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Comment by scelerat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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