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I'm not saying free food/drinks/heck-even-beer is a Bad Thing, or necessarily evil. My current employer does the free snacks/free drinks thing, and I've worked
by bmj 17y ago
I'm not saying free food/drinks/heck-even-beer is a Bad Thing, or necessarily evil. My current employer does the free snacks/free drinks thing, and I've worked for another start-up that did free lunch for a long time. At neither job was there any expectation that the employees needed to put in long hours in return for the perks.
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.
- cookiecaper 17y agoI don't think this is unreasonable. It should be clear that a lot of the motivation for things like on-site cafeterias and such is that people won't go off-site for lunch. That's not necessarily evil, unless your company bans off-site lunches. The companies I've worked for who offered on-site, not-even-free lunches obviously did so because it increased productivity, but there was no issue if you wanted to go off-campus for lunch, and we did both with about the same frequency. 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.