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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

Some interesting quotes from Dropcam's CEO last year:

“Our business model is very straightforward. I think if your business model is not straightforward, it veers into potentially being unethical, if you look at things that are quote-unquote ‘free.’ None of the people who work here want to work on something that works like that. They look at it as tricking the user, when [a company is] turning around and using some part of the user’s data to make revenue."

and

"He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days."

http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2013/04/23/dropcam-ceos...

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He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days.

WTF is wrong with people!?! I'd work my butt off at a place that provides thrice-a-day healthy, delicious, diverse, vegetarian (for me) meals, on-site gym and sleeping pods!! Hell, I'd have surely done that when I was a decade younger! I hate cooking and it is ridiculously expensive to buy food with my dietary constraints in the open market. Especially food that is not only delicious but also healthy in the long term.

Why is there this utterly misguided hatred against "company food"?

Even after breaking down my yearly compensation to an hourly rate, I bet there will be a marginal difference in the money the company makes by keeping me working the extra hours and the price I'd pay for buying such food everyday (remember, I hate to cook).

Plus, nobody forces you to eat that food, if you really prefer cooking your own food or buying it from elsewhere, keep doing that.

I really feel that good, healthy food is an awesome incentive and stigmatizing it reeks of a bloody first world problem.

> I'd work my butt off at a place that provides three-a-day healthy, delicious, diverse, vegetarian (for me) meals

> Even after breaking down my yearly compensation to an hourly rate, I bet there will be a marginal difference in the money the company makes by keeping me working the extra hours and the price I'd pay for buying such food everyday

Any company providing you multiple meals per day for free is getting the better end of the bargain. Make no mistake about it. It's an arbitrage between the cost of cooking labor + cooking material vs. your labor.

In other words, you're getting the short end of the stick. People do not value perks rationally. If they did, they would deny every last one of them.

In other words, you're getting the short end of the stick. People do not value perks rationally. If they did, they would deny every last one of them.

How many people value anything rationally? Ever?

As humans we are programmed to be pain averse. I hate foraging for and/or cooking my food. I consider it an utter waste of my time and breath. Yes, I care about my health, but don't have the money to pay an arm and a leg for a personal chef, or even plan meals. In short, I want to eat well (tasty+healthy), but without any direct effort on my part. That is the pain I am averse to. If a company can remove that pain, for me it is a fair exchange, even if in a most superficial manner.

Give and Take. Plus, no exchange in life is perfectly equivalent. Is it?

A personal chef isn't rational either--there are economies of scale here. But you could pool your and your coworkers' budgets to get an office chef, for an amount from your paycheque much less than the value of the time you're funging against by deciding to work overtime.

Fully realized, you could have all the benefits offered (selfishly) by your employing corporation instead provided by an employee's union co-op. Even the building. The corporation would just be thin pipe keeping labor flowing in one direction and money flowing in the other.

Nice concept! Free-agent nation, but with a Marxist twist, heh! I like it! Any place that has successfully implemented this in the US?

Similar concepts to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

There was a company, a big one, that I forget the name of that was run like that through the second half of the 20th century, but I can't remember the name :(

Perhaps it was Mondragon? Mondragon started in 1956 and is now at 80000 workers and an annual revenue of 14 billion. It's still a worker cooperative in the 21st century, though :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Not a US company or established in the US. So not the example I asked for. I am aware of other non-US cooperatives, eg. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul

That would be such a whiney pain in the ass. This is like saying an air conditioned office is an irrational perk, it isn't. It is better for everyone. Besides, if you get your work done at Google there is nothing stopping you from reading a book during the one extra hour of overtime you'd have to waste between lunch and dinner.

>How many people value anything rationally? Ever?

So you admit you are getting a bad deal?

>I hate foraging

Have you EVER foraged in your life?

>I want to eat well (tasty+healthy), but without any direct effort on my part.

If you are talking about the meals that Google provides, there is no evidence that their food is any more healthy than alternatives.

So you admit you are getting a bad deal?

