On Perks | Hacker News Reader

On Perks

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89 pointsmr_tyzic67 comments

In the Netherlands, meals and other benefits provided by the employer are taxed into oblivion after a certain amount. It makes a lot of financial sense to just give your employees more money here and let them buy their own stuff after income tax. The way it works is that a company can spend 1.2% of the yearly income on the employee in terms of coffee, company retreats, free lunches, whatever they please, but over that you pay a huge tax rate which make the expense slightly higher than an employee buying it themselves after income tax. Some things are exempt from this, such as free fruit.

In practice this means that the cheaper things, such as coffee and tea are usually free (at least in offices with white collar workers) and the more expensive things such as dinner are usually not employer provided. Company provided lunch does exist, and seems to be on the rise, but due to the spartan nature of Dutch lunch, companies are usually able to squeeze that in the 1.2% given that the yearly salaries are high enough. It seems to me that all of this is quite a nice compromise between employers running your life and you thus being limited in your choices, while still offering free coffee and the like.

Edit: misremembered the amount, changed 1.8 to 1.2%

> spartan nature of Dutch lunch

I just ran some numbers. The average salary of Dutch Software Engineer is €42,993[1]. 1.2% of €42,993 = €516.

There are 261 weekdays in a year; subtract 30 holiday/vacation days from that, you get 221 working days.

€516 / 221 = €2.23

Can lunch be a mere €2.23 (US$2.50) in the Netherlands?

My employer delivers free lunch to all its employees everyday as well ( via a service called https://www.servedbystadium.com/ ), but the cost of this is typically around $15-$20 per meal.

(I estimate my employer has allocated about $4000/year per employee for the free lunch. That's around 2% to 3% of the salary of most of our software engineers, but salaries on average are about 3 times[2] in the U.S. compared to the Netherlands.)

[1] https://www.payscale.com/research/NL/Job=Software_Engineer/S...

[2] https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary

I think €2.23 is a little on the light side, but not unrealistic, considering that a Dutch lunch mostly consists of cheap sliced bread with some form of stuff spread out on it, mostly Gouda cheese, or any of the sweet stuff like the traditional chocolaty sprinkles: hagelslag. I talked to the guy that buys the lunch at our office, and his estimate is anywhere between €2.50 and €3.50 per person a day, but he did not have hard numbers. For Dutch standards, our lunch is considered quite luxurious.

Then again, I'm not exactly sure what part of that is just lower prices in supermarkets. As a student I routinely could cook dinner for under €2.50 per person, although nowadays I'm averaging more like €4 pp, with rising prices and me cooking for a smaller group.

The article talks about free food. But the most bizarre perk is how health insurance is linked to one's employer. Whatever system we have in 20 years, pretty much anything will be better than this one.

In Switzerland, health insurance is still expensive and obligatory (which is bad), but can only be paid from after-tax money, which is good and delivers at least some market pressure to the system.

In the US, how do freelancers and individual consultants even work?

The obligatory part is the good part. In the Netherlands it is obligatory and costs are lower than in the US.

No, the obligatory part leads to less competition, less market pressure, and therefore costs spiral. Our costs are almost on par with the US, and raise every year.

How does the obligation to buy insurance cause there to be less competition? If someone doesn't have to have insurance, wouldn't the pool of possible customers be smaller?

I agree with you on the cost comparison side - I've lived in both places and find the systems quite similar in many respects outside of costs.

I think one key difference between the Swiss / American model and that of other western EU countries is the cost of billing and processing. In the US a full third of the cost of care is this part of the system, something that doesn't need to happen when there is a single universal payer for all care.

We don’t have a singe payer healthcare here, there are many insurance companies.

Obligatory insurance destroys competition (and insurance companies are lobbying hard to support it), because obligatory customer is a perfect customer — you can be as bad as you wish to them, and they still won’t leave you. With multi-payer insurance, they can still leave to other company (but it still enables bad behavior in the insurance industry in general). With single-payer, no such luck, you are at the complete mercy of the single-paying entity.

I think you may be misunderstanding “single-payer”. That term refers to there being a single entity paying for the care (generally speaking, this is the government), vs the US system which is multi-payer (you pay part of it, public or private health insurance pays another).

In a single-payer system, there can still be many healthcare providers, and the single entity doing the paying is incentivized to push aggressively for low prices from providers, because that keeps their own overhead low. Likewise, they’re incentivized to keep their premiums low, because when you’re the government, if people think you’re screwing up their healthcare they vote you out of office.

As an example of this in the US, take the Medicare system, which can negotiation super aggressively on pricing from healthcare providers because a provider who lands a contract for Medicare knows they have a massive pool of humans to provide care (and thus receive payment) for/from.

I believe understand it right. What _motivation_ this single entity will have to always have the best customers interests in mind? What will prevent it from being sloppy, or even corrupted and colluding with healthcare providers?

