7 ms·

Google's "free food" is not free

291 points by andrew_k 15y ago

overgard 15y ago
I find myself in a weird situation, in that I find this writer's writing intriguing exactly because of how much I vehemently disagree with almost all of it. It's like somehow it manages to push all the wrong buttons, in a very precise way. Usually when I read things that I disagree with it doesn't really prod at me, but for some reason almost this entire blog does. The controversy this blog always digs up on really minor topics makes me think I'm not the only one. I think what always strikes me in her writing is the lack of any empathy in any of the rants/complaints. When I read credible arguments, I always feel like there's a bit of understanding involved, as in "these people think this, for certain reasons we've actually bothered to explore and will treat fairly, but it turns out this other thing is the case because.." The problem is, if you don't bother to look into the other side of things, you can't have real understanding. I saw nothing in that article as to /why/ google might have done what they did, only some really petulant complaints and vague innuendo about "rogue contractors". I got the same impression from other posts, like where she accused ruby programmers of being "hipsters", because, you know, obviously you can just do everything in C++ so why bother to learn something new?
- rdtsc 15y ago
  > Usually when I read things that I disagree with it doesn't really prod at me ... I saw nothing in that article as to /why/ google might have done what they did And then from the article: """ but enough people finally cornered them and got them to admit it was about the cost. """ From what I see, you really didn't read the article.
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    Of course it was about the cost. The article doesn't mention any reasons why they would have to cut costs, though.
    - zeroboy 15y ago
      No, it's not "of course it's because of the cost" because it could have been for another reason, and (thank God) the article wasn't about why Google would cut back on a perk. If it was, I wouldn't have read it.
- wisty 15y ago
  Everyone knows Google cut perks to save money. If they'd told people to accept a lower salary, on the basis of the perks being worth 20k, that employee is bound to be pissed when they were taken away. They were part of the salary negotiation - to the author, that's like cutting her wage because the stock numbers were down.
- lusr 15y ago
  I too find the writing style very distracting, but I can't quite place my finger on what it is exactly. It's very strange, though. That being said, I think the post makes a valuable point that anybody can learn about negotiating: what are they really giving you, did you expect to get that anyway (i.e. is it material to negotiations), can you reasonably claim it's not material even if it IS something special they're offering (I have allergies to about 25% of common foods, so I prepare my own food), can they take it away later, etc.
  - zeroboy 15y ago
    Interesting how that is. I thought the writing was particularly good, and I make my living writing for the web.
- zeroboy 15y ago
  The article isn't about why Google cut costs like free cafeteria food. It's about an employee agreeing to work somewhere that is reputed to be "world class" because they were promised a benefit and then that benefit was taken away.
cleverjake 15y ago
better perks can mean less money. this is not news.
- stfu 15y ago
  Exactly - bashing a former employer because they took the cookies away is not that much of a breaking news story. If this is really about the money: Didn't we have some time ago a story about women earning less than men just because they don't ask for more? I had read nothing about negotiation, and didn't know what I was doing. They offered a sum which was in fact an improvement over what I had been making seems to me even kind, considering her not mentioning once that she asked for a raise etc.
- skore 15y ago
  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.
  - cleverjake 15y ago
    My mistake, I misread it. Thank you for pointing that out, for myself and others.
  - ok_craig 15y ago
    What about that 10% raise the whole company got?
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      Everybody forgot about it. Yea, I guess they won't be doing that again, for all it got 'em.
      - throwaway64 15y ago
        the 10% raise was 5 years after the perks started dissapearing....
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
laserDinosaur 15y ago
STOP THE PRESSES!
veyron 15y ago
The real lesson for employees is to ignore the cash value of the perks when evaluating offers. Perks can be taken away, but cutting salaries is much more controversial.
- latch 15y ago
  Which is why some sectors treat money as a perk (bonuses). But as much as companies make sure employees understand what a "bonus" is, there's a sense of entitlement and people quit when this years bonus wasn't as big as last years.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Companies try to do the same playing-both-sides there, too, though, which is what causes some of the confusion and ire. On the one hand, it's formally just a perk that isn't guaranteed. But on the other hand, they'll often make claims about what kinds of bonuses you can expect to get -- "baseline 10% is usual" or "we've never given less than a 5% average bonus in the last decade" -- because they want potential employees to consider it as quasi-salary when evaluating the offer.
patio11 15y ago
I'm writing a post on salary negotiation today, so I zeroed in on two supporting details here that you should remember for later: when pressed on price, savvy negotiators said: 1) Give us some time to think about it. 2) We are going to re-focus the discussion on a different compensation lever where we can present something you're already going to get as if it were a new incentive justifying your concession on a lever you're currently interested in. You can do both of these as a job seeker. (For example, if you have extra-curricular interests like many desirable tech employees do, the extra-curricular interests can be used to justify an increase in your compensation vis-a-vis a hypothetical employee who punches out of the Internet at 5 pm. It doesn't particularly matter that you're going to continue blogging and OSS regardless of the outcome of this negotiation, you just frame the discussion such that that becomes newly discovered value which gives the other party something to hang their hat on for getting you that last $10,000.)
- dlss 15y ago
  Way to put a positive spin on the article :) Don't forget the lesson though -- if you use an extra-curricular in a negotiation it's no longer extra-curricular.
  - its_so_on 15y ago
    Nope, still extra-curricular, just like the food is still theirs to make available or take away as they see fit. This is a shady tactic you and the employer can both use. I wouldn't though. let me elaborate. if someone looks me in the eye and says, "Don't forget that we never work weekends, how much is that worth?" then they are not my friend. That's a given, it's part of a 40-hour job not to work weekends. To put a price on it and have me concede part of my salary means they don't have my interests at heart. Now, you might say that negotiators don't have to have the other guy's interests at heart. Then maybe you can read Getting to Yes ("the Harvard principle") or even the old How To Win Friends and Influence People. the toughest negotiators usually end up having no one to talk with but mud with a stick in it. If all you want for an employee is a mud with a stick in it, by all means, harp on about how elephants do not trample around your premises, there are no monsoons in the area, and other employees don't use the outhouse or squat outside to potentially poop on them. But if you want a quality employee, an actual human, then the negotiation that works on mud with a stick in it will not be very compelling. Or honest. Pretty soon you won't be negotiating with another human again.
cluda01 15y ago
You could also use this as a potential lever in discussing future compensation increases. If they claimed perk x was worth $y but now they are scaling it back to $z then $y-z should be put back into your base as you no longer receive the perk.
temphn 15y ago
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.
- irahul 15y ago
  > Has rachelbythebay ever written a post that is not about bashing Google as evil or all engineers as sexist? Suppose Hitler said exercising is good for health. Now Hitler was one sick son of a bitch, but that has nothing to do with whether exercising is good. May be rachelbythebay holds a grudge against Google, but here she is specifically pointing out negotiators taking free food into account while negotiating, cafes closing down and shortage of food. I don't know about you, but her article sounds pretty genuine to me. That might be because I dislike the "green initiatives." Most of the "green initiatives" are done as a PR move or cost cutting measure, totally disregarding the employees. At an earlier workplace, man, was I pissed when they replaced the urinal flushes with bio cubes. Thankfully, it didn't last long(1 week). Another workplace switched off escalators after 5 in the evening, even though the escalators were the auto on/off model, and didn't consume much power when they weren't actively used. What pissed me off more was when there was some HR conference going on in the same building, the power saving mode wasn't engaged. I remember the conversation with a senior folk: Me: Hey, escalators are working today? Oh, there is a HR conference going up on the 2nd floor, and people need to use it. Me: Has it ever fucking occurred to you that there are engineers working on the 3rd floor, who regularly stay well after 5, and need to use the escalators? Oh, you can use the stairs or the elevator in the other section? Come on, it's not a big deal - we are being green.
- Adaptive 15y ago
  I don't think I've ever read a post by her previously but I'm looking at her index of posts and at least by title there sure seems to be a lot of variety. Regardless of her previous comments on Google (I don't think sexism is relevant here) I don't think the authorship in this case warrants dismissal. I think your point about 10% salary increase is relevant, but perk-baiting itself is a very important issue that more new hires should be aware of. I've seen this many times in many different industries. Without good advice early on I would have fallen for it myself more than once, I'm sure. So let's not shoot the messenger in this case.
andrewfelix 15y ago
There's a possibility that a lot of un-eaten food was being wasted, so Google cut back to reduce food waste. ie. being green. Lot of conjecture in this article.
Hominem 15y ago
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. Out of concern for our health, they would be eliminating all beverages except water coolers. Then meals were only free for certain people. Then free meals went away. It is easy to eliminate these kinds of perks because many people will be in favor of cost cutting. Not so for salary, not many people will argue in favor of across the board salary cuts. I'll take salary every time.
- rdl 15y ago
  I would have probably quit sometime between spending limits and a "town hall meeting" about food being worth everyone's time.
  - Hominem 15y ago
    It was a funny meeting. The CEO was a hell of a salesman, he came in with a nalgene bottle and made a big show of taking big gulps while touting his new health initiatives that just happened to include cutting a perk. By the time he left people were saying it was a good thing he was so concerned for our health. He did the same speech 5 times in one day to get all the employees, must have been pretty hydrated at the end.
    - mikeklaas 15y ago
      Coke costs all of 25c/can in bulk. Even 10 cans a day is only 2.50
      - matwood 15y ago