Personally, quite the opposite actually, if you read my full comment.

Have you EVER foraged in your life?

You mean, by the dictionary definition of foraging? In the wild? Then, No. But, if you mean gathering edible items that are uncooked or semi-cooked, to be cooked for creating a meal, then, Yes. And I consider it an utter waste of time. So, what's your point?

As for the nutrition value of Google meals, perhaps you know more than I do? Are you a (ex)Googler? I'd wait to hear from some current Google employees to get the truth on this point, rather than rush to judgement.

Personally, I like cooking but for someone who wants to eat well/healthily but (strongly) wants it to "just happen," a Google-style company cafeteria actually seems like a pretty good benefit. Even eating out takes effort, especially if you're picky about what you'll eat even within the domain of quality/"healthy" (whatever your parameters are for that).

I'm a bodybuilder, CEO and a parent. Cooking your own healthy meals is so ridiculously easy and cheap (in terms of time).

So is my wife (not the CEO or bodybuilder part, but parent and cooking). More power to the likes of you!

I'm sure there are as many folks with your motivations and inclinations as there are with mine.

Assumption here being that by refusing corporate food just anybody can go home and whip up a great healthy meal.

Just because you are getting less out of the deal than they are does not mean you are getting less out of the deal than not having any deal at all.

The deal "provide me a decent meal and I'll stay at work another hour or so" is, evaluated rationally, completely 100% fine by me. I'd rather stay at work for an hour than take an hour out of my day to cook & clean, or spend the equivalent of an hour's wage on feeding myself.

And this is called added value. The product is more valuable than its components simply added together. Something that hipsters who look very hard, every day, for injustices to fix, always seem to miss.

I would argue that if they gave you the money they spend on food in the salary, you would not be able to eat as well (or even half as well). The cost of the food that I get at my company is ridiculously low per person (this might not be true at smaller places, but I am in a 1000+ person office).

You probably generate a 5-10x multiple over your salary at most tech companies (if you're a dev or one of the other people those perks are "intended for"). At an early stage startup, it can be way more than that (because success or failure is kind of binary).

Genuine question. Is there any verifiable, quantitative data to substantiate what you wrote or is it all a HackerNews urban-myth?

I am genuinely curious because I hear that argument thrown around a lot, anytime non-monetary compensation is being discussed among the HN crowd.

If you're talking about the 5x revenue there are certainly a lot of public data on that.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aapl+goog+msft+facebook

Look for revenue/employee.

And that's with LOTS of overhead people, communications complexity, etc.

If you strip out just the developers at a big company which is very profitable and product focused, you'll get even more insane revenue-per-employee figures.

It's depressing/unpolitic to say, but the "free meals, shuttles, etc." are intended for the developers, management, and other highly-in-demand people. It's probably overall worse for corporate culture to set up multiple tiers of employees, some of whom don't qualify for those perks, but a company with huge numbers of easily-recruited, low-value-add employees (e.g. walmart) tends to have crappy perks; a company with a small number of key employees with absurd productivity and profitability per employee (hedge fund?) tends to have amazing perks.

(That startups tend toward binary outcomes based on the productivity of the first 5-10 people is probably not in dispute here, I assume and hope.)

Point proven.

Wow, at first I thought that you were being sarcastic, but then I kept reading.

I don't know about you, but my salary (plus benefits) rate is about $95-100 / hr.

So, let's say I 'work my butt off' for an extra 4-6 hours a day. That is an extra $3000 of unpaid work, per week, that the company gets for giving me food. Or, $200 per meal.

(That's not even taking into account the considerable extra value that the company gets in owning the results of my work.)

I doubt 4-6 hours extra per day (13-14 hour days) is typical.

Aside from that quibble, look at it from both sides:

The company spends a few hundred dollars a week on meals and gets 5-10x return on that money. Everybody agrees this is a good deal for the company.

The employee trades a few hours of his life for food. The hours he works, he would not have received any money for anyway unless he was working another paying job. The employee is trading "opportunity costs" (imaginary value) and receiving substantial value in "free" food.