What stops any group of people from being sloppy or corrupted?

I called out the things that keep single-payer systems in check in my original comment, which you’ve replied to: pressure from constituents keeps premiums low (in the same way that the government is pressured to keep taxes low by their electorate), and they’re incentivized to negotiate low rates with providers because it improves their ability to keep premiums low without having them be lower than expenses.

That said: the US’s current privatized system is sloppy and corrupt in a multitude of ways, because their incentive structure includes turning a profit, and they can’t negotiate costs as hard as a single-payer system can, because their pool of customers is smaller. So we’ve got the worst combination of traits.

You seem to misunderstand what “there are many insurance companies“ means. There are multiple entities doing the paying. A person contracts health insurance with one among several insurers (at least one, different companies can be chosen for the compulsory insurance and the optional plans offering additional coverage). In the end healthcare is paid directly by the individuals (deductibles, contribution up to some threshold, non-covered charges), by their insurer(s) and by the state (public hospital budgets are not completely covered by the amounts they charge, a large share of the costs is paid from taxes).

In the US as a freelancer, you generally either:

(a) Have a plan bought on an ACA marketplace (pretty expensive and not very good)

(b) After you leave a full-time job, a government program called COBRA means you can still maintain your relationship with your old health care provider for 18 months, except you have to pay all the premiums your employer formerly paid (generally better coverage than an ACA plan, but way more expensive)

It's not great.

> In the US, how do freelancers and individual consultants even work?

Comparing plans is complex, but the actual purchase process is extremely easy. Not much different than getting home or auto insurance.

"Expensive" is a relative term. I'm paying about twice as much freelance as I was an employ for comparable coverage levels. That really comes down to not having an employer cover part of the cost.

After having done it for a couple years, I actually prefer non-employer insurance. We're able to go with an insurer that fits our needs (particularly with physician network coverage) without breaking the bank.

In India, health insurance is not obligatory, but is paid from pre tax income by the individual. This helps reduce the overall taxable income.

I was told by an American the linkage to be the employer was a decision grounded in a hypothetical efficiency goal. It was thoughtm it would distribute the cost burden of administration. It was not designed to become a differentiator between employers.

It wasn’t designed at all. It’s an accident of history.

After WWII the government didn’t remove wage controls right away so businesses started offering health insurance as a differentiator. They wrote it off their taxes as a business expense. Over time through lobbying and tax code rewites this expense became enshrined and untouchable, to the extent that the foregone taxes are the single greatest annual tax expenditure outside of the military.

Article misses an important point. Free food is a benefit, and ERISA requires all employees get the same benefits. If you have a company with lots of low paid workers, it doesn’t work financially. Silicon Valley firms mostly contract out low wage jobs (janitorial, security) partially for this reason.

This is very interesting to hear. In Germany, we don't have a law as such, and the employees of the company I work for that work less than 40 hours per week have to pay for food at the cafeteria, while those who do get it for free. If I understand ERISA correctly, that would be illegal in the US.

I could see it being illegal under EU law too - as indirect discrimination

In Germany, free lunch is a taxable income. It might explain the difference between full and part time employees. How does it look like in your payslip?

It’s not as simple as that. The employer can support lunch up to a set limit by day (I think currently 6.40 EUR, but I might be wrong on the exact number per day) and depending on the exact way things are laid out, the reminder is taxed flat at 25% and not subject to social security. It’s actually one of the best perks that an employer can give (the others are paying for a transport ticket, or a bike). It provides real value, everyone has to eat and not paying for lunch translates into real money unlike a flipper table.

my company had offices in bay area and chicago. No free food in chicago, free food in sfo.

Same for Bloomberg. Free food in my office (it was great too, A+), none in New York or SFO.

Princeton, I assume?

Correct.

That could also be due to local competition for talent. There aren't as many places in Chicago with free food as in SF.

Depends on the industry, I suppose.

My experience from interviewing and first hand employment experience is that most finance shops in Chicago offer at least a free lunch. Some also offer hot breakfast and dinner as well. (Sometimes dinner is left overs from lunch, depends on the shop).

I've only worked in one trading shop that didn't offer lunch, but they were small and out of the financial district.

I briefly contracted at a shop that even extended the free lunch me, even while on the clock.

Outside of finance, I dont have any direct knowledge. This is over 15 years of working as an FTE in either trading or financial services as a developer.

Same experience in Chicago trading . Cold breakfast (cereal, bagels, yogurt, fresh fruit, etc) and paid lunch. Sometimes dinner, depends on the shop.

That's a very minor one its mostly for cost savings and also now a days makes the gender disparity figures look better by getting all lose low paid female cleaners off the books

Google janitors and security definitely eat in our cafeterias. It's an even bigger deal for them than it is for us.

to his defense he said "lots of"

Is this true for remote employees as well? E.g., suppose my colleagues at HQ and I are in the same meeting, I dial in to the meeting, and onsite employees receive lunch provided by our employer.

