7 ms·

On Perks

89 points by mr_tyzic 7y ago

draw_down 7y ago
We all die alone. :)
bsimpson 7y ago
> Free lunch, though, is not where the action is: the economics of free food are driven by free dinner. Lunch just amortizes the fixed cost of food prep facilities. The Google SF office had lunch, but not dinner, for 10 years. Dinner is a fairly recent offering.
- warp_factor 7y ago
  free lunch is also good economically though, without free lunch most employees spend 1+ hours outside the company. With free lunch, most employee spend less than 25 minutes eating, then going back directly to work.
  - bsimpson 7y ago
    I definitely understand why they do it; just providing a counterpoint to "they only lunch so they can dinner." That's been the exact opposite of my experience. It was an uphill battle to get dinner at Google, so there were plenty of nights where the reason I left was "I have to get home before my food options close."
    - Spoom 7y ago
      There are relatively few people actually getting dinner at my office, even though it is offered four days a week. Perhaps an order of magnitude fewer than those getting lunch.
hardtke 7y ago
Article misses an important point. Free food is a benefit, and ERISA requires all employees get the same benefits. If you have a company with lots of low paid workers, it doesn’t work financially. Silicon Valley firms mostly contract out low wage jobs (janitorial, security) partially for this reason.
- Longhanks 7y ago
  This is very interesting to hear. In Germany, we don't have a law as such, and the employees of the company I work for that work less than 40 hours per week have to pay for food at the cafeteria, while those who do get it for free. If I understand ERISA correctly, that would be illegal in the US.
  - walshemj 7y ago
    I could see it being illegal under EU law too - as indirect discrimination
  - seppel 7y ago
    In Germany, free lunch is a taxable income. It might explain the difference between full and part time employees. How does it look like in your payslip?
    - Xylakant 7y ago
      It’s not as simple as that. The employer can support lunch up to a set limit by day (I think currently 6.40 EUR, but I might be wrong on the exact number per day) and depending on the exact way things are laid out, the reminder is taxed flat at 25% and not subject to social security. It’s actually one of the best perks that an employer can give (the others are paying for a transport ticket, or a bike). It provides real value, everyone has to eat and not paying for lunch translates into real money unlike a flipper table.
- dominotw 7y ago
  my company had offices in bay area and chicago. No free food in chicago, free food in sfo.
jacques_chester 7y ago
The tax position of benefits varies by country. Australia, for example, has the Fringe Benefits Tax, which is a tax on benefits levied on the employer at the highest marginal tax rate. Unsurprisingly, Australian workplaces are miserly. At my last job before moving to the US, there was a hot water dispenser installed in the staff room. But we, the employees, had to buy for coffee, tea, sugar and milk ourselves. It was achieved on an honour system, with a little container where you would throw in some cash from time to time.
- dannyw 7y ago
  Food and drinks are not FBT’d in Australia. > Food and/or drink provided to, and consumed by, current employees on your business premises on a working day are exempt property benefits https://www.ato.gov.au/law/view/document?DocID=SAV%2FFBTGEMP%2F00015 https://www.ato.gov.au/law/view/document?DocID=SAV%2FFBTGEMP... There are plenty of companies in Australia with very good benefits, like Atlassian and Canva.
  - jacques_chester 7y ago
    I guess they were the regular sort of misers, then.
octocode 7y ago
I disagree with pretty much everything in this article. I've never been happier than when I worked for a company that provided free, daily, healthy lunches. We were never coerced into working through dinner. Now I have to food prep dinner and lunch. I'm making 4x the portions just so we each have enough to eat for leftovers. I spend way more of my personal time cooking and doing groceries and not with my family or working on my projects. Food waste has skyrocketed since everything is bought in bulk, and sometimes not all of it gets used. It's created way more dishes too, in meal prep and tupperwares. Sometimes we ate out the night before, or there are just no leftovers. I can either get unhealthy fast food, wait an hour to get served at a healthy place, or spend even more of my limited personal time preparing a meal for the next day.
- healsjnr1 7y ago
  I'm curious. It seems like the before after in this situation seems to have more to do with not having a family / having a family, than working somewhere that has food perks / doesn't have food perks. Unless the the corporation is paying for your entire families food budget, prep, cleaning etc, I think what you have just described is exactly the point of the article: being single and having all (or most) household chores done for you is really attractive and great, having a family and needing to do this yourself for multiple people sucks and is hard. Ergo, these perks prolong the time spent single and enjoying the perks.
