Hacker News Reader

Comment by evmar | Hacker News Reader

Man, I remember* getting "coffee encrusted filet mingon with a vanilla glaze" at Charlie's back around this time, and thinking both "this is amazing" and also "this can never last". Also I remember many years later when they were instead serving stuff like hot dogs. RIP the good times!

* likely corrupted by memory's distance

View on HN

It's weird to see so much ink spilled about free food at Google, which is, in monetary terms, a pretty trivial perk. Compared to things like their generous 401(k) match, many 401(k) contribution options (pre-tax, Roth, after-tax), their health plan which includes an HSA that gets seeded with a chunk of free money each year, tuition reimbursement, and so on which probably adds up to an order of magnitude more dollar value than some coffee-encrusted meat. Yet, everyone talks about the food, maybe just because it's an unusual perk.

HSA seeded with money is indeed amazing. I learned recently that HSA’s benefit from a triple tax advantage: the money goes in pretax, the money is withdrawn without tax, and any investment gains are tax free. Which - if you’re willing to do the paperwork - means you can just save the HSA money forever and pay yourself back out of it when you retire to cover medical expenses you previously incurred.

I never understood the food thing, to me it comes with the implication of them wanting you to stick around longer. Not inherently a bad thing, but there's definitely companies that I've interviewed for that told me up front that I was expected to work 10-12 hours and they would provide free meals to cover those hours, as if it was even remotely making up for it.

AFAICT the free food didn't really contribute to people staying longer. The campus was often a ghost town by 4PM and one of the common complaints was people filling up multiple takeout containers with tasty meats ... to bring home to their family!

For me it just meant I was more likely to eat when I needed to, like right after a 45-minute commute.

When I was there I heard stories from other parts of the company where the workers felt like they were obliged to stay until after their boss left (and the boss would leave at 7PM or something). I didn't really understand but later I found out a lot of people felt trapped by the visa system.

When I worked at google I typically would show up pretty early, and leave pretty early. Over 10 years I don't think any manager ever commented about my hours. Note: I could typically choose "good" managers and I knew to stay away from Android, Nest, and parts of Cloud.

It depends. As an intern, working an extra hour to get free dinner and a bus ride home was absolutely worth it. But it's not as if they were forcing people to stay (for either the work or the food). My experience was that people with families generally didn't stay, which absolutely makes sense given their different priorities and life situation.

These kinds of things are a canary in the coal mine indicating an overall tone of the company that reflects through more tangible benefits and culture.

> "this is amazing" and also "this can never last". A

I think a lot of people seem to want to tie these things to greater tech industry trends but I don't think it applies (people that claim x, y z was a ZIRP etc).

I feel like that ignores the fact that most companies were never this generous! I never even got bananas at my last company!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com