Is my employer explicitly obligated for me to get my own lunch, at their expense?

No, they don't have to make sure every employee enjoys the benefit, they just have to not exclude anyone from it. Unfortunate coincidences like being 1000 miles away from the benefit are unfortunate.

Similarly I'm guessing that if those employees were to visit the office, they'd be given free food too.

I've found my employer will cover these lunches, though it may not be strictly necessary for them to do so.

And to my sibling commenter: when I am at HQ, I am able to partake in the free food perk.

That's absurd. The cost of letting support staff feed at the trough is a drop in the bucket compared to the other financial and management issues of contractors/vendors.

Most places without free food still contract out generic support services, as is standard in the modern specialized economy.

> Article misses an important point. Free food is a benefit, and ERISA requires all employees get the same benefits. If you have a company with lots of low paid workers, it doesn’t work financially. Silicon Valley firms mostly contract out low wage jobs (janitorial, security) partially for this reason.

ERISA seems narrowly focused on retirement plans and insurance, can you point me to more information on the lunch aspect, or some language that would suggest a broader applicability.

> Free lunch, though, is not where the action is: the economics of free food are driven by free dinner. Lunch just amortizes the fixed cost of food prep facilities.

The Google SF office had lunch, but not dinner, for 10 years. Dinner is a fairly recent offering.

free lunch is also good economically though, without free lunch most employees spend 1+ hours outside the company.

With free lunch, most employee spend less than 25 minutes eating, then going back directly to work.

I definitely understand why they do it; just providing a counterpoint to "they only lunch so they can dinner."

That's been the exact opposite of my experience. It was an uphill battle to get dinner at Google, so there were plenty of nights where the reason I left was "I have to get home before my food options close."

There are relatively few people actually getting dinner at my office, even though it is offered four days a week. Perhaps an order of magnitude fewer than those getting lunch.

Just started a new job that offers the breakfast/lunch/dinner perks. There are several aspects to it.

Retention:

* obviously, if the competition doesn't offer lunch, you want to go there

* obviously, if the competition offers lunch and your company doesn't, you will want to leave the company

* building a community starts with breaking bread. If you can get friendships and relationships to form via this mechanism then you will have a stronger retention, stronger ties between coworkers, etc.

cross-pollinating:

* grabbing lunch with someone else in the company is easier

Team:

* go grab lunch with coworkers to know what they're working on

* free lunch = better moral for the team

* you save time looking for lunch, so you can spend more time eating with your coworker

* since you all eat at the same place you randomly bump into coworkers, you often eat with them, etc.

Life outside of work:

* you can go earlier at work since they serve breakfast

* if you can bring food home, you don't have to lose time meal prep'ing and can spend more time doing other things

I'm not sure, if it's really the free part. I had free food at a previous employer and loved it, but a company cafeteria with high-quality food, fast service and acceptable prices serves the same purpose. And every single company cafeteria I ate in so far had same or better quality food with more options. The important thing is that there is an easily available place for good food.

Big corps in Germany (and probably all around the world) usually offer that, while small companies for obvious reasons cannot afford it.

> At a minimum, it saves a little bit of search time and wait time. If you were going to work until 10, dinner that takes five minutes rather than thirty still saves you five minutes.

Am I the only one who doesn't understand this math? Isn't 30 - 5 = 25?

If it stops people eating lunch at their desk, I'm all for it. I've started timing my lunches to coincide with some people near me so I don't have to experience them eating lunch at their desks.

<shudder> eating at desks must stop

Why? Genuinely curious. Couldn't care less if people near me eat at their desks.

Because some people have to work with complete barbarians who chomp with their mouth open whole Granny Smith apples, whole bell peppers and whole celery sticks without cutting them up, as if to deliberately annoy everyone in the vicinity.

For me it's the smells. Whether it's a scent I love or hate, it's very distracting.

For me, it's the slurping and the rustling and the crunching. And cutlery tapping against plates and teeth. And the wet sound of someone moving food around inside their mouth with their tongue; cheeks and lips flexing and slurping against each other because they took too large a mouthful, barely even looking at their food because they're staring at something else. And the snorts of breath around it as they need to keep breathing around a mouthful of food. And the sound of teeth clicking together as they munch too hard. Greasy fingers wiping on themselves or their desks if they even bother to wipe them before tapping away again at a keyboard. Back of a hand scraping across their face to remove detritus.

This isn't much of a problem if you work in a proper office with four walls and a door, rather than an open hellscape.

I disagree with pretty much everything in this article. I've never been happier than when I worked for a company that provided free, daily, healthy lunches. We were never coerced into working through dinner.