  - octocode 7y ago
    We both lost cafeteria breakfast/lunch when we got new jobs after moving. Making dinner used to be really easy, just grab some fresh ingredients on the way home and throw together something small and healthy. Now it's a whole performance. We're constantly trying to make bulk meals, and store the rest for breakfast/lunch. We've gone from preparing 2 servings of food per day to 6 or more. We needed to buy larger kitchen appliances and equipment just to cook/store it all. There are 3x more groceries (We shop on foot and bought one of those little carts) and 3x more dishes. It doesn't seem like much but I've lost at least 30 mins a day, but probably a lot more on average. The food I am eating is, on average, less healthy, less diverse, and less tasty (I am no professional chef). This article just seemed to resolve to a point that free lunch was a corporate tool to discourage "family formation", and I ultimately disagree. I think a lot of working parents would love to not have to worry about preparing their own lunch meal on top of their families. I just don't see the connection of "free food == single life", and the article doesn't really establish one. At worst I'd still end up with the same amount of time, and at best it has given me more free time to spend with my family.
baby 7y ago
Just started a new job that offers the breakfast/lunch/dinner perks. There are several aspects to it. Retention: * obviously, if the competition doesn't offer lunch, you want to go there * obviously, if the competition offers lunch and your company doesn't, you will want to leave the company * building a community starts with breaking bread. If you can get friendships and relationships to form via this mechanism then you will have a stronger retention, stronger ties between coworkers, etc. cross-pollinating: * grabbing lunch with someone else in the company is easier Team: * go grab lunch with coworkers to know what they're working on * free lunch = better moral for the team * you save time looking for lunch, so you can spend more time eating with your coworker * since you all eat at the same place you randomly bump into coworkers, you often eat with them, etc. Life outside of work: * you can go earlier at work since they serve breakfast * if you can bring food home, you don't have to lose time meal prep'ing and can spend more time doing other things
purplezooey 7y ago
The article talks about free food. But the most bizarre perk is how health insurance is linked to one's employer. Whatever system we have in 20 years, pretty much anything will be better than this one.
- atemerev 7y ago
  In Switzerland, health insurance is still expensive and obligatory (which is bad), but can only be paid from after-tax money, which is good and delivers at least some market pressure to the system. In the US, how do freelancers and individual consultants even work?
  - gvd 7y ago
    The obligatory part is the good part. In the Netherlands it is obligatory and costs are lower than in the US.
    - atemerev 7y ago
      No, the obligatory part leads to less competition, less market pressure, and therefore costs spiral. Our costs are almost on par with the US, and raise every year.
      - alex_young 7y ago
        How does the obligation to buy insurance cause there to be less competition? If someone doesn't have to have insurance, wouldn't the pool of possible customers be smaller? I agree with you on the cost comparison side - I've lived in both places and find the systems quite similar in many respects outside of costs. I think one key difference between the Swiss / American model and that of other western EU countries is the cost of billing and processing. In the US a full third of the cost of care is this part of the system, something that doesn't need to happen when there is a single universal payer for all care.
        atemerev 7y ago
gnicholas 7y ago
> At a minimum, it saves a little bit of search time and wait time. If you were going to work until 10, dinner that takes five minutes rather than thirty still saves you five minutes. Am I the only one who doesn't understand this math? Isn't 30 - 5 = 25?
kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago
I used to work in a company that gave free food and I'd choose that even if they offered to pay me 15 dollars per meal (B, L, D) for every weekday instead. There is just such a massive emotional value to having free food all around the office. It was a sad sad day when I left that job.
- Zeebrommer 7y ago
  I think this is exactly one of the points the article makes: free food makes employees stick around longer.
ascar 7y ago
I'm not sure, if it's really the free part. I had free food at a previous employer and loved it, but a company cafeteria with high-quality food, fast service and acceptable prices serves the same purpose. And every single company cafeteria I ate in so far had same or better quality food with more options. The important thing is that there is an easily available place for good food. Big corps in Germany (and probably all around the world) usually offer that, while small companies for obvious reasons cannot afford it.