If the "opportunity cost" of those extra work hours are sitting in front of Netflix watching zombie movies, he probably got a good deal trading that time for food. If the "opportunity cost" is starting the next hot startup, he got a bad deal.

Talk to anybody who works for a company who offers meals. 12-14 hour days are typical at most. Not officially, of course, but that's the point. Raw ROI aside, the real benefit of offering meals is to foster the type of culture where the company is "home." You eat there. You exercise there. You socialize there. There's no need to have a life outside of work, so a lot of the employees don't have one. If you're always around your work and people you work with, chances are you'll spend most of your time thinking about and doing work. It's a way of getting 14 hour days out of people without them realizing it or complaining about it. In that way, it's absolutely a form of "mind control" (operand conditioning).

Most would say the above is harmless and it benefits the company, which benefits the employee, so why is it such a bad thing? It's bad because this type of culture makes it extra easy for engineers to burn out.

I don't really mind staying late at the office (with has gigabit nLayer, a 4K monitor, free drinks and snacks, etc.) vs. at home (which has comcast, and is pretty small). The commute between the locations is a pain, but otherwise I have no real difference between "being online doing whatever I want to do" at home vs. at the office.

Right now, I'm working on a TC article and some conference talks on independent research. I'll probably drive home once the traffic is done. I'll go to my co-presenter's house Saturday night to work on the talks again.

The "work vs. personal" distinction is really secondary to me, compared to "stuff I want to do, vs. stuff I'm forced to do"; work-related projects are just as often "want to" as home projects are "forced to".

I'd gladly work an 11 hour day at a company that provided food if two of those hours were meals (lunch and dinner) and another hour was time spent in the gym/playing games. That's 8 hours of work, and three hours of free recreation that would have cost me a non-trivial sum of money elsewhere. I just wouldn't want that to be expected.

> "He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days."

Is there actually honestly anyone out there who doesn't think so? I mean, is it really disguised even? We give you stuff, you make your life revolve around the company. It's a very straightforward exchange in my opinion.

Hell, people have directly said to me in interviews "We want this company to be all you think about" when explaining why they'd prefer to hire me full-time rather than part-time.

I've often thought about this problem:

On the one hand, you want to provide perks that offset personal cost to your employees AND reduce the amount of time it takes for them to do something like lunch with the result in increased productivity (ostensibly simply due to removing factors such as travel-time-to-lunch-place).

The company store comes to mid, as well.

There are many great benefits that companies do provide: free commute costs (bus, bike and ferry service) as well as on-site food...

Perhaps a way to quash any misgivings about such services would be to provide a daily per diem for services as pay, where you get the per diem pay UNLESS you partake of the companies service instead.

So you badge into each service and thus get that per-diem pay redacted from your check.

If you use NONE of the company's services, then you get that same portion of pay back.

This also has its problems, though.

----

What I would far prefer, though, is tech services system that companies can buy into:

Want your employees to be able to bus from SF to MTN VIEW: pay in and let them badge into that service.

Why should all the tech giants run separate services that are basically all the same routes? Let a company run that, and let ANY company add users and pay based on badging.

Let companies have a "groupon" of sorts for restaurants in their area, where the per-diem lunch allowance is spendable at any restaurant within a radius of the office. The employee will get a % of their meal paid for by the company, and they pay for anything they personally want over the base?

Allow for perks that are not walled to the campus/office/etc.

Heck, Path.com employees had a monthly Uber allowance they could spend...

This should be encouraged in Silicon Valley, to allow startups to share services at a discount which both provides revenue, data, testing, users, validation, etc....

> On the one hand, you want to provide perks that offset personal cost to your employees AND reduce the amount of time it takes for them to do something like lunch with the result in increased productivity (ostensibly simply due to removing factors such as travel-time-to-lunch-place).

Yes, it does make things incredibly convenient. No doubt about that.

But what about just doing it the way it's done in Europe? Where employers are required by law to be paid X amount per month for lunch, X amount of transit, and so on. Company gives you the money, you spend the money whichever way you feel.

