What's The Value of a Free Lunch? | Hacker News Reader

What's The Value of a Free Lunch?

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33 pointsmike247734 comments

I've always valued a midday walk in fresh air, away from my desk. I'm happy to do it with co-workers.

At the two places I've worked that offered the free lunch, there was a lot of pressure to stay in the office for the lunch, both implicit and explicit. I felt the free lunch offer was not so much a boon to my productivity but as an encroachment on my personal time.

Perhaps only coincidentally, I felt those two companies also had many problems understanding their engineering and creative employees and their needs, probably familiar to a lot of HN folks: flexible working hours, office layout, transparency, etc.

Our company has been in hot water for not properly compensating employees during our "free lunch / trainings" that we hold every so often. Yes, you're giving them free food, no they don't get a choice and yes that's illegal. Pay up, clueless managers.

I was new at a company that did this. We had to submit weekly timesheets. No one told me the procedure but I figured, everyone attended so I figured marking down 30 minutes (out of 60) on the time on the timesheet billed to the company was a fair deal.

A few days later a company-wide email was sent out specifying that these trainings were optional and not to be billed to the company.

They did pay me for the time though that time.

Ah, what a joke. I recall someone not putting it on their timesheet and instead going directly to the Department of Labor. Good on them, I say. I've got a vested interested in the company doing well, but that was a ridiculous policy.

That's not all places though -- I've worked at a company with free lunch that was awesome about it. Eat there if you want; if you don't like the food that day or just felt like not eating there then go eat somewhere else. In fact, my work friends and I started doing weekly outside lunches just to get a little more variety and to see some of the restaurants we'd stopped going to when catered lunch began (first world problems...)

I had the CTO of a startup reach out to me multiple times over the course of a year. It was in a similar space to the company I was at at that time. When I came by, the office was basically a large open room with what amounted to something like long picnic tables for desks (their version of open office) that resembled a call center. The CTO then mentioned that teams take their lunches together. I was there during the lunch time, there was little chatter, banter, or any non-work interaction.

That was the last discussion with that company.

I like that google has multiple locations for lunch and employees roam and get out of their buildings (been invited many times). Where I am, we have a catered lunch, generally do it as a team, but I am not in every day...and caterers get lazy over time. So, lunch w/ the team every couple of days is ok. When I am at home, lunch is about getting outside and getting a ride or a surf session in. A small meal and exercise is much better for me than sitting around and chit chatting.

I cannot imagine being in an environment where everyone was so gung-ho about "The Mission" that they all took lunch together in the office. It sounds cultish. It would creep me out.

When I worked in an office, I was there to do a job. I was there to get work done and go home. I had my own things I wanted to do. The company pays me for 40 hours a week. Nothing more. They don't deserve any more.

And my side projects are mine and I will do with them as I wish, not volunteer them on the altar of 10% time. Maybe if (proverbial) I weren't trapped in the office all the time with free lunches and rock climbing walls I wouldn't need the company to bestow upon me the extreme privilege of doing what I want with a small portion of my time.

Why does this math even make sense? Why wouldn't people just leave half an hour early?

Also, reminds me of factory work. We all took lunch breaks together. Sat in the provided lunch area. It was well understood you were expected to be back to work in half an hour or your ass was grass.

Also also, reminds me of school. Get on the bus. Go to class. Do what you're told. Read what you're told. Think what you're told. Eat this lunch that we have provided for your maximal nutritional value at minimal cost/benefit ratio, strategically balanced to avoid inciting a riot.

Fuck. That. Shit. I'm an adult and a professional. I'll take two hours for lunch on my own dollar, thank you. I've got potential clients to entertain as I plan my exit out of your Branch Davidian complex.

Dang. You give people a free lunch and this is how they react...

TANSTAAFL

The math is off. Employers PAY the average employee $35/hour, but they get > $35/hour value out of the employee---or else they would go out of business. The employer's margin varies widely, but is often at least 2x.

However, I feel that when I had a free lunch I wasn't that much more productive. I need breaks during the day. I'm going to take them whether or not you give me a free lunch.

I agree that taking breaks more often is needed -- Although I would also say that going to get your own lunch is extra required "work".

The idea here is the average worker doesn't have to worry about it. The less they worry about or "work" on things outside of work, the more they can exert energy at work.

Am I alone in wanting to get away from the people I work with for an hour every day for lunch?

I get a free lunch at work every day and some days I take it and eat it by myself. It's not always necessary to be social.

That's a good start. It's not just hanging out with the same people though: it's also a change of scenery. I find that a sammich on the park bench knocks the morning's clutter away and makes me more productive in the afternoon.

