Pizzatime: Throw a pizza party for your remote team

Downside, when the company gives you a voucher for £20 to order food (that ought to be enough for anyone!).

Turns out the delivery app automatically adds £10 in delivery/service fee, and there's hardly any food you can pick for the remaining £10. Had to buy out of my own pocket.

My company has done this and I hate it because 20+ people all ordering some fast(ish) food for individual delivery through a disintermediary service has so many things wrong with.

I can't reconcile trying to discourage wasteful, race-to-the-bottom, lowest-price-first lifestyles and yet clueless acts like food delivery apps.

from the FAQ:

"I have a complaint about my pizza.

No."

This seems like the kind of service where if your pizza arrives at all it's by the grace of God, let alone getting there at the right time or being the right order.

Gr8 customer service

That was my first thought. How are they ordering pizzas? I could see a backend portal combined with phone calls working well, but I doubt that a stereotypical tech startup is comfortable using humans to order. And if I ran a Dominos pizza store, I would certainly find an automated order by text-to-speech or email to be fraudulent and ignore it.

No.

(as per their FAQ).

No.

I've been studiously avoiding the local lockdown Friday 4:30pm "drinking together on video" events. Work events are already awkward enough as it is, at least in real life you can have multiple concurrent conversations going on.

Using $Video_call_tech, it's predicated on one person talking at a time.

I have a weekly meeting with ~10 friends by Zoom. During the lockdown it's impossible to meet IRL, and we are distributed in ~4 countries, so we are even meeting more than before.

Not really.

If it’s voluntary perhaps, but mandatory crap like this sucks.

If people want this, they are welcome to join but don’t force social community at work.

Imagine "living your dream to the fullest" and build this startup. This is the broest SV can get.

No. I find Zoom (and the like) to be generally painful. The less of it, the better.

I mean, what are you going to do in a lockdown?

We did "meet" a couple of times for remote beer last year with the rest of the team.

It's not like going out, but it was better than nothing to spend some off-work time with the colleagues.

Online social events are neither social nor events. What is physically a mingling cocktail party feels like an AA meeting.

No.

Yes but their big idea is that pizza is a fundamentally underpriced item relative to the value it brings a group of people... sitting in front of laptops...

$70 is cheaper then paying your company staff to organize the logistics.

I'm not sure it's an unpopular take so long as you don't expect other members of your team to join you if they don't want to.

Leaving aside whether you want a manufactured social event like this.

I have trouble imagining how it works. The food will invariably arrive very asynchronously. I have limited delivery options where I live and actually end up going and picking up a pizza from one or two different places if I want one. (Or make one at home.) I don't have any interest in some app/third party randomly picking a pizza place and delivering to me.

If you must have a remote team social event, just let people deal with their own food and drink.

And if they find one, how confident are they at ordering in Telugu or Urdu?

"We will attempt to place orders in any country and location!" Yeah, right. Never mind team members in South Asia.... I'm in the south-east of England, and neither Deliveroo nor UberEats offers service to my town. Just Eat can find a couple of local restaurants that claim to offer delivery, but pizza isn't among my options.

I think their idea of a "remote team" may be quite limited.

In this context, a pizza party is an office party with pizza.

Back in the early 2000s, when Amazon announced the 2-pizza team concept, my team thought "great, we're a 2-pizza team now, let's get some pizza." Then we found out that the pizza is theoretical - you don't get a budget for ordering pizza.

Gosh I think it really depends on your company. Sometimes extra work needs to get done, that’s part of being a salaried employee to me. Providing food is a nice acknowledgment of work that, while it falls within the job description, falls outside of normal work hours.

Whether a job takes undue advantage of salaried employees times is another matter entirely. At my work, 36 hour hackathons would never fly, corporate fun is either paid or optional, and late nights to meet a deadline happen a couple times a year - no problems there. I’m sure that’s not how it is at Amazon but I think the problems there run deeper than the food.

Eh, after our chip fab burned down, I was part of the recovery team sent into the (not burned down, but technically part of the same building) computer laboratories. Basically our remit was, identify key machines or paperwork that needs to be retrieved, ensure anything that needs to be running is restarted, stay away from the access corridors into presumably unsafe sections leading towards the destroyed fab, and if you see anything that is out of place in a normal office building that just suddenly had its power go out (e.g. smoke damage or actual smoldering debris), retreat and report what you saw to the team surveying the damage who are trained to go somewhere actually dangerous.

Anyway they ordered us pizza and I thought that was nice. It felt like a team activity, and pizza is a team food. Also you're wearing gear, so having pizza brought in saves changing. And the insurers are out the price of a state-of-the-art chip fab, so what do they care about buying us pizza?

But obviously I'm not working unpaid overtime, the job is the job, if I need to put an extra hour in to ship the code today I can do that, if I need some time to wait for a plumber tomorrow I'll just take it, if you've got a two person job you need to hire two people not expect me to do more.

If your workplace has work-life balance problems or you feel under rewarded for your work, that's not because pizza is the problem, that's a whole separate problem and it's exactly as weird to blame pizza for that problem as it would be for management to think pizza can solve it.

In the UK at least I believe the tax rules mean the business can justify the expense of taking everybody out for food and fun (e.g. pizza and bowling, or golf plus cheese and wine if you're determined that pizza is for children although personally I would take pizza and bowling) say once a year so long there is a business purpose to the meeting, so e.g. you spend an hour attending a presentation about the corporate mission and financial projections with little relationship to your actual job, then you spend the rest of the day eating and hanging out.

so true.

also the idea of a "virtual" pizza party makes me feel kind of uncomfortable. it's like we bought you pizza so let us gawk at you while you eat it. no thanks.

i don't like looking at myself on a camera, let alone while shoving a pizza into my gob. but im sure more extroverted people would enjoy it.

Double the insult if it’s some crummy Dominos pizza.