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In my first job at a fancy tech company in the Bay Area, I saw more free food and drinks than I've ever seen outside of a grocery store. It was crazy. 30 differ

In my first job at a fancy tech company in the Bay Area, I saw more free food and drinks than I've ever seen outside of a grocery store. It was crazy. 30 different kinds of beers. Free drinks, snacks, lunch. I jokingly said out loud, "what did we do to deserve this?". A coworkers overheard and replied, "speak for yourself". The entitlement was and probably still is crazy.

codr7 2y ago
Entitlement is one thing; companies acting like they give a shit about employees was pretty nice though, I for sure miss it.
itake 2y ago
SWE created billions of dollars of value for $300k/yr paychecks.
marcinzm 2y ago
> The entitlement was and probably still is crazy. Google pays SWEs around $300k average total comp and gets $1.5 MILLION per employee (SWE or not) per year in revenue. With a profit margin of over 20%. A single project can increase revenue by $100m/year so not sure if "I made the company $500m over the last five years" is entitlement. Tech companies should be paying more and not less.
- bmitc 2y ago
  I would suggest rethinking that. Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers". It isn't due to the "brilliance" of their engineers.
  - DeathArrow 2y ago
    >Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers". Google is like a reverse Robin Hood. It steals data from the users. The customers are the ones buying that data.
- card_zero 2y ago
  Their special skill is being in the place where all the ad money goes.
  - marcinzm 2y ago
    Their special skill is ensuring they are the place where all ad money goes by being better at getting eyeballs for that money and being better at targeting ads to those eyeballs. Many many many companies have tried to usurp one or both sides of that without success. You may not like their business model but they are objectively very good at what they do.
    - card_zero 2y ago
      Usurping a popular thing is difficult, because you don't have its one important quality that attracts everybody: popularity.
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
        The above comment also completely sidesteps the monopolist and regulatory capture factors in difficulty to usurp Google, and thus incorrectly implies that a level playing field exists.
    - luckylion 2y ago
      Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do? Google has great research going on, but their products seem to be mostly coasting along. There's still some growth, but is that more than inertia and network effect? Where the large innovation in their product that keeps them ahead?
      - marcinzm 2y ago
        Coasting is exactly how I'd describe increase revenue by 6x in 10 years. "Coasting." > Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do? So your bar for success is having a perceptual monopoly on the whole world? Or just the digital world? You're jumping to mental gymnastic to not acknowledge that Google has consistently grown while being highly profitable. It's a massive success as a company.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Or maybe not exploiting society/privacy/attention to make that much.
  - salawat 2y ago
    It is hard to get a man to understand that which his salary depends on him not understanding. -Upton Sinclair
- lolinder 2y ago
  This kind of math betrays a total lack of understanding of the way businesses earn money. With vanishingly few exceptions, no one developer makes the company $500m, and this is trivially testable with a quick thought exercise: Would Google's bottom line drop by ($500m - $devSalary) if that developer were to quit this year? Of course not! In most cases Google's bottom line wouldn't even notice if Google failed to replace them, but if their job was really important and they did have to replace them, they still wouldn't notice that it was someone else and not that one dev. This suggests that the dev isn't actually what's making Google $500m/employee, it's the systems that make up Google that are making Google $500m/employee. Any one employee doesn't actually contribute nearly that much to the functioning of the system, otherwise every company would make $500m per developer. So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
  - marcinzm 2y ago
    I'd answer but it seems you didn't read the first part of what I wrote or even the second part (I never said 500m/year). So not much point.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Okay, you're right, I grabbed the wrong number. Sub in $1.5m/year or $500m/5 years and replace "bottom line this year" with "bottom line over the next 5 years". The exact numbers don't matter, the point is the same: with only a few exceptions, no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company. If they did, you could pick up your laptop and go to any other company and start earning them $N/year for whatever value of N you prefer.
      - marcinzm 2y ago
- andsoitis 2y ago
  > But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable Your compensation is dominated by the function of supply of and demand for labor, not how much the company makes from your labor.
  - djrockstar1 2y ago
    Isn't demand a function of how much the company makes from your labour?
    - 9rx 2y ago
      Labour doesn't make money until the labour is already provided, so how much money labour can produce is an unknown until hindsight is available. An established company with a stable business can make some pretty reasonable forecasts, but when it comes to startups and other new business ventures one is ultimately straight up guessing. Demand being a function of how much investment money is available is going to be closer to reality, although that is not the whole story either.
- skybrian 2y ago
  Google’s economic model has been like that for decades and it’s paying for my early retirement. Being “exploited” in this way is nice work if you can get it. The companies with narrow profit margins don’t pay nearly so well.
- JustExAWS 2y ago
  So if they have a 2% profit margin on 1.5 million that’s $300K in profit…
  - marcinzm 2y ago
    Your point being? The profit margin is after employee compensation.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      Would you invest in something with a 2% profit margin?
eaenki 2y ago
my reply to you would’ve been: “oh, not much, we just made the founder the richest most powerful man on this planet. Right now he’s probably on a giant island in hawaii which he wholly owns, in a €200mm mansion, having an orgy with 25 escorts, while on lsd. Oh, right now he just took the jet, one of 6 €50mm jets he owns, to fly to the coast of italy. there, he will fly his giant helicopter to land on his giant 3 floor yatch with 3 pools where he will fuck 30 more chicks at once. But yeah, we get extra free food for having contributed to that”.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  Shouldn't you be happy you help poor boss to barely make ends meet?
- aurareturn 2y ago