EliRivers 7y ago
If it stops people eating lunch at their desk, I'm all for it. I've started timing my lunches to coincide with some people near me so I don't have to experience them eating lunch at their desks.
- vbuwivbiu 7y ago
  <shudder> eating at desks must stop
  - elyobo 7y ago
    Why? Genuinely curious. Couldn't care less if people near me eat at their desks.
    - 0db532a0 7y ago
      Because some people have to work with complete barbarians who chomp with their mouth open whole Granny Smith apples, whole bell peppers and whole celery sticks without cutting them up, as if to deliberately annoy everyone in the vicinity.
    - scribu 7y ago
      For me it's the smells. Whether it's a scent I love or hate, it's very distracting.
    - EliRivers 7y ago
      For me, it's the slurping and the rustling and the crunching. And cutlery tapping against plates and teeth. And the wet sound of someone moving food around inside their mouth with their tongue; cheeks and lips flexing and slurping against each other because they took too large a mouthful, barely even looking at their food because they're staring at something else. And the snorts of breath around it as they need to keep breathing around a mouthful of food. And the sound of teeth clicking together as they munch too hard. Greasy fingers wiping on themselves or their desks if they even bother to wipe them before tapping away again at a keyboard. Back of a hand scraping across their face to remove detritus.
- 7y ago
superice 7y ago
In the Netherlands, meals and other benefits provided by the employer are taxed into oblivion after a certain amount. It makes a lot of financial sense to just give your employees more money here and let them buy their own stuff after income tax. The way it works is that a company can spend 1.2% of the yearly income on the employee in terms of coffee, company retreats, free lunches, whatever they please, but over that you pay a huge tax rate which make the expense slightly higher than an employee buying it themselves after income tax. Some things are exempt from this, such as free fruit. In practice this means that the cheaper things, such as coffee and tea are usually free (at least in offices with white collar workers) and the more expensive things such as dinner are usually not employer provided. Company provided lunch does exist, and seems to be on the rise, but due to the spartan nature of Dutch lunch, companies are usually able to squeeze that in the 1.2% given that the yearly salaries are high enough. It seems to me that all of this is quite a nice compromise between employers running your life and you thus being limited in your choices, while still offering free coffee and the like. Edit: misremembered the amount, changed 1.8 to 1.2%
- winter_blue 7y ago
  > spartan nature of Dutch lunch I just ran some numbers. The average salary of Dutch Software Engineer is €42,993[1]. 1.2% of €42,993 = €516. There are 261 weekdays in a year; subtract 30 holiday/vacation days from that, you get 221 working days. €516 / 221 = €2.23 Can lunch be a mere €2.23 (US$2.50) in the Netherlands? My employer delivers free lunch to all its employees everyday as well ( via a service called https://www.servedbystadium.com/ https://www.servedbystadium.com/ ), but the cost of this is typically around $15-$20 per meal. (I estimate my employer has allocated about $4000/year per employee for the free lunch. That's around 2% to 3% of the salary of most of our software engineers, but salaries on average are about 3 times[2] in the U.S. compared to the Netherlands.) [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Software_Engineer/Salary https://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Software_Engineer/S... [2] https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary
  - superice 7y ago
    I think €2.23 is a little on the light side, but not unrealistic, considering that a Dutch lunch mostly consists of cheap sliced bread with some form of stuff spread out on it, mostly Gouda cheese, or any of the sweet stuff like the traditional chocolaty sprinkles: hagelslag. I talked to the guy that buys the lunch at our office, and his estimate is anywhere between €2.50 and €3.50 per person a day, but he did not have hard numbers. For Dutch standards, our lunch is considered quite luxurious. Then again, I'm not exactly sure what part of that is just lower prices in supermarkets. As a student I routinely could cook dinner for under €2.50 per person, although nowadays I'm averaging more like €4 pp, with rising prices and me cooking for a smaller group.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
My most memorable experiences at Google were perks like the invited talks (I got to have a very long chat with author of the Moose Wood Cookbook Molly Katzen and a short chat about Reddit dropping Common Lisp with Alexis Ohanian) and the interesting food at 28 cafes. The work was OK, I just did one specific thing - not much freedom, but my main great memories were the perks. Another great perk was the invited chefs from local restaurants who would be guest chefs, and they would be available to talk with.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