        Coke costs all of 25c/can in bulk. Even 10 cans a day is only 2.50 Yep, and it baffles me when companies miss the forest through the trees and cut something like sodas. In the scheme of what a fully loaded engineer costs the company, even 10 cans of soda/day is minuscule (~$625/year). As companies get bigger the same thing always seem to happen. The bean counters see the large costs of providing free X to thousands of people and/or people who work there start taking advantage of the situation (bring home a 12 pack of soda each day for all their roommates). No matter how cool the company claims to be, this seems to eventually happen to all large companies past a certain size.
linuxhansl 15y ago
The most important rule of salary negotiation: Always let them make an offer first. If you're lucky it's higher than what you would have proposed, so you'll just accept it. If it's lower you just continue to negotiate.
- sown 15y ago
  I've heard that tactic before, and it's a good one. However, how do you force them to give you a number first? The only tactic I can think of is to say 'give me market rates'. One time, they just kept pressing for more and more of a number until I blurted out something. In this case it was $80k, in a Rocky Mountain state, in 2004, fresh out of college. I don't think it worked in my favor.
- jmonegro 15y ago
  Also, if you're somehow pressured into making the first offer, aim high and let them negotiate down from there.
- notaddicted 15y ago
  I think psychologically, it is better to be the one to blurt out the first number in order to take advantage of Anchoring Bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring). BUT, I think that this only applies when you have good knowledge about their salary range, or at least the market range, because you can start the conversation at the top of the range instead of the bottom. Discreetly trading salary data with a few friends can be quite beneficial I think.
- jwegan 15y ago
  This is the exact opposite of how to successfully negotiate. Maybe if your not confident in your worth, some company might offer you more than you would have suggested. However, the art to successful negotiation is to make a first offer on the high end of what is realistic so you can set an anchor point which limits how far the company can reasonably negotiate you down.
molmalo 15y ago
At the end: Or, worse, they'll assign blame to "rogue contractors" and say it was never their policy to do that. Right. Now where have we heard that before? Rogue contractors? I may be wrong, but... Is she implying that (in her personal opinion), Google knew and instructed them about OpenStreetMap sabotage? That's controversial at least. Edit: I mean, I'm not defending anyone, but without proofs, I think that's a very harsh sentence.
- earl 15y ago
  Not really. Look at google + mocality: it's easy to understand why the contractors where doing what they were: it helped them sell something or hit quota. Compare to Google contractors + open street map: what incentive does a contractor have to go screw up their data? In the first case I see directly why unethical people would do what they did. What exactly is the motive here? Just griefing? It makes me wonder.
_shane 15y ago
The author complains that she was dissatisfied with her offer six years prior but took the job anyway. Then it turns into a rant about how she was robbed of her entitlements. "But what happens when the economy improves? Those wounds will never heal. Anyone with half a brain will say "hey, these guys are evil!" and will bail for greener pastures." Because they don't have bagels in the microkitchen Google is evil? As someone who works at Google, I can assure you that the microkitchens are overflowing with drinks, snacks, fruits, coffees, and candies, The cafeterias are plentiful(24 in mountain view alone) and the food is incredibly delicious, even for a foodie like myself. Plus, the pay is very competitive. The author must not have stuck around for this: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-11-09/tech/30024423_1_google-ceo-googlers-eric-schmidt http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-11-09/tech/30024423... It's unfortunate that her experience didn't end well, but this article comes across as hyperbolic and catty.
- neilk 15y ago
  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 creep me out a little. I worry about it warping my mind too much. One day during my time at Google, I was in a grocery store and felt mild outrage at the thought that they were going to charge me for food. Once you're used to a perk, it's another fishhook the company has embedded into your flesh.
  - copper 15y ago
    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.
    - 15y ago
jcampbell1 15y ago
It is amusing that Google offers "free lunches". I wonder how many compensation discussions include the quip, "there is no such thing as a free lunch". Just out of curiosity, does Google gross up salaries for tax purposes? I really think the IRS needs to crack down on companies using excessive perks as non-taxable compensation. If Google is using the perks to justify a "lower but equivalent salary" then they should be paying taxes on the non-cash compensation. If they are not, then Google is taking advantage of a shady tax dodge.
- craigmccaskill 15y ago
  My wife works at Google. We both live in San Jose, and she frequently gets the shuttle to work in the Mountain View office. For tax reasons, I'm not allowed to get the shuttle with her to or from work, so I'm pretty sure that some if not all perks are offset somehow. Various things like the holiday gift (this year it was a galaxy nexus) are also offset for tax on your payslip. Net it works out at zero to you, as Google puts extra money into your paycheque to cover the extra tax charge.
  - patio11 15y ago
    Allowing non-employees on company transportation would threaten to make furnishing the transportation to employees a taxable event. See the same link that I posted on a sibling comment about food, just search for "transportation".
- patio11 15y ago
  I am not Google's tax accountant, but the meals are not compensation based on the IRS' published guidelines. http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html#en_US_2011_publink1000193705 http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html#en_US_2011_pu... Tax tip going way back to Learned Hand: you don't have to feel guilty about structuring your affairs to take advantage of every legitimate opportunity to decrease your tax burden. Here's a related example: US tax law allows you to deduct 50% of meals incurred on business trips. I travel internationally for a significant portion of every year, on business trips. There are two ways to calculate how much you spend on meals: 1) Actual cost 2) An approximation method which takes a per-diem rate supplied by the US government based on your location and adds one or two wrinkles not relevant here. Either is acceptable to the IRS. I keep appropriate records of business expenses, so running both the exact cost and the approximation method was trivial. The approximation overstates my actual cost on meals by several thousand dollars -- using it as the basis for my deduction saves me about a thousand bucks. That's totally kosher. P.S. You know those beating-the-system-is-worth-bonus-points neuroreceptors that most of us hackers have? Doing taxes gives you the opportunity for that sort of thing in spades. (Though I'd probably still suggest getting someone competent to do yours -- advice which I will be taking for myself from next year on.)
wonnage 15y ago
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 over 4+ years is comparable to the additional options' value. Sure, perks can make the work environment nicer. I'll take that into consideration given competing offers. But it seems silly to attempt to fix a monetary value on these things that the company has no contractual requirement to fulfill.
- tzs 15y ago
  > Why bother calculating "effective salary"? Personally, anything that isn't cold, hard cash I view as tangential to my compensation During the work week, I typically grab breakfast on the way to work ($5.10 at McDonalds, plus $1.25 for a drink out of the vending machine at work). If I have lunch, it might be Subway (around $7). Maybe dinner from Wendy's ($7). Toss in a snack somewhere in there and I'm at over $20/day. If work provided acceptable free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that would save me $5000/year. That seems big enough to me to not ignore when comparing jobs.
  - wonnage 15y ago
    And if the company isn't doing so hot? It's a lot more trouble to lower salaries than it is to cut food. Hence I'd rather not sit down and assume I'm making $5000 more. Plus it puts you in the position of feeling like you need to make 100% use of your perks, or you're getting shortchanged. After all, you're not really gaining $5000 in value, if you don't eat all your meals at the office. Or take advantage of every company-sponsored event. Unnecessarily fixing values to things is a stressful way to live. Slightly off-topic, I rather like the opportunity to get out of the office to eat lunch. That's a perk in and of itself (for me, at least). How would you value that? I could argue that it's worth the hour we spent eating out, which is surely more than the value of some catered food (unless it's some seriously fancy stuff). And you could argue back that since I'm salaried, it doesn't count... In any case, it's just not a worthwhile endeavor for me to try and conjure up numbers, when I can just reap the emotional value instead.
jayzalowitz 15y ago
Came here to say this... as a former google intern... if this was your reasoning for hating google, you weren't right google in the first place.
- hackinthebochs 15y ago
  No true scotsman rears its ugly head. So because she actually cares to be fairly compensated, she's not right for Google? I think that says more about Google than her.
  - jayzalowitz 15y ago
    I meant that she wasnt in it to make cool shit, I am at my current job because I like what my company is doing, the money dosen't mattter.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
Pretty much spot on of course, anyone who was at Google 'before' can trace the dots to today. One of the benefits of a generous set of perks is that management can adjust the expense once they get close to the end of the quarter so that the 'numbers come out right.' Google is losing that ability. It makes things like their Q4 'miss' [1] more likely. It is of course entirely Google's prerogative on how they spend their money. And if you look at their Q4 results [2] they deposited 2.97 billion dollars into the bank in cash based on the work done by their 32,467 employees. That is $91,477 in cash for the 90 days that ended December 31st. Lets say every employee ate 3 gourmet meals a day, at a cost of $15+$25+$50 or $90, and consumed another $25 in snacks so $115 per employee per day. (and those are gonna be some fat employees!) That is 32,467 x $115 x 90 days or $335 million dollars. Or about 11 cents of each dollar they dropped into the bank. The numbers of course reflect the costs that a typical restaurant would charge that was profitable, and $25 a day in snacks? That is probably way beyond what most anyone would eat so these numbers are way over if anything. But at some point between the original prospectus where Larry and Sergei told potential investors that they were going to spend a lot on perks like this so get used to it; to today, where sometimes elaborate explanations about social consciousness and environmental justice precede the denial of those perks. Someone decided the company's interest was to build a cash pile, not invest in quality of life benefits for the rank and file. Sad really, they are the kind of company that can afford to do it, and now they choose not to. So much for being different. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/technology/googles-strong-results-less-than-expected.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/technology/googles-strong-... [2] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q4_google_earnings.html http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q4_google_earnings....
- nostrademons 15y ago
