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Pizzatime: Throw a pizza party for your remote team
- mhardcastle 5y agoA friend used this service to try to have a pizza party for a small cohort of graduating Master's students, and said that one pizza came hours early and the rest never arrived.
- basedgod 5y agofrom the FAQ: "I have a complaint about my pizza. No." This seems like the kind of service where if your pizza arrives at all it's by the grace of God, let alone getting there at the right time or being the right order. Gr8 customer service
- maxwelldone 5y agoI don't consider myself old so not sure if this kind of answer appeals to a particular demographic but it doesn't induce any confidence in their service. Playful stance is ok as long as it covers fundamental questions but a business should err on the side of caution. Maybe I am old.
- rvnx 5y agoIt makes more sense for everyone to handout Uber vouchers ( https://www.uber.com/us/en/business/products/vouchers/ https://www.uber.com/us/en/business/products/vouchers/ ) The fees are insanely high and the coverage is worldwide, so it means that their smart AI "magic Pizza Bots" ordering is actually probably an underpaid student doing manual work. Again a scam to bait investors. Well played.
- elil17 5y agoWhat is the point of this service if they don’t actually ensure the pizza arrives on time with no problems?
- AndrewMock 5y agoThat was my first thought. How are they ordering pizzas? I could see a backend portal combined with phone calls working well, but I doubt that a stereotypical tech startup is comfortable using humans to order. And if I ran a Dominos pizza store, I would certainly find an automated order by text-to-speech or email to be fraudulent and ignore it.
- londons_explore 5y agoI'd totally use humans to order... Just adding $1 to the price of each pizza will more than pay for a humans wages to make the order. Automatic integrations with pizza companies can be done later if the service sees success.
- rvnx 5y agoNo. (as per their FAQ).
- chihuahua 5y agoWhen they have a complaint about my charge back: No.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andyp-kw 5y agoMy company has a very good expense app. So remote employees can just order a pizza or whatever substitute they wish, photograph the receipt and then expenses the cost against an event or case. We have staff in South East Asia, who might not have a pizza shop nearby. They can just order a local takeaway instead.
- JackFr 5y ago$69 fee + $20 per pizza? Absurd.
- nateburke 5y agoYes but their big idea is that pizza is a fundamentally underpriced item relative to the value it brings a group of people... sitting in front of laptops...
- alisonkisk 5y ago$70 is cheaper then paying your company staff to organize the logistics.
- astatine 5y agoWe had an office virtual get-together and we got prepaid vouchers to everyone on a popular food delivery app. Everyone could order whatever they wished to, from their favorite restaurants. This accounts very easily for varying dietary needs, who else might be physically with them so that they can order more or less. I can't see the simplicity of this being beat easily.
- skeeter2020 5y agoMy company has done this and I hate it because 20+ people all ordering some fast(ish) food for individual delivery through a disintermediary service has so many things wrong with. I can't reconcile trying to discourage wasteful, race-to-the-bottom, lowest-price-first lifestyles and yet clueless acts like food delivery apps.
- ghaff 5y agoI tend to find swag somewhat wasteful even under normal circumstances, but over the past 18 months or so I've gotten a bunch of team and speaker/attendee event swag individually mailed to me and I feel a bit of guilt given that pretty much none of it is anything I remotely need. And, in many cases, will ever use. (Some is nice though so I hesitate to say just get rid of all this sort of thing.)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- user5994461 5y agoDownside, when the company gives you a voucher for £20 to order food (that ought to be enough for anyone!). Turns out the delivery app automatically adds £10 in delivery/service fee, and there's hardly any food you can pick for the remaining £10. Had to buy out of my own pocket.
- jaden 5y agoAnd the alternative of having each person order what they want and expensing it isn't much better. You don't pay anything, but it forces everyone to spend a fair amount of time. Plus accounting for different timezones means everyone isn't eating at the same time.
- wolframhempel 5y agoHonest question: Do you actually enjoy this (or any similar) kind of remote team event via Zoom? To me at least this seems like a properly dystopian future.
- k3liutZu 5y agoI mean, what are you going to do in a lockdown? We did "meet" a couple of times for remote beer last year with the rest of the team. It's not like going out, but it was better than nothing to spend some off-work time with the colleagues.
- EdwardDiego 5y ago> I mean, what are you going to do in a lockdown? Anything but trying to be social on a medium designed for speaking one at a time.
- jMyles 5y ago> I mean, what are you going to do in a lockdown? Ideally, assemble resistance, overcome the lockdown, and implement whatever real, plausible, evidence-based, genuine public health measures are necessary instead.
- ghaff 5y agoWhatever your opinion of restrictions in a given location, I'm pretty sure the right answer isn't to put pressure on people in a job context to ignore restrictions/recommendations/what makes them feel personally comfortable in their own situation to get together with coworkers in person.