89 points by mr_tyzic 7y ago

We all die alone. :)

> Free lunch, though, is not where the action is: the economics of free food are driven by free dinner. Lunch just amortizes the fixed cost of food prep facilities. The Google SF office had lunch, but not dinner, for 10 years. Dinner is a fairly recent offering.

warp_factor 7y ago
free lunch is also good economically though, without free lunch most employees spend 1+ hours outside the company. With free lunch, most employee spend less than 25 minutes eating, then going back directly to work.
- bsimpson 7y ago
  I definitely understand why they do it; just providing a counterpoint to "they only lunch so they can dinner." That's been the exact opposite of my experience. It was an uphill battle to get dinner at Google, so there were plenty of nights where the reason I left was "I have to get home before my food options close."
  - Spoom 7y ago
    There are relatively few people actually getting dinner at my office, even though it is offered four days a week. Perhaps an order of magnitude fewer than those getting lunch.

hardtke 7y ago

Article misses an important point. Free food is a benefit, and ERISA requires all employees get the same benefits. If you have a company with lots of low paid workers, it doesn’t work financially. Silicon Valley firms mostly contract out low wage jobs (janitorial, security) partially for this reason.

Longhanks 7y ago
This is very interesting to hear. In Germany, we don't have a law as such, and the employees of the company I work for that work less than 40 hours per week have to pay for food at the cafeteria, while those who do get it for free. If I understand ERISA correctly, that would be illegal in the US.
- walshemj 7y ago
  I could see it being illegal under EU law too - as indirect discrimination
- seppel 7y ago
  In Germany, free lunch is a taxable income. It might explain the difference between full and part time employees. How does it look like in your payslip?
  - Xylakant 7y ago
    It’s not as simple as that. The employer can support lunch up to a set limit by day (I think currently 6.40 EUR, but I might be wrong on the exact number per day) and depending on the exact way things are laid out, the reminder is taxed flat at 25% and not subject to social security. It’s actually one of the best perks that an employer can give (the others are paying for a transport ticket, or a bike). It provides real value, everyone has to eat and not paying for lunch translates into real money unlike a flipper table.
dominotw 7y ago
my company had offices in bay area and chicago. No free food in chicago, free food in sfo.

jacques_chester 7y ago

The tax position of benefits varies by country. Australia, for example, has the Fringe Benefits Tax, which is a tax on benefits levied on the employer at the highest marginal tax rate. Unsurprisingly, Australian workplaces are miserly. At my last job before moving to the US, there was a hot water dispenser installed in the staff room. But we, the employees, had to buy for coffee, tea, sugar and milk ourselves. It was achieved on an honour system, with a little container where you would throw in some cash from time to time.

dannyw 7y ago
Food and drinks are not FBT’d in Australia. > Food and/or drink provided to, and consumed by, current employees on your business premises on a working day are exempt property benefits https://www.ato.gov.au/law/view/document?DocID=SAV%2FFBTGEMP%2F00015 https://www.ato.gov.au/law/view/document?DocID=SAV%2FFBTGEMP... There are plenty of companies in Australia with very good benefits, like Atlassian and Canva.
- jacques_chester 7y ago
  I guess they were the regular sort of misers, then.

octocode 7y ago

I disagree with pretty much everything in this article. I've never been happier than when I worked for a company that provided free, daily, healthy lunches. We were never coerced into working through dinner. Now I have to food prep dinner and lunch. I'm making 4x the portions just so we each have enough to eat for leftovers. I spend way more of my personal time cooking and doing groceries and not with my family or working on my projects. Food waste has skyrocketed since everything is bought in bulk, and sometimes not all of it gets used. It's created way more dishes too, in meal prep and tupperwares. Sometimes we ate out the night before, or there are just no leftovers. I can either get unhealthy fast food, wait an hour to get served at a healthy place, or spend even more of my limited personal time preparing a meal for the next day.