  Google's Q4 miss had nothing to do with perks. They could eliminate all the perks and it wouldn't have made a dent in stock performance. The earnings miss was by about $1/share, or $323M. That's about $10K per employee over the quarter. You really think Google spends $10K/employee/quarter on perks? I've heard numbers for the food costs, and you're overestimating by more than an order of magnitude. I actually think perks today are significantly better than they were when I joined in Jan 2009. Cafes are open on weekends. There's more than one option for Friday dinner. They booked the whole Oracle Arena and took us all to see Cirque du Soleil. Cake played at Googleween. Random speakers like Sandra Day O'Connor, Lady Gaga, Carlos Santana, George R.R. Martin, and Bear McCreary show up for talks. We get random schwag more often.
jayseattle 15y ago
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 6.3 Good luck Engineers!
hurray 15y ago
Scroll to the bottom for the best comment of the lot.
ajays 15y ago
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.
- Hominem 15y ago
  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.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    They can "want you at your desk". In most of the US, you're entitled, by law, to a lunch break of at least 30 minutes. You can thank unions for that.
- rdtsc 15y ago
  > 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 becomes s question of quality. It is one thing to offer free steaks at lunch (a real perk) vs offering beans and rice every day. [just using it to illustrate a point, not saying Google is serving rice and beans only]. The goal of Google is to present how they have very high quality food during interview then start scaling down the quality (and cost) until employees will still feel like driving is a hassle but now a meal is $10 vs $30. In the end however they lose with this strategy. The people working there can read between the lines. Google might end up with better end-of-quarter bottom line, but in the long long run they will be shooting themselves in the foot.
georgieporgie 15y ago
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?
- ngokevin 15y ago
  "you're lucky you even have a job!"
- webdev42 15y ago
  I've worked at Google for almost four years and found this hilarious. "The Friday morning bagel or donut supplies also were curtailed. Sure, they still existed, but you now had to go hunt for them. They were no longer set up in a microkitchen near your office. They would now appear only in certain cafes." – The same donuts and bagels are still at Google. You have to walk an extra 30 feet to the cafe to get them. Oh, and I'd take the 10% raise – which was more like a 15-20% raise after all was said and done, based on total compensation + bonus factored in – over 30 feet of additional bagel proximity any day.
  - nostrademons 15y ago
    Sometimes I feel like the vast majority of annoyances I face at work should have a #firstworldproblems hashtag on them. I remember, I joined in Jan 2009 at the bottom of the recession, which was basically around the same time that all these perks were being cut. And people at work would gripe all about how the microkitchens weren't as good and they discontinued tea time and the cafes were closed on weekends. And then I'd go home to my two roommates, one of whom worked at EMC, and she would be like "We laid off 15% of the company today. I still have a job. I have to do the work of two additional people, but I still have a job."
    - kelnos 15y ago
      I absolutely despise this kind of thinking. The whole "firstworldproblems" meme pisses me off. You can extend this to anything. "People in Country X are starving so it's lame of me to complain about my 2-hour commute." "Children are being beaten in Country Y so I feel bad complaining about working on the weekend once a month." Ok, I'll even pull away from the hyperbole: "my friend Bob got laid off, so I shouldn't complain about working 14-hour days because at least I have a job". Yes, you absolutely should complain. I just don't buy any of this. If I'm unhappy about something, then I'm unhappy about something. The tsunami that destroyed the lives of thousands of people in Country Z, while tragic, doesn't make my grievances any less valid. It's like a new form of Godwin's Law. Any complaint can be dismissed as trivial by claiming it's a "first world problem". If you want to feel institutional guilt because many people in the world have it worse than you, fine. I'm not going to play that game. (General "you", here. Nostrademons, I'm not pointing specifically at you, just at the general pain this sort of thinking gives me.)
deleted 15y ago
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stretchwithme 15y ago
The whole idea of free food is not good. I'd prefer to have a wide variety of the highest quality food and pay something reasonable for it. I really don't want an incentive to maximize my consumption of food. What matters is how much you enjoy what you do it and being as healthy as you can be. Caffe Macs at Apple does it well. The healthiest options are clearly subsidized, and desserts are not.
MattLaroche 15y ago
One thing this article doesn't point out: it wasn't Google who argued that the supposedly lower salary was offset by food - it was a person (sure, an employee or contractor of Google). Perhaps this person was reading from a recruiting script sanctioned by management. But it wasn't the big overarching company that made this argument to the author - it was a person. Recruiters often have the wrong incentive structure. They have numbers to hit - and so they use classic high pressure tactics (exploding offers, "accept the offer now" durring the offer, misinformation, tricks) to convince people to accept. It's unfortunate that the recruiter's goals don't line up with the applicant's, but it's true. How one fixes that isn't obvious to me tonight. I also hate the victim mentality when an employee no longer feels like they're getting what they want from their employer. If you don't like what you're getting, if the economic transaction is no longer acceptable, leave. (I respect employment laws, I think everyone should treat each other, I don't condone abusive behavior or manipulation) Employees aren't victims trapped by evil employers, they're participants in an economic transaction. If the transaction is no longer as profitable as one at another company, then that doesn't make the employer bad or wrong, it's simply time to move on. (I worked at Google for 5 years, I left in April 2011. And when I went back for lunch one day in November with former coworkers, I had the best meal I'd had since I left.)
- bigiain 15y ago
  "One thing this article doesn't point out: it wasn't Google who argued that the supposedly lower salary was offset by food - it was a person (sure, an employee or contractor of Google)." I'm really intrigued at how often this "excuse" is trotted out, almost word-for-word, whenever "a person who works at Google" gets caught doing something sleazy. It's almost as predictable as the first-line call center staff asking you if you've re-booted Windows. In my more suspicious moments, I wonder what the "Google aren't evil, it's just some people who _work_ for Google that do evil shit" apologists are going to say when "the script" they're all reading out of gets posted to PasteBin - complete with Page or Brin or Schimdt's signature at the bottom? Surely if "do no evil" were and overriding company policy from the top down, "people who work for Google" would knw not do try and pull shit like this?
  - 15y ago
philwelch 15y ago
This is the second post from this blog I've had the displeasure of reading on HN, and both of them make this person seem to be a congenital malcontent.
- omonra 15y ago
  I think this post sums it up: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/15/bofh/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/15/bofh/
moocow01 15y ago
Maybe Im just a calculating, cold, emotionless engineer but when it comes to pay packages Ive stopped caring about the fancy 'perks'. I only try to gauge how much Ill get paid, how much Ill enjoy the work and learn, and how many hours Ill be putting in. Ive seen perks too many times used against employees. (The following rant is nothing towards Google - never worked there.) - Free food and onsite amenities usually is a sign that they want you there for extra long hours and that you'll probably need to use that stuff. - Unrestricted vacation days can mean you don't really get any vacation because its always crunch time. - Fancy employee outings are not so thrilling to me - I like my coworkers but I already spend the majority of my waking hours with them. I'm not trying to completely debase the value of these things - I'm just saying that in terms of negotiating salary I weight these types of perks at 0 or negative dollars.
- tomjen3 15y ago
  I get free breakfast and lunch which combined with living alone means I don't have to cook -- so I note that down as a saving of about an hour a day.
- vidarh 15y ago
  Same here - perks are stuff I expect to come on top of the salary I ask for. If they try to make the perks an excuse to offer me less, I'll turn around and ask them to rather drop the perks and pay me more, or I'll go somewhere else. It actually turns me off a company if they offer unusually large perks, as they do need to claw the money back somewhere, and usually it will be salaries, and the reason companies use perks is because employees on average tends to be really bad at judging their actual monetary value.
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  And dont forget that the Taxman will want to tax you on benefits in kind - or they will be if they are doing their job right
  - mdkess 15y ago
    You don't get taxed on free food at work.
basman 15y ago
I found it interesting that their claimed value of 15-20k a year went unquestioned. At ~300 days a year, that's $60 a day. I'd value free food at a quarter of that at most.
- zackattack 15y ago
  I dunno; with inflation, it seems that I can easily spend $10 per meal. Maybe $15, and if I eat generous portions, $20. Seriously-- in San Francisco, it's not unreasonable to expect someone to spend $20 for a meal. Now consider all the extra convenience fees... $60/day (or $50/day) is not unreasonable. Of course, since it's a corporate perk, it should get a discount rate applied... but all the same, it's still valuable: more than $15/day (come on, dude: $5 a meal? Get real, or move away from North Dakota).
amirf 15y ago
This reminds me a lot of one company I worked for. While I can understand cutting costs when the economy is bad, his last question hits the spot: "But what happens when the economy improves?"
- duncanj 15y ago
  When the economy improves and they have trouble finding employees they pay junior employees more than senior employees.
noonespecial 15y ago
Google claims to want to hire smart people. Google claims to these ostensibly smart people during the hiring process that the 'free food' is worth (cough) 20 grand in salary?! I sense a disturbance in the force.
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  And if that perk then goes away - a smart person would have this in writing. So boss wheres my pay rise to replace the free food "hr said" the free food was part of my compensation
  - brown9-2 15y ago
    Not sure that would work in the situation as Rachel described since the free food was still there, just with decreased availability and ubiquitousness.
    - mikeash 15y ago
      That would depend entirely on the specifics of how the contract was written to include the food. If it just said generic food, sure. If it specified a monetary value, then I think she'd have a case.
  - noonespecial 15y ago
    Any person smart enough to clear all of the brain teasers in order to get to that point should be far well able to do the final one that starts "an engineer is given free food at work in lieu of $X salary, calculate the value of X at which this is a fair deal..." My point was that X=$20k doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. Its absurd.
- knarf_navillus 15y ago