- jMyles 5y agoSure, I didn't mean to suggest it's people's duty to capitalism to gather with coworkers if they don't want to. But in general, if the question is, "how do we accommodate <unsuccessful interdictive intervention whose collateral damage is visited with horrific severity on the most vulnerable in society>", I think that answer is: you don't. You organize and overcome it and speak truth to power.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoNothing would make me more demoralised than being given pizza and being told it's a party. Pizza parties are for children.[1] The whole concept of a "pizza party" is some Silicon Valley crap created to justify working devs into the ground then giving them pizza to "build team spirit". And yes, Amazon's pizza based team sizing is very prominent in my disdain for all pizza based employee engagement. [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=k6DA_WwO90c https://youtube.com/watch?v=k6DA_WwO90c Edit: for the love of Jesus, the fact that "pizza based employee engagement" is very real in software shows some contempt for us. * Work unpaid overtime, hey we ordered pizza! * Come into the office for Corporate Mandated Fun Day, there'll be pizza! * Do a hackathon and don't sleep for 36 hours so we can borrow your ideas, we even provide free pizza! * Your team delivered a well engineered and tested product that will bring in an estimated $2.4m in the first year, you bloody bet we ordered some pizza! And some wedges, with the fancy sauces, you deserve it!
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y agoso true. also the idea of a "virtual" pizza party makes me feel kind of uncomfortable. it's like we bought you pizza so let us gawk at you while you eat it. no thanks. i don't like looking at myself on a camera, let alone while shoving a pizza into my gob. but im sure more extroverted people would enjoy it.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoVery true, I didn't consider that aspect of bloody eating on camera. It's like trying to eat on a first date, you're terrified of dropping food on yourself, or getting sauce on your face... ...and so are they.
- chihuahua 5y agoBack in the early 2000s, when Amazon announced the 2-pizza team concept, my team thought "great, we're a 2-pizza team now, let's get some pizza." Then we found out that the pizza is theoretical - you don't get a budget for ordering pizza.
- 5y ago
- Grustaf 5y agoWhat is a “pizza party” and who would pay $70 for aggregating the ordering? $20 per pizza also seems pretty expensive.
- JohnFen 5y agoIn this context, a pizza party is an office party with pizza.
- oceanghost 5y agoI always found "Pizza Parties" to be an exemplar of bad management. Pizza is something that, when done right, is exactly the kind of thing management doesn't understand. It takes time, skill, effort and quality ingredients to assemble.
- joezydeco 5y ago"no matter where they are" Do they know a decent pizza place in Hyderabad that can deliver at 2:00am local time? Because I sure don't.
- jfk13 5y agoAnd if they find one, how confident are they at ordering in Telugu or Urdu? "We will attempt to place orders in any country and location!" Yeah, right. Never mind team members in South Asia.... I'm in the south-east of England, and neither Deliveroo nor UberEats offers service to my town. Just Eat can find a couple of local restaurants that claim to offer delivery, but pizza isn't among my options. I think their idea of a "remote team" may be quite limited.
- pizzapill 5y agoI endorse this message!
- ducharmdev 5y agoThis reminds me of that Silicon Valley episode about the pizza app, Sliceline. Solving a problem that doesn't need to be solved, and has to do with pizza.
- jawns 5y agoThe details say they will send a small pizza to each person. In my area you can pretty easily find a small-sized pizza for $5 to $8 from an independent pizza place. Similar prices from national chains. Little Caesar's, for instance, offers a $5.55 large cheese pizza. Let's suppose the delivery fee and tip is another $5. And let's suppose it takes five minutes per person in time to find a pizza place near them and place the order. At an hourly rate of $60 for the coordinator, that's $5 per person. So now you're looking at about $5 in profit per person, not even factoring in the $69 administrative fee. I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't want to do this particular chore in-house, unless your entire team is billing hundreds per hour.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoUnpopular (for HN) take, but you know what's been great for my mental health and productivity and made me feel more connected to my team? Going into the office a few days a week again. It's been wonderful. Including eating real lunch with real people from my team. Gold.
- ghaff 5y agoI'm not sure it's an unpopular take so long as you don't expect other members of your team to join you if they don't want to.
- LindyTalker 5y agoUgh, how many more of these businesses can start up? Don’t the founders want to do something more interesting?
- nobody_nowhere 5y agoI appear to be alone in the sentiment of "I'd totally overpay like this to have someone coordinate food for my remote team"
- ghaff 5y agoLeaving aside whether you want a manufactured social event like this. I have trouble imagining how it works. The food will invariably arrive very asynchronously. I have limited delivery options where I live and actually end up going and picking up a pizza from one or two different places if I want one. (Or make one at home.) I don't have any interest in some app/third party randomly picking a pizza place and delivering to me. If you must have a remote team social event, just let people deal with their own food and drink.
- kthejoker2 5y agoI would like the literal opposite of this: We donate the party funds to a Zero Hunger program, take half a day off to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, and then come back and swap feel good stories.