Googler here. I can speak to my experience, but others have their own. > The campus felt designed to suck more work hours out of you. Another way to describe

Googler here. I can speak to my experience, but others have their own. > The campus felt designed to suck more work hours out of you. Another way to describe it is that the campus is designed to suck more employees away from the competition. If you assume the existence of an employee as a given, then the only reason for a perk must be to extract more labor from that employee. But that's not how Google is looking at it. They're trying to convince good employees to work for them instead of other tech companies. Those perks exist to keep the grass greener on Google's side of the fence instead of Facebook/Apple/Amazon/etc. This provides an entirely rational/economic answer for nice perks without needing overtime to justify them. (There are, of course, also plenty of non-financial justifications for the perks.) In the Google offices I've worked in, they tend to be almost completely empty by 6:00. > If I go play ping pong for an hour, do I now owe that hour to the company later? My experience is that different employees have different feelings about that. Some do, some don't. Personally, I don't feel I owe the company another 30 minutes if I go outside for a walk because the walk tends to reinvigorate me and increase my productivity. But I would probably feel weird if I was playing a game for a significant period of time more than once a week or so. > If I'm working past 5, will I be inclined to keep working because I can just go grab a free bite to eat later? Some do, but dinner is extremely low-key compared to lunch. On the rare times I've been around at dinner time, the cafes are mostly empty with just a few partaking.