  Another problem with it is that food isn't as liquid as cash. I can't buy a car with their food. I can't buy a TV with their food. I can't even buy groceries with their food. Presumably, yes, I am going to have to buy some food anyway. However, perhaps I would prefer to buy something cheaper, and use the money for something else. Or, perhaps I would prefer to buy something more expensive, and not have to worry that I've already paid for Google's food on top of it. Or perhaps I just want something different. Saying, "We're going to convert $X of your salary to an equivalent value of our food" robs you of choice. I'd want a deep, deep discount in exchange. At least 50%. And no, I wouldn't accept an inflated number like $20k just so they could discount it to $10k. And yes, I'd get this perk in writing, including availability hours.
notaddicted 15y ago
Employment isn't a transaction, it is a relationship. If one is not being paid enough nothing prevents revisiting the discussion. Having said that, I don't see a lot of advice on the topic online. Obviously after spending some time at a company you have a better idea of what the talent level is like and where the money goes, so you should be able to negotiate better with the extra information, and the history of what you've done.
egfx 15y ago
My only comment after reading this story. Is he seriously complaining about having to walk around and hunt for food, (donuts) rather then finding it in a kitchen next to his desk? If that's the case I would be complaining about the lack of a good gym at Google instead.
cromwellian 15y ago
I read a previous article by her about no one being able to like Apple products after Android and decided she has a totally warped view of reality. I was there when they handed out Android phones. I still use an iPhone. Many Google employees use iPhones. No one has ever given me crap about it, and I haven't seen anyone look at anyone funny in any way. I mean, Google gives MacBook Airs/MacBook Pros to every employee for christsakes. And if you want to know how the recruiters talk you into accepting a lower salary, it isn't the value of the food, it's the value of Google's bonuses. Google HR talks to you about "Total Compensation" and the dollar value of the food is not (AFAIK) part of this discussion. Personally for me, I have no complains about my salary, but the real reason I decided to work for Google was the chance to work on world class infrastructure with access to an incredible pool of talented people, plus the culture. Google is the only large corporation I've worked at (and I've worked at others like IBM and Oracle), that didn't feel so much like a suffocating bureaucracy, and whose employees generally care about trying to do the right thing, and care about openness and honesty. You've all no doubt seen the Steve Yegge rant. That's par for the course on Google internal mailing lists, and I like the fact that people challenge management frequently with rants like this.
- yellowbkpk 15y ago
  This is a good point. I've also worked at huge behemoths before, and I wish there had been internal mailing lists to rant on. The bureaucratic walls around innovation and product release were so tall that a healthy release of those frustrations would have been nice. It's good to see that Google's employees have something to complain about, but more importantly that they actually complain about it.
  - ryanmolden 15y ago
    There is a danger with internal lists and rants, they are subject to discovery on lawsuits afaik (IANAL), so things have a tendency to not stay internal over time. Google may not have been bitten by this yet, but I imagine it is only a matter of time.
    - 15y ago
ryguytilidie 15y ago
I have worked at both Google and Facebook and this was an annoyance for everyone. People would come into the job and be promised the normal salary+benefits and then be told about the unlimited Odwalla and Aldale being open all day and how the food is amazing and then suddenly the most profitable companies in the world "realize" that these things are expensive, cut back, and expect something other than to have their world class employees go somewhere where they are treated a bit better. I will never understand not continuously investing in your employees, especially at the best companies on earth.
jaggederest 15y ago
I always think it's interesting when companies try to negotiate compensation by perks... They're basically giving away more cash. "Well our health benefits are worth $15,000 a year, you know. It's a very good plan." My answer is always "Wow, I didn't know you guys thought I was worth X+$15,000, I'll take that in cash, thanks." My health plan is comparable and costs me $200 a month + $1500 a year in deductibles, tax free.
daintynews 15y ago
So I multiplied the $30/day by the 9,600 employees in Mountain View and New York by the 251 days Google is open every year. Remember that Google probably spends a lot more than this, because there are employees outside those offices, and because visitors are there all the time eating. The grand total: By our guesstimate, Larry and Sergey are spending at least $72,288,000 per year to fill their workers' pie-holes. How can they afford to do that? Easy, of course: Last year Google (GOOG) earned $4.2 billion.
- mattmillr 15y ago
  You seem to have just lifted your comment directly from this 2008 Business Insider article and changed "we" to "I." But you missed the "our" in the second paragraph. http://articles.businessinsider.com/2008-04-23/tech/30027421_1_google-china-larry-and-sergey-employees http://articles.businessinsider.com/2008-04-23/tech/30027421...
jergosh 15y ago
$15k / 250 business days, that would be $60 per day AND they would get the food at much lower prices then you do when you sit in a restaurant. Really? If it was a random company that kind of BS would put me off working there big time.
- knarf_navillus 15y ago
  "The meals are worth $15,000." Simple response: "They're not worth that much to me, I'm afraid."
anil_mamede 15y ago
I wish the company I work would offer me free meals. Not only free meals but an infrastructure and environment where I could spend more time in my intellectual growth and personal achieviements. Of course all this requires an huge investment not only in buildings but in human resources (someone has to do the dirty work). If some company offered me free food, nice, clean and complete bathrooms, restrooms, libraries, lockers, an office arranged in manner where I could work without any disturb in trade of less but still acceptable salary I would accept it. If they cut me on sallary I would not mind but if they took me the free food completely I would be pissed off.
logn 15y ago
ITT an ex-google employee complains about google cutting some on-campus cafe hours and morning bagels/donuts being more difficult to find. Complains that during the job offer they mentioned food as a perk. Yawn.
steve8918 15y ago
I was at Google's campus last month for lunch. The food is better quality than a Las Vegas buffet with all the trimmings, except it's all free. The author complaining about Google being "evil" for cutting back or "screwing the employee" is so incredibly ridiculous and so self-entitled it sickens me. It's like someone complaining that the company used to drop free $100 bills on the ground, but now they're only dropping $50s. The employees were "WOUNDED" because they closed a few locations, or they had to wander an extra 30 ft for donuts? For F*CK'S sake get a grip! The food there is pretty damn good and if you don't like it, there's something wrong with you, not Google. Too bad they closed a couple of locations and you have to walk an extra 30 seconds or be in line an extra 2 mins. IT'S FREE FOOD AND IT'S GOOD.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - steve8918 15y ago
    The first part of the post is talking about a mistake the author made thinking that salary was worth $20,000. It's a mistake many young people make, and it's a mistake they only make once. I made the same mistake as well, but it was with respect to options. However, the rest of the article was a mindless, self-entitled rant about how evil Google was for daring to change how the food was served. "Those wounds will never heal. Anyone with half a brain will say "hey, these guys are evil!" and will bail for greener pastures." Keep in mind, Google food is still free and still high quality. All they did was consolidate the locations and maybe change the total types of food. And for this employees were "wounded" and Google was "evil"? The food is still free, it's still very much a Las Vegas buffet not slop served in a trough. You just maybe have to walk further!!! It's ridiculous!
- j_baker 15y ago
  Fair enough, but what if said company convinced you to take a lower salary because the company was always dropping $100 bills? Cutting back there would effectively be a salary cut, and you would have a right to be upset. I think the real issue is that the author's recruiter was unscrupulous and willing to take advantage of someone who wasn't skilled at the whole negotiating thing.
kamaal 15y ago
Organisation must focus on paying people well and then they must just leave people on their own. We are clever enough to know how to figure out what to do with our money. We can buy our own food, snacks and ice cream if we want to. Instead, every company that I've seen so far seems to come up with every possible reason to pay people as little as they can. Generally its like this, "Hey we are giving you x,y,z perks and you sit around in a beautiful office so the peanuts we pay is sufficient, now get back to work and slog for us until your bones hurt." Companies know damn well, that not everyone is eating these Ice creams, drinking coffee of eating stomach full everyday. And not everyone is taking the free transport. Some will, not all. On an average they pay every body less for these reasons, and the money they save by not paying in cash but by perks is often huge. Salary offers are the most fraudulent documents. Minus taxes, and some other 'hidden' deductions which always exist. Because most companies have a component of salary with string attached. What you get in hand is always close to 50% of what is promised on paper. This is every where, no matter which company you will every work at.
funkah 15y ago
Wow, no thanks. I'd prefer they skip the bi-weekly trip to Whole Foods and I'll keep the $20k.
jxcole 15y ago
Negotiator: Our free lunch costs us about 15 to 20k per year per employee, so add at least 15k to our offer to find it's true value. Me: If I were left to my own devices I would make myself a PB and J sandwich and have an apple every day. That comes down to about $2 a day for lunch. So there's 365 days in a year, take away about 104 for weekends, and you are left with about 261 free lunches a year. Hence to me the free lunch is only worth about $522. Just so you know, that's not a lot of money. Fun fact: It doesn't actually matter if you really would have PB&J every day.
JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Kind of a first-world problem. A lot is made of a company 'culture', and frequently perks are pointed out. Well, sorry, culture is what is left when the chips are down, the perks are gone, and its time to work your way out of the hole. At Google, as the article said, when perks dried up folks left. Those folks were never part of their culture, they were what's known as freeloaders. So why not be a freeloader? I don't know, I just feel kind of sticky when I find myself in that position. I would much rather be part of a small company, doing whatever it takes to be successful because its MY company.
napierzaza 15y ago
It's an advertised perk so sure. Just like they might convince you to work somewhere because it's more geographically convenient for you or it has a day care. It offers better quality of life in lieu of cash money. I know cash is what most americans want. They want it over better health care or fairer lifestyle. But some people just want to live more comfortably instead of being able to tell people how many "figures" they make. As for the cuts, maybe they decided to be more "honest" and cut that program and just give new hires more money?
resnamen 15y ago
This is SOP for negotiation. Candidates do this shit too, trying to claim some sort of inflated salary boost for every thing they give up from their previous employer. It's a game and the lesser negotiator loses out.