healsjnr1 7y ago
I'm curious. It seems like the before after in this situation seems to have more to do with not having a family / having a family, than working somewhere that has food perks / doesn't have food perks. Unless the the corporation is paying for your entire families food budget, prep, cleaning etc, I think what you have just described is exactly the point of the article: being single and having all (or most) household chores done for you is really attractive and great, having a family and needing to do this yourself for multiple people sucks and is hard. Ergo, these perks prolong the time spent single and enjoying the perks.
- octocode 7y ago
  We both lost cafeteria breakfast/lunch when we got new jobs after moving. Making dinner used to be really easy, just grab some fresh ingredients on the way home and throw together something small and healthy. Now it's a whole performance. We're constantly trying to make bulk meals, and store the rest for breakfast/lunch. We've gone from preparing 2 servings of food per day to 6 or more. We needed to buy larger kitchen appliances and equipment just to cook/store it all. There are 3x more groceries (We shop on foot and bought one of those little carts) and 3x more dishes. It doesn't seem like much but I've lost at least 30 mins a day, but probably a lot more on average. The food I am eating is, on average, less healthy, less diverse, and less tasty (I am no professional chef). This article just seemed to resolve to a point that free lunch was a corporate tool to discourage "family formation", and I ultimately disagree. I think a lot of working parents would love to not have to worry about preparing their own lunch meal on top of their families. I just don't see the connection of "free food == single life", and the article doesn't really establish one. At worst I'd still end up with the same amount of time, and at best it has given me more free time to spend with my family.

baby 7y ago

Just started a new job that offers the breakfast/lunch/dinner perks. There are several aspects to it. Retention: * obviously, if the competition doesn't offer lunch, you want to go there * obviously, if the competition offers lunch and your company doesn't, you will want to leave the company * building a community starts with breaking bread. If you can get friendships and relationships to form via this mechanism then you will have a stronger retention, stronger ties between coworkers, etc. cross-pollinating: * grabbing lunch with someone else in the company is easier Team: * go grab lunch with coworkers to know what they're working on * free lunch = better moral for the team * you save time looking for lunch, so you can spend more time eating with your coworker * since you all eat at the same place you randomly bump into coworkers, you often eat with them, etc. Life outside of work: * you can go earlier at work since they serve breakfast * if you can bring food home, you don't have to lose time meal prep'ing and can spend more time doing other things

purplezooey 7y ago

The article talks about free food. But the most bizarre perk is how health insurance is linked to one's employer. Whatever system we have in 20 years, pretty much anything will be better than this one.

atemerev 7y ago
In Switzerland, health insurance is still expensive and obligatory (which is bad), but can only be paid from after-tax money, which is good and delivers at least some market pressure to the system. In the US, how do freelancers and individual consultants even work?
- gvd 7y ago
  The obligatory part is the good part. In the Netherlands it is obligatory and costs are lower than in the US.
  - atemerev 7y ago
    No, the obligatory part leads to less competition, less market pressure, and therefore costs spiral. Our costs are almost on par with the US, and raise every year.
    - alex_young 7y ago
      How does the obligation to buy insurance cause there to be less competition? If someone doesn't have to have insurance, wouldn't the pool of possible customers be smaller? I agree with you on the cost comparison side - I've lived in both places and find the systems quite similar in many respects outside of costs. I think one key difference between the Swiss / American model and that of other western EU countries is the cost of billing and processing. In the US a full third of the cost of care is this part of the system, something that doesn't need to happen when there is a single universal payer for all care.
      - atemerev 7y ago

gnicholas 7y ago

> At a minimum, it saves a little bit of search time and wait time. If you were going to work until 10, dinner that takes five minutes rather than thirty still saves you five minutes. Am I the only one who doesn't understand this math? Isn't 30 - 5 = 25?

kinkrtyavimoodh 7y ago

I used to work in a company that gave free food and I'd choose that even if they offered to pay me 15 dollars per meal (B, L, D) for every weekday instead. There is just such a massive emotional value to having free food all around the office. It was a sad sad day when I left that job.

Zeebrommer 7y ago
I think this is exactly one of the points the article makes: free food makes employees stick around longer.

ascar 7y ago

I'm not sure, if it's really the free part. I had free food at a previous employer and loved it, but a company cafeteria with high-quality food, fast service and acceptable prices serves the same purpose. And every single company cafeteria I ate in so far had same or better quality food with more options. The important thing is that there is an easily available place for good food. Big corps in Germany (and probably all around the world) usually offer that, while small companies for obvious reasons cannot afford it.