  It wasn't a profitable company. The point is that many tech companies in the Bay Area were not profitable, never going to be profitable, but they treated software developers like kings because of the distorted market supported by low interest rate environment.
dbattaglia 2y ago
10 years ago I was at an “innovation lab” of a big HR tech company that gave out free lunches and snacks. The best explanation I heard was a coworker originally from the big boring corporate HQ who said basically this is a software petting zoo for big investors to look at. “Good code monkey, here’s a banana!”
- gogogendogo 2y ago
  I think I just learned why Amazon gives out free bananas now!
osrec 2y ago
In a lot of cases, the companies leverage a large chunk of their employees' time to make very hefty returns. It's the least they can do. As someone who runs a company now (having been an employee previously), it is obvious to me that the cost of providing food is a rounding error in the overall company budget, and is well worth it, if it keeps people happy.
fullshark 2y ago
They got free snacks in exchange for labor utilized to capture billions of dollars of market value, which will generate cash flows far into the future. You need to understand the game you are playing.
amazingamazing 2y ago
It’s funny how impressed people are by food and beverages. Let’s be super conservative and say it was only for a mere 20 people. What percentage of wages do you think is being spent on that stuff? Let me give you a hint - if the existence of snacks made people work a mere 20 minutes more a week it would’ve already paid for itself. The calculus is a bit more complicated for full service lunch, but you get the idea.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  Yeah free food is a really good way to spend money on your employees. Just the cost of people walking to get food makes it worthwhile to provide on site.
  - borgdefenser 2y ago
    Coffee even more so. I worked at place before that didn't have coffee so people would walk to the coffee place in groups that took 15-30 minutes. Sometimes twice a day. It became a routine part of the day, everyday. Like literally throwing the cost of an invisible bag of Starbucks beans in the garbage everyday to save the visible cost of brewing a few cups.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  I don't think it's the literal spending money on snacks that impresses people; it's more about the thought behind doing that. For example I work in a company where the salary is pretty good, but they're also super stingy in general. No snacks, no socials, shitty laptop, etc. It betrays a lack of interest in making employees happy. The absence of things like snacks is also an indication of how much the bean counters are in charge, because as you say it's probably good value for money in terms of morale, but as soon as the bean counters come in they see you spending £1k/month on snacks or coffee or whatever and that's an easy thing to cut.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    Not only that, but if the company once had these things, and then took them away, it might be the wake-up call that snaps an otherwise satisfied employee out of his complacency and cause him to start looking around where the grass might be greener. Steve Blank wrote about this in [1]. Congratulations, you saved a couple of hundred dollars but caused three good employees to leave. 1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-–-soda’s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
SirensOfTitan 2y ago
I worked at Facebook for half a decade during its golden period and there were a lot of people who shared your sentiment. …in fact, when some folks suggested engineers organize, the types who complained about worker entitlement remarked: “we make enough, why would we organize?” This perspective of worker entitlement is really harmful to labor, I assure you that the execs rarely talk about entitlement as they issue bonuses to themselves now while simultaneously embracing rolling layoffs. Now engineers are working to obsolete themselves with AI and reduce their bargaining power permanently for the promise of a post-scarcity AGI facilitated future that is all but guaranteed. But they’re just entitled, that’s the problem.
doitLP 2y ago
Your salary is not about moral desserts but about how much value or money you bring to someone else. That’s why a laborer gets paid a few dollars for a backbreaking day of work and Matt Damon makes a million dollars for holding a can of Pepsi and smiling for the camera for 15 minutes.
9dev 2y ago
Watching the Bay Area from over the Atlantic was always a very bewildering experience. I honestly think you guys now get something closer to the reality of European startups, where we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€! The sentiment of the OP resonates with me; it’s closer aligned with reality, and building a product that actually produces value, that needs to satisfy customers, is both a rewarding and a humbling experience.
- mamcx 2y ago
  > we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€! Lucky! Here in Colombia I went for the `get investor` phase, and despite get 'great' interest and even win some competition where I go to a thousands event to get it, I get at then end US1500 (today money) that was restricted in what I can spend on (nothing in what I need that was get more developers!). (The rest of the money, that was for the startups consultants)
tm-infringement 2y ago
I've always felt that the moral panic about food perks in Tech was weird. That's not free, it's part of your salary. Sure, you can't buy index funds with Pineapples but at the end of the day it's still remuneration. The market TC is crazy high, do you add a minor bump in $$$ to attract some candidates that will go to Sweetgreen? Or you add flashy food while taking advantage of economies of scale? Bonus, the very expensive people stay more in the office.
- fullshark 2y ago
  It's because there's a story that a lot of laborers (and capital owners) want to believe, that capitalism is a great meritocracy, and the rewards of it are based on one's moral fiber, instead of purely a function of every individual's leverage effect on the returns on capital/labor.
entropyneur 2y ago
The replies are hilariously illustrative of your point. Why do you guys keep working for theese evil capitlists taking away the bilions of value you generate and leaving you with pitiful hundreds of thousands (+free snacks)? You should start a cooperative or something.
swat535 2y ago
I never understood the excitement over "free food" or "ping pong tables." as perks. I'd rather have better compensation and sensible vacation / work-life balance policies, be treated as a professional, and make my own sandwich..
gls2ro 2y ago
Can I offer a different perspective of providing drinks and food at the office? Add to that coffee places and more on the company campus. In some cases, maybe not yours, that is also a way to keep employees in the campus/at the office together. Nice things for the company happens there: you go with your team, have lunch and also have a meeting/discussion about the project you are working on. I think when the company can afford it it is mostly a win-win situation that maybe it is presented only with the benefit side for the employee.