Now I have to food prep dinner and lunch. I'm making 4x the portions just so we each have enough to eat for leftovers. I spend way more of my personal time cooking and doing groceries and not with my family or working on my projects. Food waste has skyrocketed since everything is bought in bulk, and sometimes not all of it gets used. It's created way more dishes too, in meal prep and tupperwares.

Sometimes we ate out the night before, or there are just no leftovers. I can either get unhealthy fast food, wait an hour to get served at a healthy place, or spend even more of my limited personal time preparing a meal for the next day.

I'm curious. It seems like the before after in this situation seems to have more to do with not having a family / having a family, than working somewhere that has food perks / doesn't have food perks.

Unless the the corporation is paying for your entire families food budget, prep, cleaning etc, I think what you have just described is exactly the point of the article: being single and having all (or most) household chores done for you is really attractive and great, having a family and needing to do this yourself for multiple people sucks and is hard.

Ergo, these perks prolong the time spent single and enjoying the perks.

We both lost cafeteria breakfast/lunch when we got new jobs after moving.

Making dinner used to be really easy, just grab some fresh ingredients on the way home and throw together something small and healthy.

Now it's a whole performance. We're constantly trying to make bulk meals, and store the rest for breakfast/lunch. We've gone from preparing 2 servings of food per day to 6 or more. We needed to buy larger kitchen appliances and equipment just to cook/store it all. There are 3x more groceries (We shop on foot and bought one of those little carts) and 3x more dishes. It doesn't seem like much but I've lost at least 30 mins a day, but probably a lot more on average. The food I am eating is, on average, less healthy, less diverse, and less tasty (I am no professional chef).

This article just seemed to resolve to a point that free lunch was a corporate tool to discourage "family formation", and I ultimately disagree. I think a lot of working parents would love to not have to worry about preparing their own lunch meal on top of their families.

I just don't see the connection of "free food == single life", and the article doesn't really establish one. At worst I'd still end up with the same amount of time, and at best it has given me more free time to spend with my family.

I'm unfamiliar with life in America, but why don't you just eat at a cheap no-frills restaurant instead of buying groceries and spending time to cook all of that food? Are those restaurants not available within walking distance, or too expensive, or don't have good salads / fish / meat / whatever?

Cheap no-frills restaurants are typically unhealthy in America. Think Mcdonalds. Also being a bit of a drive is not an issue.

Most of the US doesn't have a dining out culture like in some other parts of the world, like Singapore, Vietnam etc

It depends - when I worked in Novato there was only one mediocre cafe (which was slow) and one restaurant (which was a bit too upscale) within walking distance. There were a few more options within short driving distance, but it was kind of a hassle.

Free, healthy, and delicious food makes people happy.

I am puzzled as to how offering perks that make people happy, except in extreme examples, are a bad thing — even if it does result in a net benefit to the employer.

I don't mean to be condescending, but it rather seems like you haven't learnt how to cook. In my home, we have the culture of simply cooking our own meals since it's much cheaper than eating out. Generally, one meal (one pack of meat) will last us (me and my wife) for 3-4 lunches. Nothing gets wasted, everything gets eaten. There are no 'leftovers', we cook simply for multiple portions.

Sounds to me like you need to learn to cook in bulk; your unhappiness simply sounds like lack of cooking experience.

The tax position of benefits varies by country. Australia, for example, has the Fringe Benefits Tax, which is a tax on benefits levied on the employer at the highest marginal tax rate.

Unsurprisingly, Australian workplaces are miserly. At my last job before moving to the US, there was a hot water dispenser installed in the staff room. But we, the employees, had to buy for coffee, tea, sugar and milk ourselves. It was achieved on an honour system, with a little container where you would throw in some cash from time to time.

Food and drinks are not FBT’d in Australia.

> Food and/or drink provided to, and consumed by, current employees on your business premises on a working day are exempt property benefits

https://www.ato.gov.au/law/view/document?DocID=SAV%2FFBTGEMP...

There are plenty of companies in Australia with very good benefits, like Atlassian and Canva.

I guess they were the regular sort of misers, then.

I used to work in a company that gave free food and I'd choose that even if they offered to pay me 15 dollars per meal (B, L, D) for every weekday instead. There is just such a massive emotional value to having free food all around the office. It was a sad sad day when I left that job.

I think this is exactly one of the points the article makes: free food makes employees stick around longer.

My most memorable experiences at Google were perks like the invited talks (I got to have a very long chat with author of the Moose Wood Cookbook Molly Katzen and a short chat about Reddit dropping Common Lisp with Alexis Ohanian) and the interesting food at 28 cafes. The work was OK, I just did one specific thing - not much freedom, but my main great memories were the perks.

Another great perk was the invited chefs from local restaurants who would be guest chefs, and they would be available to talk with.

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