As for brilliant colleagues: that could be good or bad depending on whether you get along with them. Sometimes it's better to be the brightest person in the room.
Well, all the people I've ever worked with need to eat.
If food is provided free (and it's edible), this seems like a perk with a direct measurable benefit.
And besides, if the perks are outstanding enough, what is wrong with taking a job where the work isn't the most important factor in your choice to be there? For many, jobs are just a means to provide for their needs and wants in life. Not a place to spend their creative energy or brain power. They save those for the rest of their more enjoyable life activities.
Note: I personally have to work at a place where the work is interesting or I'll go nuts. Work is important to me and is a form of expression. But it's not like that for everyone.
By providing a meal worth, Google can get atleast 1-2 hours extra work hours from an employee.
Any company that emphasizes how long the employees are working in this industry is clearly misguided.
The correct goal should be how much is the employee accomplishing, not how long his ass is stuck in that seat.
Complicating matters is the fact that the company wants to provide benefits that provide greater utility to the employee than the cost to the company, but smart employees will take that into account.
Different kinds of expenses (benefits and salaries are expenses) have different tax consequences. Things that are on the pay stub may be taxed differently than things that aren't but I don't think that you're going there.
Are you thinking that telling employees "here's how much I'm spending on you that doesn't appear on your pay-stub" is going to have some effect? If so, I suspect that you're about to learn that some folks would rather have that money in their paycheck and that most will tune you out.
Offering benefits allows both companies and employees to agree on a lower cash salary; it's in the company's interest to provide benefits that have a large perceived value for minimum cost, whereas it's in the employee's best interest to only offset his desired salary by no more than the amount that the benefit would cost him were he to purchase it individually.
Many times, even in a down economy, these things are truly offered as perks to try to lure good employees away from other jobs. Often times you can only go so far with pure salary because if you start to get compensation packages that are too much above "market" then you get many questions from your board and stockholders. But, paying a 5% premium over market salary AND offering perks like freebies, you can attract good candidates without making your direct headcount numbers look so high.
I would be careful with the declarative statements. My direct experience is quite different:
Company U: late 90's/early 2K's startup. Free food was selected primarily on the basis of the cheapest stuff we could get for $1000/mo at the local discount club. If $50 steaks would have made developers work 24/7 they would have still been outside of the budget.
Company H: Selection primarily based on what employees asked the Kitchen managers to stock. If you wanted free-range organic tofu breakfast bars, you got them (provided the price was at least semi-reasonable).
Company S: (My wife is the director of finance here, I know enough about the selection criteria although I've never been a direct employee) Primarily cost/budget driven as well.
None of my experiences have ever involved people who consciously plot after-hours retention ratios of various foods. It has pretty much always been a recognition along the lines of "if people want to stay at work, it's cheaper to feed them than pay them to make them feel valued". No one had ever been coerced into working more just because of these kinds of perks.
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BTW, to the comment below (HN seems to limit the level of replys), I just came across some unused TicketMaster gift certificates this weekend from another company. There was a monthly raffle for these tickets and other "out of the office" local goings-on...
I don't think all of Google's perks are evil, either. Certainly a free lunch is a great perk, and reasonable, since you will be at the office over a lunch hour. Heck, I usually eat at my desk when I'm in the office. But when the perks begin to replace things I would do outside of the office, then I begin to wonder if it isn't an attempt to keep workers at the office for longer hours.
The best perk for me would be management that set reasonable time lines and clear requirements for projects that didn't require engineering and QC to spend long hours in the office.
If people leave for lunch, they'll almost take longer lunch hours. I would appreciate an on-site cafeteria right now, primarily _because_ it would keep the length of my lunches down and make things more convenient. This role is often filled by the McDonald's a couple hundred feet in front of our office now, which is terrible and sad.
Also, I disagree about a cafeteria milking an extra hour out of employees. It's entirely fair to give them so many hours per day and reap the benefits of them stacking the time together more efficiently for both of us. In other words, barring some other commitment I have no problem going home after 8 hours of work, even if that's at 4:00 instead of 5:00. Negotiating that with your boss is orthogonal to where you go to lunch and who pays for it.
The reality: it's way too easy to overindulge, and over time, it's less that they're giving you food and more like they're taking away your independence.
As for your other point, it's good to have a variety in your career -- sometimes, be the smartest guy in the room, other times, the dumbest.
At Google, sometimes you find youself in a group of brilliant but egoless developers who rapidly come to a consensus based on fact and experiment. And the other half of the time, you will be in a room of people who all think they are the smartest person there and spend all day picking apart the proposals of their colleagues.
You need to get out more. Having sampled the wares at Google I can assure you that a wider variety of better food is available within a 30 minute drive of the googleplex if you were actually hungry for a good meal (perhaps not for lunch, but definitely for dinner.) Jeez, you are a 5 minute drive from Chez TJ and you would dare to make a statement like that? :)
I've had pretty fancy meals here and there in the peninsula and South Bay but the experience was that we paid a lot for well-plated tiny morsels. Never been to this Chez TJ but from the website I suspect it's something like that.
I used to live in Vancouver and there were far more options for interesting, delicious, satisfying food, and you didn't have to be a millionaire to afford it. It's always mystified me why the valley is so bland, given the amount of money available. I wonder if the valley literally attracts blandness. I've had Indian engineers recommend Amber India to me, which is sweetened de-spiced Indian cuisine, about as authentic as "American" Chinese food.
Of course I've had way better meals that Google's cafeterias. But if you compare Google to the fare that's available to a person of reasonable means in downtown Mountain View for breakfast or lunch, Google does very well. Or at least they used to (I have not been there since 2006).
Strange. I have had Amber recommended to me by people visiting from India, first and second-generation Indian-Americans, English ex-pats from London (whose home town has the best Indian restaurants in the world) and by just about every guidebook, rating service, and newspaper review that has covered them. The outlier here is you.
If you know a Googler - and most people in the Bay Area do - they can bring you in as a visitor. I've taken both my roommates to dinner, and am taking my sister and her boyfriend to lunch next week. Many of my non-Googler friends here have already had at least one meal at the Googleplex.
I agree with the sibling poster though - it's really nothing special compared to some of the restaurants in the area. Yeah, for free food it's great, but if you're willing to pay for restaurant food, you can get way better.