Life insurance is provided as a separate benefit.
Pro-tip for HNers here, by the way: Notice how you responded much, much more viscerally to this emotional, novel perk than you would have if Google had described it as an industry-standard perk with a knob slightly adjusted? Please remember this the next time you're e.g. writing a pricing plan or feature grid.
Life insurance is provided by extremely conservative, highly diversified investment companies.
> Notice how you responded much, much more viscerally to this emotional, novel perk ...
Yeah, with nausea that employees are expected to gamble something so important on ... AdSense.
The point is that betting on your employer is a bad idea when it comes to insurance products and especially annuities. If you want your kids to have financial support if you die, you owe it to them to buy policies from more than one conservative insurance company. The whole point of insurance is to defray risk, not get a handsome payout.
The interesting perks are the ones that save the employee more than money. Free food does more than save employees from spending money on brown bag lunches or fast food joints: it saves employees from having to even think about how they'll eat lunch. Shuttle service? It doesn't just save employees the money they'd spend commuting, it saves them time and the frustration of dealing with traffic or public transportation.
In that sense, a survival benefit like this isn't just the company throwing a few extra dollars for life insurance at employees. It's not just saving employees money, it's saving employees from the pain of having to concern themselves with how their surviving dependents will get along. They don't need to see a doctor for a physical to get this benefit. They don't need to calculate their number of expected children, multiply by their expected college expenses in a decade, figure in the remaining cost of their mortgage, the time it will take their spouse to find employment, etc. in order to put a number of how large a life insurance policy they need to take out; they can simply rest easy knowing that their dependents will be taken care of for a decade or longer and not give it a second thought.
The survival benefit Google offers in addition to industry-standard life insurance is only "an entirely cosmetic abstraction layer" in the most uninteresting of ways.
(Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer for Google, but these opinions are entirely my own.)
That's only sort of true. What large corporations offer in addition to things that can be abstracted as money is collective bargaining / purchasing power.
The important inequality is that there's not fundamental equivalence between a dollar spent by Google and that dollar given to an employee to be spent on the same aim. Real benefits, as opposed to those which are simply redirected salary, are those where the corporation leverages its collective power to obtain a significant discount or make possible things which would otherwise be unavailable.
Google can in bulk buy insurance policies that might even be wholly impossible for individuals to acquire at any reasonable price point. Certainly there are some benefits (insurance or otherwise) that would not be reasonably available to individuals to buy a la carte.
This, however, is probably not one of them. Extra life insurance benefits are probably something that could rather easily be rolled up in a standard life insurance policy. That said, Google probably does get more bang for their buck than the average consumer would.
I've worked at several large companies where almost all of the insurance (health, life, etc) was done on a self-insured basis, with an insurance company providing providing administrative oversight (validating claims) for a flat fee. (But not actually providing insurance coverage.) If necessary, a company can buy reinsurance to cover claims above some (very, very high) deductible, the same way that your insurance company does.
And the reason why large companies do this is that, in fact, they do get a lot more bang for the buck than any of their employees could as individual consumers.
This is exactly what life insurance is. Death benefit: 5x salary total, payable in ten annual installments. Anybody worrying about their future does need to worry if 5x salary is going to be a sufficient amount.
... is it just me or would this be an incredible perk? If a roll of quarters and an envelope with $250 worth of $1, $5, and $20 bills were delivered to my desk every month I'd save a lot of time going to the ATM or the laundromat for tips/laundry/cash-only restaurants/etc. I think I'd willingly give up a lot more of my salary than it's actually worth for the convenience of perks like that. Free laundry (like, full wash and fold and dry cleaning)? Shit, for that I'd probably take a $95K job over a $100K job (all other things being equal) even though it's really worth ~$1000 at most (comparing against the cost of laundry services, not machines, of course). Does Facebook still have that?
OK. Give me your postal details, pay me $1000 per month, and I can organise that for you.