291 points by andrew_k 15y ago

I find myself in a weird situation, in that I find this writer's writing intriguing exactly because of how much I vehemently disagree with almost all of it. It's like somehow it manages to push all the wrong buttons, in a very precise way. Usually when I read things that I disagree with it doesn't really prod at me, but for some reason almost this entire blog does. The controversy this blog always digs up on really minor topics makes me think I'm not the only one. I think what always strikes me in her writing is the lack of any empathy in any of the rants/complaints. When I read credible arguments, I always feel like there's a bit of understanding involved, as in "these people think this, for certain reasons we've actually bothered to explore and will treat fairly, but it turns out this other thing is the case because.." The problem is, if you don't bother to look into the other side of things, you can't have real understanding. I saw nothing in that article as to /why/ google might have done what they did, only some really petulant complaints and vague innuendo about "rogue contractors". I got the same impression from other posts, like where she accused ruby programmers of being "hipsters", because, you know, obviously you can just do everything in C++ so why bother to learn something new?

rdtsc 15y ago
> Usually when I read things that I disagree with it doesn't really prod at me ... I saw nothing in that article as to /why/ google might have done what they did And then from the article: """ but enough people finally cornered them and got them to admit it was about the cost. """ From what I see, you really didn't read the article.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  Of course it was about the cost. The article doesn't mention any reasons why they would have to cut costs, though.
  - zeroboy 15y ago
    No, it's not "of course it's because of the cost" because it could have been for another reason, and (thank God) the article wasn't about why Google would cut back on a perk. If it was, I wouldn't have read it.
wisty 15y ago
Everyone knows Google cut perks to save money. If they'd told people to accept a lower salary, on the basis of the perks being worth 20k, that employee is bound to be pissed when they were taken away. They were part of the salary negotiation - to the author, that's like cutting her wage because the stock numbers were down.
lusr 15y ago
I too find the writing style very distracting, but I can't quite place my finger on what it is exactly. It's very strange, though. That being said, I think the post makes a valuable point that anybody can learn about negotiating: what are they really giving you, did you expect to get that anyway (i.e. is it material to negotiations), can you reasonably claim it's not material even if it IS something special they're offering (I have allergies to about 25% of common foods, so I prepare my own food), can they take it away later, etc.
- zeroboy 15y ago
  Interesting how that is. I thought the writing was particularly good, and I make my living writing for the web.
zeroboy 15y ago
The article isn't about why Google cut costs like free cafeteria food. It's about an employee agreeing to work somewhere that is reputed to be "world class" because they were promised a benefit and then that benefit was taken away.

cleverjake 15y ago

better perks can mean less money. this is not news.

stfu 15y ago
Exactly - bashing a former employer because they took the cookies away is not that much of a breaking news story. If this is really about the money: Didn't we have some time ago a story about women earning less than men just because they don't ask for more? I had read nothing about negotiation, and didn't know what I was doing. They offered a sum which was in fact an improvement over what I had been making seems to me even kind, considering her not mentioning once that she asked for a raise etc.
skore 15y ago
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.
- cleverjake 15y ago
  My mistake, I misread it. Thank you for pointing that out, for myself and others.
- ok_craig 15y ago
  What about that 10% raise the whole company got?
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    Everybody forgot about it. Yea, I guess they won't be doing that again, for all it got 'em.
    - throwaway64 15y ago
      the 10% raise was 5 years after the perks started dissapearing....

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

laserDinosaur 15y ago

STOP THE PRESSES!

veyron 15y ago

The real lesson for employees is to ignore the cash value of the perks when evaluating offers. Perks can be taken away, but cutting salaries is much more controversial.

latch 15y ago
Which is why some sectors treat money as a perk (bonuses). But as much as companies make sure employees understand what a "bonus" is, there's a sense of entitlement and people quit when this years bonus wasn't as big as last years.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Companies try to do the same playing-both-sides there, too, though, which is what causes some of the confusion and ire. On the one hand, it's formally just a perk that isn't guaranteed. But on the other hand, they'll often make claims about what kinds of bonuses you can expect to get -- "baseline 10% is usual" or "we've never given less than a 5% average bonus in the last decade" -- because they want potential employees to consider it as quasi-salary when evaluating the offer.

patio11 15y ago

I'm writing a post on salary negotiation today, so I zeroed in on two supporting details here that you should remember for later: when pressed on price, savvy negotiators said: 1) Give us some time to think about it. 2) We are going to re-focus the discussion on a different compensation lever where we can present something you're already going to get as if it were a new incentive justifying your concession on a lever you're currently interested in. You can do both of these as a job seeker. (For example, if you have extra-curricular interests like many desirable tech employees do, the extra-curricular interests can be used to justify an increase in your compensation vis-a-vis a hypothetical employee who punches out of the Internet at 5 pm. It doesn't particularly matter that you're going to continue blogging and OSS regardless of the outcome of this negotiation, you just frame the discussion such that that becomes newly discovered value which gives the other party something to hang their hat on for getting you that last $10,000.)

dlss 15y ago
Way to put a positive spin on the article :) Don't forget the lesson though -- if you use an extra-curricular in a negotiation it's no longer extra-curricular.
- its_so_on 15y ago
  Nope, still extra-curricular, just like the food is still theirs to make available or take away as they see fit. This is a shady tactic you and the employer can both use. I wouldn't though. let me elaborate. if someone looks me in the eye and says, "Don't forget that we never work weekends, how much is that worth?" then they are not my friend. That's a given, it's part of a 40-hour job not to work weekends. To put a price on it and have me concede part of my salary means they don't have my interests at heart. Now, you might say that negotiators don't have to have the other guy's interests at heart. Then maybe you can read Getting to Yes ("the Harvard principle") or even the old How To Win Friends and Influence People. the toughest negotiators usually end up having no one to talk with but mud with a stick in it. If all you want for an employee is a mud with a stick in it, by all means, harp on about how elephants do not trample around your premises, there are no monsoons in the area, and other employees don't use the outhouse or squat outside to potentially poop on them. But if you want a quality employee, an actual human, then the negotiation that works on mud with a stick in it will not be very compelling. Or honest. Pretty soon you won't be negotiating with another human again.

cluda01 15y ago

You could also use this as a potential lever in discussing future compensation increases. If they claimed perk x was worth $y but now they are scaling it back to $z then $y-z should be put back into your base as you no longer receive the perk.

temphn 15y ago

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.

irahul 15y ago
> Has rachelbythebay ever written a post that is not about bashing Google as evil or all engineers as sexist? Suppose Hitler said exercising is good for health. Now Hitler was one sick son of a bitch, but that has nothing to do with whether exercising is good. May be rachelbythebay holds a grudge against Google, but here she is specifically pointing out negotiators taking free food into account while negotiating, cafes closing down and shortage of food. I don't know about you, but her article sounds pretty genuine to me. That might be because I dislike the "green initiatives." Most of the "green initiatives" are done as a PR move or cost cutting measure, totally disregarding the employees. At an earlier workplace, man, was I pissed when they replaced the urinal flushes with bio cubes. Thankfully, it didn't last long(1 week). Another workplace switched off escalators after 5 in the evening, even though the escalators were the auto on/off model, and didn't consume much power when they weren't actively used. What pissed me off more was when there was some HR conference going on in the same building, the power saving mode wasn't engaged. I remember the conversation with a senior folk: Me: Hey, escalators are working today? Oh, there is a HR conference going up on the 2nd floor, and people need to use it. Me: Has it ever fucking occurred to you that there are engineers working on the 3rd floor, who regularly stay well after 5, and need to use the escalators? Oh, you can use the stairs or the elevator in the other section? Come on, it's not a big deal - we are being green.
Adaptive 15y ago
I don't think I've ever read a post by her previously but I'm looking at her index of posts and at least by title there sure seems to be a lot of variety. Regardless of her previous comments on Google (I don't think sexism is relevant here) I don't think the authorship in this case warrants dismissal. I think your point about 10% salary increase is relevant, but perk-baiting itself is a very important issue that more new hires should be aware of. I've seen this many times in many different industries. Without good advice early on I would have fallen for it myself more than once, I'm sure. So let's not shoot the messenger in this case.

andrewfelix 15y ago

There's a possibility that a lot of un-eaten food was being wasted, so Google cut back to reduce food waste. ie. being green. Lot of conjecture in this article.