codr7 2y ago

Entitlement is one thing; companies acting like they give a shit about employees was pretty nice though, I for sure miss it.

itake 2y ago

SWE created billions of dollars of value for $300k/yr paychecks.

marcinzm 2y ago

> The entitlement was and probably still is crazy. Google pays SWEs around $300k average total comp and gets $1.5 MILLION per employee (SWE or not) per year in revenue. With a profit margin of over 20%. A single project can increase revenue by $100m/year so not sure if "I made the company $500m over the last five years" is entitlement. Tech companies should be paying more and not less.

bmitc 2y ago
I would suggest rethinking that. Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers". It isn't due to the "brilliance" of their engineers.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  >Google makes that money because they steal data from their "customers". Google is like a reverse Robin Hood. It steals data from the users. The customers are the ones buying that data.
card_zero 2y ago
Their special skill is being in the place where all the ad money goes.
- marcinzm 2y ago
  Their special skill is ensuring they are the place where all ad money goes by being better at getting eyeballs for that money and being better at targeting ads to those eyeballs. Many many many companies have tried to usurp one or both sides of that without success. You may not like their business model but they are objectively very good at what they do.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Usurping a popular thing is difficult, because you don't have its one important quality that attracts everybody: popularity.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
      The above comment also completely sidesteps the monopolist and regulatory capture factors in difficulty to usurp Google, and thus incorrectly implies that a level playing field exists.
  - luckylion 2y ago
    Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do? Google has great research going on, but their products seem to be mostly coasting along. There's still some growth, but is that more than inertia and network effect? Where the large innovation in their product that keeps them ahead?
    - marcinzm 2y ago
      Coasting is exactly how I'd describe increase revenue by 6x in 10 years. "Coasting." > Are they though? Why is TikTok a thing if Google is so great at what they do? So your bar for success is having a perceptual monopoly on the whole world? Or just the digital world? You're jumping to mental gymnastic to not acknowledge that Google has consistently grown while being highly profitable. It's a massive success as a company.
giantg2 2y ago
Or maybe not exploiting society/privacy/attention to make that much.
- salawat 2y ago
  It is hard to get a man to understand that which his salary depends on him not understanding. -Upton Sinclair
lolinder 2y ago
This kind of math betrays a total lack of understanding of the way businesses earn money. With vanishingly few exceptions, no one developer makes the company $500m, and this is trivially testable with a quick thought exercise: Would Google's bottom line drop by ($500m - $devSalary) if that developer were to quit this year? Of course not! In most cases Google's bottom line wouldn't even notice if Google failed to replace them, but if their job was really important and they did have to replace them, they still wouldn't notice that it was someone else and not that one dev. This suggests that the dev isn't actually what's making Google $500m/employee, it's the systems that make up Google that are making Google $500m/employee. Any one employee doesn't actually contribute nearly that much to the functioning of the system, otherwise every company would make $500m per developer. So the only sense in which Google "should" pay more isn't a practical one (clearly they pay enough to fill their roles) or a justice one (they're not stealing $500m in value from each employee if their bottom wouldn't much notice any single employee's absence)—it's some sort of argument about an ethereal sense of fairness that says that by merely participating in a system you're entitled to the average per-person output of that system. Which is definitely an ethic, but it's not one I can get behind.
- marcinzm 2y ago
