[ajays]

Google is located in an area where there aren't many restaurants close by. By offering on-site lunches, they keep the employees on campus. So instead of wasting, say, 1.5 hours getting to MtView, hunting for parking, waiting at a restaurant, eating, getting back into your car, etc., the employees just walk over to the cafe, still in work mode; or even better, take the lunch back to their offices.

Even if Google gets 1 hour of work per employee per day out of this arrangement, the lunch more than pays for itself.

So people shouldn't naively think that Google (or, for that matter, any other company) offers these perks out of the goodness of their heart; it's because it makes fiscal sense to keep employees on campus, working.

[rdtsc]

> So people shouldn't naively think that Google (or, for that matter, any other company) offers these perks out of the goodness of their heart.

It becomes s question of quality. It is one thing to offer free steaks at lunch (a real perk) vs offering beans and rice every day. [just using it to illustrate a point, not saying Google is serving rice and beans only]. The goal of Google is to present how they have very high quality food during interview then start scaling down the quality (and cost) until employees will still feel like driving is a hassle but now a meal is $10 vs $30.

In the end however they lose with this strategy. The people working there can read between the lines. Google might end up with better end-of-quarter bottom line, but in the long long run they will be shooting themselves in the foot.

[ajays]

> It is one thing to offer free steaks at lunch (a real perk) vs offering beans and rice every day. [just using it to illustrate a point, not saying Google is serving rice and beans only].

If they just offered (note: it's an offer, not mandatory) beans and rice, then the employees would just go out for lunch, defeating the purpose of the program.

The lunch has to be good enough to keep the employees there.

[Hominem]

Right, the company I worked for was open about this, they wanted us at our desks.

The problem was they had no way of measuring how much productivity gains there really were but they still had a bill every month for the food. When push comes to shove it was harder to justify any theoretical productivity gains against that bill.

[dredmorbius]

They can "want you at your desk".

In most of the US, you're entitled, by law, to a lunch break of at least 30 minutes.

You can thank unions for that.

[jfoster]

My understanding is that Google is pretty open about that. I think I've seen Marissa Mayer explain it that way in a video about Google before.

[lusr]

How does this explain them offering the food for free vs. charging for it (possibly subsidizing it)? It is still a perk, in that sense.