Hominem 15y ago

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. Out of concern for our health, they would be eliminating all beverages except water coolers. Then meals were only free for certain people. Then free meals went away. It is easy to eliminate these kinds of perks because many people will be in favor of cost cutting. Not so for salary, not many people will argue in favor of across the board salary cuts. I'll take salary every time.

rdl 15y ago
I would have probably quit sometime between spending limits and a "town hall meeting" about food being worth everyone's time.
- Hominem 15y ago
  It was a funny meeting. The CEO was a hell of a salesman, he came in with a nalgene bottle and made a big show of taking big gulps while touting his new health initiatives that just happened to include cutting a perk. By the time he left people were saying it was a good thing he was so concerned for our health. He did the same speech 5 times in one day to get all the employees, must have been pretty hydrated at the end.
  - mikeklaas 15y ago
    Coke costs all of 25c/can in bulk. Even 10 cans a day is only 2.50
    - matwood 15y ago
      Coke costs all of 25c/can in bulk. Even 10 cans a day is only 2.50 Yep, and it baffles me when companies miss the forest through the trees and cut something like sodas. In the scheme of what a fully loaded engineer costs the company, even 10 cans of soda/day is minuscule (~$625/year). As companies get bigger the same thing always seem to happen. The bean counters see the large costs of providing free X to thousands of people and/or people who work there start taking advantage of the situation (bring home a 12 pack of soda each day for all their roommates). No matter how cool the company claims to be, this seems to eventually happen to all large companies past a certain size.

linuxhansl 15y ago

The most important rule of salary negotiation: Always let them make an offer first. If you're lucky it's higher than what you would have proposed, so you'll just accept it. If it's lower you just continue to negotiate.

sown 15y ago
I've heard that tactic before, and it's a good one. However, how do you force them to give you a number first? The only tactic I can think of is to say 'give me market rates'. One time, they just kept pressing for more and more of a number until I blurted out something. In this case it was $80k, in a Rocky Mountain state, in 2004, fresh out of college. I don't think it worked in my favor.
jmonegro 15y ago
Also, if you're somehow pressured into making the first offer, aim high and let them negotiate down from there.
notaddicted 15y ago
I think psychologically, it is better to be the one to blurt out the first number in order to take advantage of Anchoring Bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring). BUT, I think that this only applies when you have good knowledge about their salary range, or at least the market range, because you can start the conversation at the top of the range instead of the bottom. Discreetly trading salary data with a few friends can be quite beneficial I think.
jwegan 15y ago
This is the exact opposite of how to successfully negotiate. Maybe if your not confident in your worth, some company might offer you more than you would have suggested. However, the art to successful negotiation is to make a first offer on the high end of what is realistic so you can set an anchor point which limits how far the company can reasonably negotiate you down.

molmalo 15y ago

At the end: Or, worse, they'll assign blame to "rogue contractors" and say it was never their policy to do that. Right. Now where have we heard that before? Rogue contractors? I may be wrong, but... Is she implying that (in her personal opinion), Google knew and instructed them about OpenStreetMap sabotage? That's controversial at least. Edit: I mean, I'm not defending anyone, but without proofs, I think that's a very harsh sentence.

earl 15y ago
Not really. Look at google + mocality: it's easy to understand why the contractors where doing what they were: it helped them sell something or hit quota. Compare to Google contractors + open street map: what incentive does a contractor have to go screw up their data? In the first case I see directly why unethical people would do what they did. What exactly is the motive here? Just griefing? It makes me wonder.

_shane 15y ago

The author complains that she was dissatisfied with her offer six years prior but took the job anyway. Then it turns into a rant about how she was robbed of her entitlements. "But what happens when the economy improves? Those wounds will never heal. Anyone with half a brain will say "hey, these guys are evil!" and will bail for greener pastures." Because they don't have bagels in the microkitchen Google is evil? As someone who works at Google, I can assure you that the microkitchens are overflowing with drinks, snacks, fruits, coffees, and candies, The cafeterias are plentiful(24 in mountain view alone) and the food is incredibly delicious, even for a foodie like myself. Plus, the pay is very competitive. The author must not have stuck around for this: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-11-09/tech/30024423_1_google-ceo-googlers-eric-schmidt http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-11-09/tech/30024423... It's unfortunate that her experience didn't end well, but this article comes across as hyperbolic and catty.

neilk 15y ago
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 creep me out a little. I worry about it warping my mind too much. One day during my time at Google, I was in a grocery store and felt mild outrage at the thought that they were going to charge me for food. Once you're used to a perk, it's another fishhook the company has embedded into your flesh.
- copper 15y ago
  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.
  - 15y ago

jcampbell1 15y ago

It is amusing that Google offers "free lunches". I wonder how many compensation discussions include the quip, "there is no such thing as a free lunch". Just out of curiosity, does Google gross up salaries for tax purposes? I really think the IRS needs to crack down on companies using excessive perks as non-taxable compensation. If Google is using the perks to justify a "lower but equivalent salary" then they should be paying taxes on the non-cash compensation. If they are not, then Google is taking advantage of a shady tax dodge.

craigmccaskill 15y ago
My wife works at Google. We both live in San Jose, and she frequently gets the shuttle to work in the Mountain View office. For tax reasons, I'm not allowed to get the shuttle with her to or from work, so I'm pretty sure that some if not all perks are offset somehow. Various things like the holiday gift (this year it was a galaxy nexus) are also offset for tax on your payslip. Net it works out at zero to you, as Google puts extra money into your paycheque to cover the extra tax charge.
- patio11 15y ago
  Allowing non-employees on company transportation would threaten to make furnishing the transportation to employees a taxable event. See the same link that I posted on a sibling comment about food, just search for "transportation".
patio11 15y ago
I am not Google's tax accountant, but the meals are not compensation based on the IRS' published guidelines. http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html#en_US_2011_publink1000193705 http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html#en_US_2011_pu... Tax tip going way back to Learned Hand: you don't have to feel guilty about structuring your affairs to take advantage of every legitimate opportunity to decrease your tax burden. Here's a related example: US tax law allows you to deduct 50% of meals incurred on business trips. I travel internationally for a significant portion of every year, on business trips. There are two ways to calculate how much you spend on meals: 1) Actual cost 2) An approximation method which takes a per-diem rate supplied by the US government based on your location and adds one or two wrinkles not relevant here. Either is acceptable to the IRS. I keep appropriate records of business expenses, so running both the exact cost and the approximation method was trivial. The approximation overstates my actual cost on meals by several thousand dollars -- using it as the basis for my deduction saves me about a thousand bucks. That's totally kosher. P.S. You know those beating-the-system-is-worth-bonus-points neuroreceptors that most of us hackers have? Doing taxes gives you the opportunity for that sort of thing in spades. (Though I'd probably still suggest getting someone competent to do yours -- advice which I will be taking for myself from next year on.)

wonnage 15y ago

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 over 4+ years is comparable to the additional options' value. Sure, perks can make the work environment nicer. I'll take that into consideration given competing offers. But it seems silly to attempt to fix a monetary value on these things that the company has no contractual requirement to fulfill.

tzs 15y ago
> Why bother calculating "effective salary"? Personally, anything that isn't cold, hard cash I view as tangential to my compensation During the work week, I typically grab breakfast on the way to work ($5.10 at McDonalds, plus $1.25 for a drink out of the vending machine at work). If I have lunch, it might be Subway (around $7). Maybe dinner from Wendy's ($7). Toss in a snack somewhere in there and I'm at over $20/day. If work provided acceptable free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that would save me $5000/year. That seems big enough to me to not ignore when comparing jobs.
- wonnage 15y ago
  And if the company isn't doing so hot? It's a lot more trouble to lower salaries than it is to cut food. Hence I'd rather not sit down and assume I'm making $5000 more. Plus it puts you in the position of feeling like you need to make 100% use of your perks, or you're getting shortchanged. After all, you're not really gaining $5000 in value, if you don't eat all your meals at the office. Or take advantage of every company-sponsored event. Unnecessarily fixing values to things is a stressful way to live. Slightly off-topic, I rather like the opportunity to get out of the office to eat lunch. That's a perk in and of itself (for me, at least). How would you value that? I could argue that it's worth the hour we spent eating out, which is surely more than the value of some catered food (unless it's some seriously fancy stuff). And you could argue back that since I'm salaried, it doesn't count... In any case, it's just not a worthwhile endeavor for me to try and conjure up numbers, when I can just reap the emotional value instead.

jayzalowitz 15y ago

Came here to say this... as a former google intern... if this was your reasoning for hating google, you weren't right google in the first place.

hackinthebochs 15y ago
No true scotsman rears its ugly head. So because she actually cares to be fairly compensated, she's not right for Google? I think that says more about Google than her.
- jayzalowitz 15y ago
  I meant that she wasnt in it to make cool shit, I am at my current job because I like what my company is doing, the money dosen't mattter.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Pretty much spot on of course, anyone who was at Google 'before' can trace the dots to today. One of the benefits of a generous set of perks is that management can adjust the expense once they get close to the end of the quarter so that the 'numbers come out right.' Google is losing that ability. It makes things like their Q4 'miss' [1] more likely. It is of course entirely Google's prerogative on how they spend their money. And if you look at their Q4 results [2] they deposited 2.97 billion dollars into the bank in cash based on the work done by their 32,467 employees. That is $91,477 in cash for the 90 days that ended December 31st. Lets say every employee ate 3 gourmet meals a day, at a cost of $15+$25+$50 or $90, and consumed another $25 in snacks so $115 per employee per day. (and those are gonna be some fat employees!) That is 32,467 x $115 x 90 days or $335 million dollars. Or about 11 cents of each dollar they dropped into the bank. The numbers of course reflect the costs that a typical restaurant would charge that was profitable, and $25 a day in snacks? That is probably way beyond what most anyone would eat so these numbers are way over if anything. But at some point between the original prospectus where Larry and Sergei told potential investors that they were going to spend a lot on perks like this so get used to it; to today, where sometimes elaborate explanations about social consciousness and environmental justice precede the denial of those perks. Someone decided the company's interest was to build a cash pile, not invest in quality of life benefits for the rank and file. Sad really, they are the kind of company that can afford to do it, and now they choose not to. So much for being different. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/technology/googles-strong-results-less-than-expected.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/technology/googles-strong-... [2] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q4_google_earnings.html http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q4_google_earnings....

nostrademons 15y ago
Google's Q4 miss had nothing to do with perks. They could eliminate all the perks and it wouldn't have made a dent in stock performance. The earnings miss was by about $1/share, or $323M. That's about $10K per employee over the quarter. You really think Google spends $10K/employee/quarter on perks? I've heard numbers for the food costs, and you're overestimating by more than an order of magnitude. I actually think perks today are significantly better than they were when I joined in Jan 2009. Cafes are open on weekends. There's more than one option for Friday dinner. They booked the whole Oracle Arena and took us all to see Cirque du Soleil. Cake played at Googleween. Random speakers like Sandra Day O'Connor, Lady Gaga, Carlos Santana, George R.R. Martin, and Bear McCreary show up for talks. We get random schwag more often.

jayseattle 15y ago

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 6.3 Good luck Engineers!

hurray 15y ago

Scroll to the bottom for the best comment of the lot.

ajays 15y ago

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.