  I'd answer but it seems you didn't read the first part of what I wrote or even the second part (I never said 500m/year). So not much point.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Okay, you're right, I grabbed the wrong number. Sub in $1.5m/year or $500m/5 years and replace "bottom line this year" with "bottom line over the next 5 years". The exact numbers don't matter, the point is the same: with only a few exceptions, no employee contributes the average per-employee output to the company. If they did, you could pick up your laptop and go to any other company and start earning them $N/year for whatever value of N you prefer.
    - marcinzm 2y ago
andsoitis 2y ago
> But when you act in ways that don’t further your company’s interests, you risk being seen as ineffective or unreliable Your compensation is dominated by the function of supply of and demand for labor, not how much the company makes from your labor.
- djrockstar1 2y ago
  Isn't demand a function of how much the company makes from your labour?
  - 9rx 2y ago
    Labour doesn't make money until the labour is already provided, so how much money labour can produce is an unknown until hindsight is available. An established company with a stable business can make some pretty reasonable forecasts, but when it comes to startups and other new business ventures one is ultimately straight up guessing. Demand being a function of how much investment money is available is going to be closer to reality, although that is not the whole story either.
skybrian 2y ago
Google’s economic model has been like that for decades and it’s paying for my early retirement. Being “exploited” in this way is nice work if you can get it. The companies with narrow profit margins don’t pay nearly so well.
JustExAWS 2y ago
So if they have a 2% profit margin on 1.5 million that’s $300K in profit…
- marcinzm 2y ago
  Your point being? The profit margin is after employee compensation.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    Would you invest in something with a 2% profit margin?

eaenki 2y ago

my reply to you would’ve been: “oh, not much, we just made the founder the richest most powerful man on this planet. Right now he’s probably on a giant island in hawaii which he wholly owns, in a €200mm mansion, having an orgy with 25 escorts, while on lsd. Oh, right now he just took the jet, one of 6 €50mm jets he owns, to fly to the coast of italy. there, he will fly his giant helicopter to land on his giant 3 floor yatch with 3 pools where he will fuck 30 more chicks at once. But yeah, we get extra free food for having contributed to that”.

DeathArrow 2y ago
Shouldn't you be happy you help poor boss to barely make ends meet?
aurareturn 2y ago
It wasn't a profitable company. The point is that many tech companies in the Bay Area were not profitable, never going to be profitable, but they treated software developers like kings because of the distorted market supported by low interest rate environment.

dbattaglia 2y ago

10 years ago I was at an “innovation lab” of a big HR tech company that gave out free lunches and snacks. The best explanation I heard was a coworker originally from the big boring corporate HQ who said basically this is a software petting zoo for big investors to look at. “Good code monkey, here’s a banana!”

gogogendogo 2y ago
I think I just learned why Amazon gives out free bananas now!

osrec 2y ago

In a lot of cases, the companies leverage a large chunk of their employees' time to make very hefty returns. It's the least they can do. As someone who runs a company now (having been an employee previously), it is obvious to me that the cost of providing food is a rounding error in the overall company budget, and is well worth it, if it keeps people happy.

fullshark 2y ago

They got free snacks in exchange for labor utilized to capture billions of dollars of market value, which will generate cash flows far into the future. You need to understand the game you are playing.

amazingamazing 2y ago

It’s funny how impressed people are by food and beverages. Let’s be super conservative and say it was only for a mere 20 people. What percentage of wages do you think is being spent on that stuff? Let me give you a hint - if the existence of snacks made people work a mere 20 minutes more a week it would’ve already paid for itself. The calculus is a bit more complicated for full service lunch, but you get the idea.