EliRivers 7y ago

If it stops people eating lunch at their desk, I'm all for it. I've started timing my lunches to coincide with some people near me so I don't have to experience them eating lunch at their desks.

vbuwivbiu 7y ago
<shudder> eating at desks must stop
- elyobo 7y ago
  Why? Genuinely curious. Couldn't care less if people near me eat at their desks.
  - 0db532a0 7y ago
    Because some people have to work with complete barbarians who chomp with their mouth open whole Granny Smith apples, whole bell peppers and whole celery sticks without cutting them up, as if to deliberately annoy everyone in the vicinity.
  - scribu 7y ago
    For me it's the smells. Whether it's a scent I love or hate, it's very distracting.
  - EliRivers 7y ago
    For me, it's the slurping and the rustling and the crunching. And cutlery tapping against plates and teeth. And the wet sound of someone moving food around inside their mouth with their tongue; cheeks and lips flexing and slurping against each other because they took too large a mouthful, barely even looking at their food because they're staring at something else. And the snorts of breath around it as they need to keep breathing around a mouthful of food. And the sound of teeth clicking together as they munch too hard. Greasy fingers wiping on themselves or their desks if they even bother to wipe them before tapping away again at a keyboard. Back of a hand scraping across their face to remove detritus.
7y ago

superice 7y ago

In the Netherlands, meals and other benefits provided by the employer are taxed into oblivion after a certain amount. It makes a lot of financial sense to just give your employees more money here and let them buy their own stuff after income tax. The way it works is that a company can spend 1.2% of the yearly income on the employee in terms of coffee, company retreats, free lunches, whatever they please, but over that you pay a huge tax rate which make the expense slightly higher than an employee buying it themselves after income tax. Some things are exempt from this, such as free fruit. In practice this means that the cheaper things, such as coffee and tea are usually free (at least in offices with white collar workers) and the more expensive things such as dinner are usually not employer provided. Company provided lunch does exist, and seems to be on the rise, but due to the spartan nature of Dutch lunch, companies are usually able to squeeze that in the 1.2% given that the yearly salaries are high enough. It seems to me that all of this is quite a nice compromise between employers running your life and you thus being limited in your choices, while still offering free coffee and the like. Edit: misremembered the amount, changed 1.8 to 1.2%

winter_blue 7y ago
> spartan nature of Dutch lunch I just ran some numbers. The average salary of Dutch Software Engineer is €42,993[1]. 1.2% of €42,993 = €516. There are 261 weekdays in a year; subtract 30 holiday/vacation days from that, you get 221 working days. €516 / 221 = €2.23 Can lunch be a mere €2.23 (US$2.50) in the Netherlands? My employer delivers free lunch to all its employees everyday as well ( via a service called https://www.servedbystadium.com/ https://www.servedbystadium.com/ ), but the cost of this is typically around $15-$20 per meal. (I estimate my employer has allocated about $4000/year per employee for the free lunch. That's around 2% to 3% of the salary of most of our software engineers, but salaries on average are about 3 times[2] in the U.S. compared to the Netherlands.) [1] https://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Software_Engineer/Salary https://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Software_Engineer/S... [2] https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary
- superice 7y ago
  I think €2.23 is a little on the light side, but not unrealistic, considering that a Dutch lunch mostly consists of cheap sliced bread with some form of stuff spread out on it, mostly Gouda cheese, or any of the sweet stuff like the traditional chocolaty sprinkles: hagelslag. I talked to the guy that buys the lunch at our office, and his estimate is anywhere between €2.50 and €3.50 per person a day, but he did not have hard numbers. For Dutch standards, our lunch is considered quite luxurious. Then again, I'm not exactly sure what part of that is just lower prices in supermarkets. As a student I routinely could cook dinner for under €2.50 per person, although nowadays I'm averaging more like €4 pp, with rising prices and me cooking for a smaller group.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

My most memorable experiences at Google were perks like the invited talks (I got to have a very long chat with author of the Moose Wood Cookbook Molly Katzen and a short chat about Reddit dropping Common Lisp with Alexis Ohanian) and the interesting food at 28 cafes. The work was OK, I just did one specific thing - not much freedom, but my main great memories were the perks. Another great perk was the invited chefs from local restaurants who would be guest chefs, and they would be available to talk with.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]