Hominem 15y ago
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.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  They can "want you at your desk". In most of the US, you're entitled, by law, to a lunch break of at least 30 minutes. You can thank unions for that.
rdtsc 15y ago
> 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 becomes s question of quality. It is one thing to offer free steaks at lunch (a real perk) vs offering beans and rice every day. [just using it to illustrate a point, not saying Google is serving rice and beans only]. The goal of Google is to present how they have very high quality food during interview then start scaling down the quality (and cost) until employees will still feel like driving is a hassle but now a meal is $10 vs $30. In the end however they lose with this strategy. The people working there can read between the lines. Google might end up with better end-of-quarter bottom line, but in the long long run they will be shooting themselves in the foot.

georgieporgie 15y ago

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?

ngokevin 15y ago
"you're lucky you even have a job!"
webdev42 15y ago
I've worked at Google for almost four years and found this hilarious. "The Friday morning bagel or donut supplies also were curtailed. Sure, they still existed, but you now had to go hunt for them. They were no longer set up in a microkitchen near your office. They would now appear only in certain cafes." – The same donuts and bagels are still at Google. You have to walk an extra 30 feet to the cafe to get them. Oh, and I'd take the 10% raise – which was more like a 15-20% raise after all was said and done, based on total compensation + bonus factored in – over 30 feet of additional bagel proximity any day.
- nostrademons 15y ago
  Sometimes I feel like the vast majority of annoyances I face at work should have a #firstworldproblems hashtag on them. I remember, I joined in Jan 2009 at the bottom of the recession, which was basically around the same time that all these perks were being cut. And people at work would gripe all about how the microkitchens weren't as good and they discontinued tea time and the cafes were closed on weekends. And then I'd go home to my two roommates, one of whom worked at EMC, and she would be like "We laid off 15% of the company today. I still have a job. I have to do the work of two additional people, but I still have a job."
  - kelnos 15y ago
    I absolutely despise this kind of thinking. The whole "firstworldproblems" meme pisses me off. You can extend this to anything. "People in Country X are starving so it's lame of me to complain about my 2-hour commute." "Children are being beaten in Country Y so I feel bad complaining about working on the weekend once a month." Ok, I'll even pull away from the hyperbole: "my friend Bob got laid off, so I shouldn't complain about working 14-hour days because at least I have a job". Yes, you absolutely should complain. I just don't buy any of this. If I'm unhappy about something, then I'm unhappy about something. The tsunami that destroyed the lives of thousands of people in Country Z, while tragic, doesn't make my grievances any less valid. It's like a new form of Godwin's Law. Any complaint can be dismissed as trivial by claiming it's a "first world problem". If you want to feel institutional guilt because many people in the world have it worse than you, fine. I'm not going to play that game. (General "you", here. Nostrademons, I'm not pointing specifically at you, just at the general pain this sort of thinking gives me.)

deleted 15y ago

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stretchwithme 15y ago

The whole idea of free food is not good. I'd prefer to have a wide variety of the highest quality food and pay something reasonable for it. I really don't want an incentive to maximize my consumption of food. What matters is how much you enjoy what you do it and being as healthy as you can be. Caffe Macs at Apple does it well. The healthiest options are clearly subsidized, and desserts are not.

MattLaroche 15y ago

One thing this article doesn't point out: it wasn't Google who argued that the supposedly lower salary was offset by food - it was a person (sure, an employee or contractor of Google). Perhaps this person was reading from a recruiting script sanctioned by management. But it wasn't the big overarching company that made this argument to the author - it was a person. Recruiters often have the wrong incentive structure. They have numbers to hit - and so they use classic high pressure tactics (exploding offers, "accept the offer now" durring the offer, misinformation, tricks) to convince people to accept. It's unfortunate that the recruiter's goals don't line up with the applicant's, but it's true. How one fixes that isn't obvious to me tonight. I also hate the victim mentality when an employee no longer feels like they're getting what they want from their employer. If you don't like what you're getting, if the economic transaction is no longer acceptable, leave. (I respect employment laws, I think everyone should treat each other, I don't condone abusive behavior or manipulation) Employees aren't victims trapped by evil employers, they're participants in an economic transaction. If the transaction is no longer as profitable as one at another company, then that doesn't make the employer bad or wrong, it's simply time to move on. (I worked at Google for 5 years, I left in April 2011. And when I went back for lunch one day in November with former coworkers, I had the best meal I'd had since I left.)

bigiain 15y ago
"One thing this article doesn't point out: it wasn't Google who argued that the supposedly lower salary was offset by food - it was a person (sure, an employee or contractor of Google)." I'm really intrigued at how often this "excuse" is trotted out, almost word-for-word, whenever "a person who works at Google" gets caught doing something sleazy. It's almost as predictable as the first-line call center staff asking you if you've re-booted Windows. In my more suspicious moments, I wonder what the "Google aren't evil, it's just some people who _work_ for Google that do evil shit" apologists are going to say when "the script" they're all reading out of gets posted to PasteBin - complete with Page or Brin or Schimdt's signature at the bottom? Surely if "do no evil" were and overriding company policy from the top down, "people who work for Google" would knw not do try and pull shit like this?
- 15y ago

philwelch 15y ago

This is the second post from this blog I've had the displeasure of reading on HN, and both of them make this person seem to be a congenital malcontent.

omonra 15y ago
I think this post sums it up: http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/15/bofh/ http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/01/15/bofh/

moocow01 15y ago

Maybe Im just a calculating, cold, emotionless engineer but when it comes to pay packages Ive stopped caring about the fancy 'perks'. I only try to gauge how much Ill get paid, how much Ill enjoy the work and learn, and how many hours Ill be putting in. Ive seen perks too many times used against employees. (The following rant is nothing towards Google - never worked there.) - Free food and onsite amenities usually is a sign that they want you there for extra long hours and that you'll probably need to use that stuff. - Unrestricted vacation days can mean you don't really get any vacation because its always crunch time. - Fancy employee outings are not so thrilling to me - I like my coworkers but I already spend the majority of my waking hours with them. I'm not trying to completely debase the value of these things - I'm just saying that in terms of negotiating salary I weight these types of perks at 0 or negative dollars.

tomjen3 15y ago
I get free breakfast and lunch which combined with living alone means I don't have to cook -- so I note that down as a saving of about an hour a day.
vidarh 15y ago
Same here - perks are stuff I expect to come on top of the salary I ask for. If they try to make the perks an excuse to offer me less, I'll turn around and ask them to rather drop the perks and pay me more, or I'll go somewhere else. It actually turns me off a company if they offer unusually large perks, as they do need to claw the money back somewhere, and usually it will be salaries, and the reason companies use perks is because employees on average tends to be really bad at judging their actual monetary value.
mjwalshe 15y ago
And dont forget that the Taxman will want to tax you on benefits in kind - or they will be if they are doing their job right
- mdkess 15y ago
  You don't get taxed on free food at work.

basman 15y ago

I found it interesting that their claimed value of 15-20k a year went unquestioned. At ~300 days a year, that's $60 a day. I'd value free food at a quarter of that at most.

zackattack 15y ago
I dunno; with inflation, it seems that I can easily spend $10 per meal. Maybe $15, and if I eat generous portions, $20. Seriously-- in San Francisco, it's not unreasonable to expect someone to spend $20 for a meal. Now consider all the extra convenience fees... $60/day (or $50/day) is not unreasonable. Of course, since it's a corporate perk, it should get a discount rate applied... but all the same, it's still valuable: more than $15/day (come on, dude: $5 a meal? Get real, or move away from North Dakota).

amirf 15y ago

This reminds me a lot of one company I worked for. While I can understand cutting costs when the economy is bad, his last question hits the spot: "But what happens when the economy improves?"

duncanj 15y ago
When the economy improves and they have trouble finding employees they pay junior employees more than senior employees.

noonespecial 15y ago

Google claims to want to hire smart people. Google claims to these ostensibly smart people during the hiring process that the 'free food' is worth (cough) 20 grand in salary?! I sense a disturbance in the force.

mjwalshe 15y ago
And if that perk then goes away - a smart person would have this in writing. So boss wheres my pay rise to replace the free food "hr said" the free food was part of my compensation
- brown9-2 15y ago
  Not sure that would work in the situation as Rachel described since the free food was still there, just with decreased availability and ubiquitousness.
  - mikeash 15y ago
    That would depend entirely on the specifics of how the contract was written to include the food. If it just said generic food, sure. If it specified a monetary value, then I think she'd have a case.
- noonespecial 15y ago
  Any person smart enough to clear all of the brain teasers in order to get to that point should be far well able to do the final one that starts "an engineer is given free food at work in lieu of $X salary, calculate the value of X at which this is a fair deal..." My point was that X=$20k doesn't even come close to passing the sniff test. Its absurd.
knarf_navillus 15y ago
Another problem with it is that food isn't as liquid as cash. I can't buy a car with their food. I can't buy a TV with their food. I can't even buy groceries with their food. Presumably, yes, I am going to have to buy some food anyway. However, perhaps I would prefer to buy something cheaper, and use the money for something else. Or, perhaps I would prefer to buy something more expensive, and not have to worry that I've already paid for Google's food on top of it. Or perhaps I just want something different. Saying, "We're going to convert $X of your salary to an equivalent value of our food" robs you of choice. I'd want a deep, deep discount in exchange. At least 50%. And no, I wouldn't accept an inflated number like $20k just so they could discount it to $10k. And yes, I'd get this perk in writing, including availability hours.