disgruntledphd2 2y ago
Yeah free food is a really good way to spend money on your employees. Just the cost of people walking to get food makes it worthwhile to provide on site.
- borgdefenser 2y ago
  Coffee even more so. I worked at place before that didn't have coffee so people would walk to the coffee place in groups that took 15-30 minutes. Sometimes twice a day. It became a routine part of the day, everyday. Like literally throwing the cost of an invisible bag of Starbucks beans in the garbage everyday to save the visible cost of brewing a few cups.
IshKebab 2y ago
I don't think it's the literal spending money on snacks that impresses people; it's more about the thought behind doing that. For example I work in a company where the salary is pretty good, but they're also super stingy in general. No snacks, no socials, shitty laptop, etc. It betrays a lack of interest in making employees happy. The absence of things like snacks is also an indication of how much the bean counters are in charge, because as you say it's probably good value for money in terms of morale, but as soon as the bean counters come in they see you spending £1k/month on snacks or coffee or whatever and that's an easy thing to cut.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Not only that, but if the company once had these things, and then took them away, it might be the wake-up call that snaps an otherwise satisfied employee out of his complacency and cause him to start looking around where the grass might be greener. Steve Blank wrote about this in [1]. Congratulations, you saved a couple of hundred dollars but caused three good employees to leave. 1: https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-earth-–-soda’s-are-no-longer-free/ https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

SirensOfTitan 2y ago

I worked at Facebook for half a decade during its golden period and there were a lot of people who shared your sentiment. …in fact, when some folks suggested engineers organize, the types who complained about worker entitlement remarked: “we make enough, why would we organize?” This perspective of worker entitlement is really harmful to labor, I assure you that the execs rarely talk about entitlement as they issue bonuses to themselves now while simultaneously embracing rolling layoffs. Now engineers are working to obsolete themselves with AI and reduce their bargaining power permanently for the promise of a post-scarcity AGI facilitated future that is all but guaranteed. But they’re just entitled, that’s the problem.

doitLP 2y ago

Your salary is not about moral desserts but about how much value or money you bring to someone else. That’s why a laborer gets paid a few dollars for a backbreaking day of work and Matt Damon makes a million dollars for holding a can of Pepsi and smiling for the camera for 15 minutes.

9dev 2y ago

Watching the Bay Area from over the Atlantic was always a very bewildering experience. I honestly think you guys now get something closer to the reality of European startups, where we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€! The sentiment of the OP resonates with me; it’s closer aligned with reality, and building a product that actually produces value, that needs to satisfy customers, is both a rewarding and a humbling experience.

mamcx 2y ago
> we’d always have to fight for customers and investor money on (in comparison) ludicrously lower levels—our seed round were 100.000€! Lucky! Here in Colombia I went for the `get investor` phase, and despite get 'great' interest and even win some competition where I go to a thousands event to get it, I get at then end US1500 (today money) that was restricted in what I can spend on (nothing in what I need that was get more developers!). (The rest of the money, that was for the startups consultants)

tm-infringement 2y ago

I've always felt that the moral panic about food perks in Tech was weird. That's not free, it's part of your salary. Sure, you can't buy index funds with Pineapples but at the end of the day it's still remuneration. The market TC is crazy high, do you add a minor bump in $$$ to attract some candidates that will go to Sweetgreen? Or you add flashy food while taking advantage of economies of scale? Bonus, the very expensive people stay more in the office.

fullshark 2y ago
It's because there's a story that a lot of laborers (and capital owners) want to believe, that capitalism is a great meritocracy, and the rewards of it are based on one's moral fiber, instead of purely a function of every individual's leverage effect on the returns on capital/labor.

entropyneur 2y ago

The replies are hilariously illustrative of your point. Why do you guys keep working for theese evil capitlists taking away the bilions of value you generate and leaving you with pitiful hundreds of thousands (+free snacks)? You should start a cooperative or something.

swat535 2y ago

I never understood the excitement over "free food" or "ping pong tables." as perks. I'd rather have better compensation and sensible vacation / work-life balance policies, be treated as a professional, and make my own sandwich..

gls2ro 2y ago

Can I offer a different perspective of providing drinks and food at the office? Add to that coffee places and more on the company campus. In some cases, maybe not yours, that is also a way to keep employees in the campus/at the office together. Nice things for the company happens there: you go with your team, have lunch and also have a meeting/discussion about the project you are working on. I think when the company can afford it it is mostly a win-win situation that maybe it is presented only with the benefit side for the employee.