The Henry Ford-esque desire to treat programmers like a resource to be relentlessly milked (we can save half an hour or dev time!) is a bit of a turnoff.

Don't forget tax advantages: if structured properly, the costs are tax deductible for the employer and do not count as additional revenue for the employee.

I'm not sure that humans' productive output can be modeled so simply (hours working -> amount produced). It's a bold assumption that the primary value of lunch on campus is to increase "hours worked".

I think that the other goals suggested in the article -- more frequent communication, and better friendships -- are most likely more valuable than the time gained, and perhaps significantly so.

Furthermore, there are still a few benefits associated with feeding employees that weren't mentioned.

Among them:

-- reduced cognitive load from meal choices (better focus, even subconsciously, on other things)

-- healthier options, since in-house food is not subject to competitive market pressures which force it to make its food more addictive and less healthy.

and what I feel like is the most important:

-- employee retention. People are wired to get pleasure from being fed [1], and getting pleasure from something usually makes you like it, so it is not a stretch to consider that being fed by a group may increase feelings of loyalty and belonging to that group, or at the very least make you like the experience of being fed by them.

From an employee retention perspective, which is one of the sorest spots in the tech industry in terms of lost productivity (workers leaving causes huge knowledge gaps and lost time), free meals make employees happy both consciously (money saved by employee = happiness) and subconsciously (being fed = happiness)

Of course, if every company does it it may not help. But the absence will definitely hurt, so it's likely always going to be the best option!

[1] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004012/

Employee retention and helping teams get and stay gelled is the real reason to do this, but the "hours worked" argument is a useful tool for convincing skeptical execs.

"Zero", at one company I worked at. As they tried to argue when, a year or so after going public, they took it away.

Ironically, they were very big into presenting "total compensation" as a larger-than-your-salary number to wave around demonstrating just how much they were giving you.

Funny when "free lunch" was not part of that, because it better aided their (pretty weak) argument.

Remember, TANSTAAFL.

P.S. I do take others' points, e.g. that it is advantageous to structure and argue in a manner that has tax benefits.

I rather take a full lunch hour and pay for my food than get it for free, but only take 30 minutes.

The issue with some suburban companies is that there's wasted travel time that benefits neither the company nor the employee (unless they like traveling I guess).

Suburban office workers might easily take 30 minutes or more to get to where they want to eat lunch, regardless of how long they take to eat it. In reality the trade off is taking an hour to eat and getting it for free (because you don't travel) versus paying for it and only getting 30 minutes.

So glad this topic is brought up on HN and great to see all the comments around it. Taking a lunch break, with co-workers or not, paid by employers or not, is the most natural thing that has been practiced by people for hundreds of years in all cultures. It is not only pleasant, productive, but also necessary.

>>Cubist Pharmaceuticals, a company with about 750 employees, recently put sensors on 30 of their employees to track the tone and frequency of their lunch conversations.

Whats next? A/B Testing the food ?

Proper nutrition is extremely important for productivity, so that probably wouldn't be a terrible idea...

That's actually awesome and should happen! Test various combinations of macro-nutrients!

That is getting uncomfortably close to Neuromancer territory:

"M-G employees above a certain level were implanted with advanced microprocessors that monitored mutagen levels in the bloodstream. Gear like that would get you rolled in Night City, rolled straight into a black clinic."

The half hour savings isn't really a thing if people take the free lunch, eat it at their desks while they work, then go and take an hour "lunch" later in the day anyway (as happens with some at my office, though the free lunch comes just once a week).

So just because I got lunch I'm going to be free to work an extra half hour?

There's no way that's sustainable. Like @goo mentioned, more hours doesn't equal more produced, by any means.

I think not having your employees discussing sensitive work in public restaurants around your office (thus easily monitored by competitors) is worth something, too.

Apple doesn't actually offer free food I believe. It's heavily subsidized, but it's not technically free.

The real advantage of the 1/2 hour lunch is that then you can have a nice (mostly) guilt free afternoon nap :)

So the business person inside me is thinking: "What if I charge for that lunch, but keep the price lower than competing venues in the area. I'll get even more money!"

You just invented the company cafeteria :)

A "you pay" (but sometimes subsidised) on premise cafeteria exists at lots of large technology / engineering companies.

The free lunch buffet is of zero value to me because I don't want to eat any of that stuff. I habitually just have two pints of 1% milk and a pint of OJ for lunch.

Great insight.. But I also believe that there are pros and cons accompanying this idea. Nice post though!

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