notaddicted 15y ago

Employment isn't a transaction, it is a relationship. If one is not being paid enough nothing prevents revisiting the discussion. Having said that, I don't see a lot of advice on the topic online. Obviously after spending some time at a company you have a better idea of what the talent level is like and where the money goes, so you should be able to negotiate better with the extra information, and the history of what you've done.

egfx 15y ago

My only comment after reading this story. Is he seriously complaining about having to walk around and hunt for food, (donuts) rather then finding it in a kitchen next to his desk? If that's the case I would be complaining about the lack of a good gym at Google instead.

cromwellian 15y ago

I read a previous article by her about no one being able to like Apple products after Android and decided she has a totally warped view of reality. I was there when they handed out Android phones. I still use an iPhone. Many Google employees use iPhones. No one has ever given me crap about it, and I haven't seen anyone look at anyone funny in any way. I mean, Google gives MacBook Airs/MacBook Pros to every employee for christsakes. And if you want to know how the recruiters talk you into accepting a lower salary, it isn't the value of the food, it's the value of Google's bonuses. Google HR talks to you about "Total Compensation" and the dollar value of the food is not (AFAIK) part of this discussion. Personally for me, I have no complains about my salary, but the real reason I decided to work for Google was the chance to work on world class infrastructure with access to an incredible pool of talented people, plus the culture. Google is the only large corporation I've worked at (and I've worked at others like IBM and Oracle), that didn't feel so much like a suffocating bureaucracy, and whose employees generally care about trying to do the right thing, and care about openness and honesty. You've all no doubt seen the Steve Yegge rant. That's par for the course on Google internal mailing lists, and I like the fact that people challenge management frequently with rants like this.

yellowbkpk 15y ago
This is a good point. I've also worked at huge behemoths before, and I wish there had been internal mailing lists to rant on. The bureaucratic walls around innovation and product release were so tall that a healthy release of those frustrations would have been nice. It's good to see that Google's employees have something to complain about, but more importantly that they actually complain about it.
- ryanmolden 15y ago
  There is a danger with internal lists and rants, they are subject to discovery on lawsuits afaik (IANAL), so things have a tendency to not stay internal over time. Google may not have been bitten by this yet, but I imagine it is only a matter of time.
  - 15y ago

ryguytilidie 15y ago

I have worked at both Google and Facebook and this was an annoyance for everyone. People would come into the job and be promised the normal salary+benefits and then be told about the unlimited Odwalla and Aldale being open all day and how the food is amazing and then suddenly the most profitable companies in the world "realize" that these things are expensive, cut back, and expect something other than to have their world class employees go somewhere where they are treated a bit better. I will never understand not continuously investing in your employees, especially at the best companies on earth.

jaggederest 15y ago

I always think it's interesting when companies try to negotiate compensation by perks... They're basically giving away more cash. "Well our health benefits are worth $15,000 a year, you know. It's a very good plan." My answer is always "Wow, I didn't know you guys thought I was worth X+$15,000, I'll take that in cash, thanks." My health plan is comparable and costs me $200 a month + $1500 a year in deductibles, tax free.

daintynews 15y ago

So I multiplied the $30/day by the 9,600 employees in Mountain View and New York by the 251 days Google is open every year. Remember that Google probably spends a lot more than this, because there are employees outside those offices, and because visitors are there all the time eating. The grand total: By our guesstimate, Larry and Sergey are spending at least $72,288,000 per year to fill their workers' pie-holes. How can they afford to do that? Easy, of course: Last year Google (GOOG) earned $4.2 billion.

mattmillr 15y ago
You seem to have just lifted your comment directly from this 2008 Business Insider article and changed "we" to "I." But you missed the "our" in the second paragraph. http://articles.businessinsider.com/2008-04-23/tech/30027421_1_google-china-larry-and-sergey-employees http://articles.businessinsider.com/2008-04-23/tech/30027421...

jergosh 15y ago

$15k / 250 business days, that would be $60 per day AND they would get the food at much lower prices then you do when you sit in a restaurant. Really? If it was a random company that kind of BS would put me off working there big time.

knarf_navillus 15y ago
"The meals are worth $15,000." Simple response: "They're not worth that much to me, I'm afraid."

anil_mamede 15y ago

I wish the company I work would offer me free meals. Not only free meals but an infrastructure and environment where I could spend more time in my intellectual growth and personal achieviements. Of course all this requires an huge investment not only in buildings but in human resources (someone has to do the dirty work). If some company offered me free food, nice, clean and complete bathrooms, restrooms, libraries, lockers, an office arranged in manner where I could work without any disturb in trade of less but still acceptable salary I would accept it. If they cut me on sallary I would not mind but if they took me the free food completely I would be pissed off.

logn 15y ago

ITT an ex-google employee complains about google cutting some on-campus cafe hours and morning bagels/donuts being more difficult to find. Complains that during the job offer they mentioned food as a perk. Yawn.

steve8918 15y ago

I was at Google's campus last month for lunch. The food is better quality than a Las Vegas buffet with all the trimmings, except it's all free. The author complaining about Google being "evil" for cutting back or "screwing the employee" is so incredibly ridiculous and so self-entitled it sickens me. It's like someone complaining that the company used to drop free $100 bills on the ground, but now they're only dropping $50s. The employees were "WOUNDED" because they closed a few locations, or they had to wander an extra 30 ft for donuts? For F*CK'S sake get a grip! The food there is pretty damn good and if you don't like it, there's something wrong with you, not Google. Too bad they closed a couple of locations and you have to walk an extra 30 seconds or be in line an extra 2 mins. IT'S FREE FOOD AND IT'S GOOD.

deleted 15y ago
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- steve8918 15y ago
  The first part of the post is talking about a mistake the author made thinking that salary was worth $20,000. It's a mistake many young people make, and it's a mistake they only make once. I made the same mistake as well, but it was with respect to options. However, the rest of the article was a mindless, self-entitled rant about how evil Google was for daring to change how the food was served. "Those wounds will never heal. Anyone with half a brain will say "hey, these guys are evil!" and will bail for greener pastures." Keep in mind, Google food is still free and still high quality. All they did was consolidate the locations and maybe change the total types of food. And for this employees were "wounded" and Google was "evil"? The food is still free, it's still very much a Las Vegas buffet not slop served in a trough. You just maybe have to walk further!!! It's ridiculous!
j_baker 15y ago
Fair enough, but what if said company convinced you to take a lower salary because the company was always dropping $100 bills? Cutting back there would effectively be a salary cut, and you would have a right to be upset. I think the real issue is that the author's recruiter was unscrupulous and willing to take advantage of someone who wasn't skilled at the whole negotiating thing.

kamaal 15y ago

Organisation must focus on paying people well and then they must just leave people on their own. We are clever enough to know how to figure out what to do with our money. We can buy our own food, snacks and ice cream if we want to. Instead, every company that I've seen so far seems to come up with every possible reason to pay people as little as they can. Generally its like this, "Hey we are giving you x,y,z perks and you sit around in a beautiful office so the peanuts we pay is sufficient, now get back to work and slog for us until your bones hurt." Companies know damn well, that not everyone is eating these Ice creams, drinking coffee of eating stomach full everyday. And not everyone is taking the free transport. Some will, not all. On an average they pay every body less for these reasons, and the money they save by not paying in cash but by perks is often huge. Salary offers are the most fraudulent documents. Minus taxes, and some other 'hidden' deductions which always exist. Because most companies have a component of salary with string attached. What you get in hand is always close to 50% of what is promised on paper. This is every where, no matter which company you will every work at.

funkah 15y ago

Wow, no thanks. I'd prefer they skip the bi-weekly trip to Whole Foods and I'll keep the $20k.

jxcole 15y ago

Negotiator: Our free lunch costs us about 15 to 20k per year per employee, so add at least 15k to our offer to find it's true value. Me: If I were left to my own devices I would make myself a PB and J sandwich and have an apple every day. That comes down to about $2 a day for lunch. So there's 365 days in a year, take away about 104 for weekends, and you are left with about 261 free lunches a year. Hence to me the free lunch is only worth about $522. Just so you know, that's not a lot of money. Fun fact: It doesn't actually matter if you really would have PB&J every day.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago

Kind of a first-world problem. A lot is made of a company 'culture', and frequently perks are pointed out. Well, sorry, culture is what is left when the chips are down, the perks are gone, and its time to work your way out of the hole. At Google, as the article said, when perks dried up folks left. Those folks were never part of their culture, they were what's known as freeloaders. So why not be a freeloader? I don't know, I just feel kind of sticky when I find myself in that position. I would much rather be part of a small company, doing whatever it takes to be successful because its MY company.

napierzaza 15y ago

It's an advertised perk so sure. Just like they might convince you to work somewhere because it's more geographically convenient for you or it has a day care. It offers better quality of life in lieu of cash money. I know cash is what most americans want. They want it over better health care or fairer lifestyle. But some people just want to live more comfortably instead of being able to tell people how many "figures" they make. As for the cuts, maybe they decided to be more "honest" and cut that program and just give new hires more money?

resnamen 15y ago

This is SOP for negotiation. Candidates do this shit too, trying to claim some sort of inflated salary boost for every thing they give up from their previous employer. It's a game and the lesser negotiator loses out.