google (or, for that matter, any other company) offers these perks out of the goodness of their heart; it's because it makes fiscal sense to keep employees on campus, working.

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#47

Post by copper »

neilk wrote: post #45
copper wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine her main gripe would be that the free food was treated as a component of her compensation, and then withdrawn for the perfectly rational (but unrelated) reason of cutting costs.If someone did that to my salary (and it's happened a few times, for various reasons), that would generate a certain amount of ill-will.

That was her fault. She acknowledges her naïveté in accepting this as part of her salary negotiation, but strangely clings to her outrage as well.

That's true. I'd say that time is pretty much the only thing that can heal outrage about such things, though.

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#48

Post by georgieporgie »

Sure, go ahead and screw the employees while the economy is bad. They'll stay on and grumble about it, because they can't go anywhere.

People got laid off and were unable to find work, possibly ending their careers, and you're complaining about bagels being cut? Seriously?

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#49

Post by rdl »

Hominem wrote: post #14

I worked at a place with free food and this exact thing happened. At first it was order any two meals off seamlessweb.com a day. Then it was order one meal, which meant people ordered enough food for two or three meals once a day. Then there were spending limits. Then there was a "town hall meeting" the CEO claimed he had been doing some investigations an came across a worker who was drinking ten cans of coke a day.…

I would have probably quit sometime between spending limits and a "town hall meeting" about food being worth everyone's time.

Re: Google's "free food" is not free

#50

Post by Hominem »

ajays wrote: post #46

Google is located in an area where there aren't many restaurants close by. By offering on-site lunches, they keep the employees on campus. So instead of wasting, say, 1.5 hours getting to MtView, hunting for parking, waiting at a restaurant, eating, getting back into your car, etc., the employees just walk over to the cafe, still in work mode; or even better, take the lunch back to their offices. Even if Google gets…

Right, the company I worked for was open about this, they wanted us at our desks.

The problem was they had no way of measuring how much productivity gains there really were but they still had a bill every month for the food. When push comes to shove it was harder to justify any theoretical productivity gains against that bill.

Post reply on HN