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Comment by taskstrike | Hacker News Reader

Some things they mention should be done at every tech company:

1. Give employees free lunch 2. Give every employee an iphone 3. Github for code review

Actually, I wouldn't be terribly happy if my company gave me a daily free lunch. It would be a disincentive to get out of the office and away from my co-workers once a day, which is something that I think makes me happier and more productive. (I work in a big city, where diverse types of food are a short walk away. If you work in an office park in Silicon Valley, I can see why a free lunch might be more appealing.)

Also, having a cell phone paid for by my employer might give my employer the idea that I'm always available to them, which I don't want to encourage. Since I'm a developer of software that doesn't get deployed to the web in real time, it isn't likely that an issue can't wait until the next work day. For dire emergencies, they have my home number.

> It would be a disincentive to get out of the office and away from my co-workers once a day, which is something that I think makes me happier and more productive.

If stepping away from your coworkers makes you happy and productive, your company has bigger problems than charging for meals.

I actually like my co-workers very much, but being an introverted type (as I suspect many developers are), I need a break from people once in a while. Even being with my best friends for ten hours straight would be a bit tiring for me.

He didn't say that it makes him "happy and productive", he said it makes him "happier and more productive".

You do realize that there is a difference here, right? I assume that you are an intelligent being that knows basic English grammar and hence you must have simply misread that comment.

I really like the "we'll provide free food onsite, and if you go out to lunch with anyone, we'll pay for that too (but keep it reasonable)" -- encouraging employees go to out to lunch together, or to have lunch with people from other companies, or potential customers, or hires, or whatever, seems worth the cost of lunch. You may or may not be able to deduct the cost of the meals (depending on who they're with), and only at 50%, but who cares.

What a hassle. Just pay more.

Basically all good engineers I've talked to at places with free food onsite value it at at least cost, and often at >>1x cost. Encouraging people to go be social at lunch itself (and not to eat at their desks, at least not every day) is a win for retention. Check the zillion times this has come up on HN.

Not offering free food will hurt in recruiting a lot more than the cost, even if you moved $1 in food costs directly into salary.

I mean, if even Yahoo! eventually figures it out, it is probably true.

Google gave out cell phones as a gift to promote interest in their mobile business. Then they gave out cell phones for traditional work related purposes as well.

>Also, having a cell phone paid for by my employer might give my employer the idea that I'm always available to them.

Heh. well, I've been on call forever. Nearly everyone I know that works at google is also on-call. (they seem to have a hierarchy, where the more valuable folks don't get called very often.)

So yeah, company cell phone? yeah, sure, that is expected. I think the thing is that most people think of an iphone as nicer than your average cellphone. From that perspective, e.g. we are going to call you anyhow, they might as well give you a nice cellphone to carry around.

(that said, a cellphone without a keyboard is of limited utility. I need to be able to type and see the screen at the same time. SSH on iphone doesn't cut it.)

Not only that, when IT departments start thinking about company owned phones they start thinking about securing important data so they start locking things down and it would be bad if some sexual harrasment was being done with company property so they need some monitoring and filtering and on and on and down the rabbit hole it goes.

You mean a smartphone, right? Why does it have to be an iphone?

And why even that? A laptop I could understand, but phone?

The argument could be made that a smartphone-as-tool-for-company-business should be as appliance-like as possible.

Years ago, that would have meant BlackBerries all around. Today, it means iOS.

I wouldn't say GitHub is the best system for code review. Pull requests work OK for open source and outside contributors, but I'd rather use Gerrit instead.

The best thing about a free lunch isn't necessarily that you'll be eating nice food (hopefully) and saving a bit of money. It's that it forces you to ditch your machine or your ritual and to spend some non-work time with your work colleagues.

As a regular desk-eater (like many I assume) you definitely miss that aspect in favour of getting a bit more work done.

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