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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

Free food to me is worth more than $10 per meal. It's the time that kills you. If you work out your rough hourly salary and calculate how much money you waste making food then it's worth thousands of dollars a month.

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Measuring non work activities by how much opportunity cost there is in salary is a losing game, imo. Cooking isn't time that I can be paid for. (And besides, shouldn't we all be considering that time ours and not our employers anyhow?)

If you'd prefer to think of it as 'X company will give you 40 more minutes of leisure per day' or however much you cook, it's probably the closest financial approximation you can get.

Another way to calculate it would be to try and figure out what you would pay for another 40 minutes in a day, but that starts getting very subjective very quickly.

I have the opposite view, that I would rather be cooking or at least away from work for a break. I optimize for me, not for my employer.

Working for a salary, outside doing your job for the hours ageeed is free money for them.

I cook to relax, to get away from the computer.

only if the time that you’re making food is time that you could be getting paid but aren’t.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted (/sigh) because you're not wrong: from a strictly cost-of-time POV, an engineer making food is a pretty poor use of time. Now that doesn't mean you need to or even should work an extra hour (or whatever) either. You can use that for free time and it's still a net benefit.

Now, if making your own food makes you happy and you want to do it, do that. Of course. But having the option not to do that. How is that bad?

Because it gives the implied impression that time can only be valued by money, or that it should be in all circumstances. That's a recipe for depression imo.

This is a good point, now that I work from home I often spend ~40 minutes a day cooking for myself. I ain't even fancy in my cooking. I am also not counting the spinup and spindown time around cooking (or my bad habit of making far more food than I should reasonably be eating).

;; Though if it is thousands a month to you then you are either much better paid than I have ever been or are going all out on your meals. :)

How much time did you spend commuting, though? Many people in the Bay Area spent a lot more than 40m on their daily commute. I spent 1h15m on my walk to/from work.

I was recently laid off, but at my last 2 previous jobs I spend exactly 25 minutes door to door (Oakland to SF).

That’s hard to pull off, unless you practically live inside a BART station, and your workplace is also right next to one.

Hah, more than that, I insisted on arriving at work at 7:00 AM and leaving at 3:00 PM, so I could get the sweet sweet 12 minute commute both ways. :)

Boil water (other things can be done in parallel)

Add tofu, soy sauce, and green onion (45 seconds of effort)

Let it cook/cool down for 10 mins (other things can be done in parallel)

Delicious and healthy meal that wont hurt your wallet or time budgets

This assumes that you have ingredients on hand, and experience cooking. I won't comment on the meal choice, as that is a very subjective. Also, a lot of people like to have variety, which if you work at some of these big companies will provide.

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