I'm not against perks, I'm against hiding them behind some feel-good crap about how much free stuff you get. It's not free, it's part of your paycheck. And it's cheaper for companies than just paying you more, to boot.

I also like the idea of just having a conveniently located lunch place (internal or external business entity, doesn't really matter) that employees go to and pay for stuff with money. It can even be cheaper than going outside because said business has a guaranteed customer base.

Guess that's along the lines of your "allowance" idea. But even less wishy-washy.

PS: when you think about it, it's really kind of funny how all these perks and stuff that magnificent Silicon Valley companies offer their employees, are taken for granted in Europe because they've been there since workers' rights movements

That's called a "salary". The only difference between those subsidies (as we call them here in the European country I live) and regular salary is for tax purposes.

Europe's a big place. We certainly don't have on-site daycares, healthy food by a good chef, life insurance, concierge service, rental cars, gyms, buses with Wi-Fi and such. The only perk I can see is the maternity leave, which has a similar duration (120 days) but doesn't have gender discrimination, and probably the vacations.

There's a lot of value to Google in having everyone on a Google bus being a Googler. You can have sensitive conversations on the bus (also, your employees are less likely to jump ship due to meeting more interesting people...)

Google doesn't actually run the bus themselves; it's Bauer.

(I hate the SV culture of having sensitive meetings in public cafes and restaurants, especially ones frequented by all your most likely competitors! Internal compartmentalization is also a bad extreme, but having a hard "insider vs. outsider" boundary, and then specific short-term projects with their own borders, and all communications about those happening in secure spaces, is my default.)

Kind of funny how your statement is the exact oposite of the famous open office idea: "we have a flat mgmt structure and desks in an open office so the collaboration and free flow of ideas can occur!"

SHARED BUSSES!?!?? Wtf! Do we want tech employees sharing ideas and getting poached?!?! What is this communist Russia???

Uh. I want free flow of information inside the company, or of certain kinds of information between companies (or company and general outsiders). You absolutely do not want to share your most sensitive company discussions with your direct competitors. There's also some information which is regulatorially or legally sensitive and can't be shared outside the company before "everyone" has access to it.

Another source of daily irony is I dislike open plan offices in general as a developer; I'm now more a product manager (although I do tech stuff as well, and conference papers, and such), which is a role which does strongly benefit from open plan, and I've also we've built monitorhenge at a pod of desks in open-plan, out of Seiki 39" 4K and portrait-mode 24" U2410 monitors. It's essentially a re-creation of my favorite work environment; a private office shared with a small team.

How did you seriously conflate sharing ideas with coworkers and sharing ideas with employees from other companies?

There is this thing called public transit. It's where government takes tax money from all companies and their workers and subsidizes a train or bus to go into most neighborhoods and commercial areas... Some companies even provide transit passes to cover the unsubsidized portion. (And then get a tax break for doing so).

For restaurants, this exists in Europe. Your employer gives you a monthly number (around 20) of $10 vouchers that are accepted as cash only by restaurants (though there was a small black market for them). One that I saw in France is called http://www.groupe-cheque-dejeuner.com/en.html

One of my employers reimbursed my work-from-home expenses (ISP, extra landline, printer and toner), and I get to deduct my home office expenses from my income for taxation purposes (percentage of my habitation costs, proportional to the percentage of my office floor space).

Sounds like the mine owner opening up a mine shop for the miners where they can spend their mining earnings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_coal_miners#Company_...

Creepy.

Except for the fact it's nothing like that at all. The perks are free, and employees are generally paid well - when compared to other professions, if, perhaps not their value add.

> The perks are free

Haha.

That's cute.

Perks are at least 60% free because company pays for them with pre-tax money (no income tax/payroll taxes).

The problem with the "company store" was that they paid employees less than their cost of living. And the store sold them items on credit, thus they could never leave the company. This hardly applies to Google or their peers unless you consider the pain of doing your own laundry and cooking your own meals as comparable to crushing debt; which it's not.

I'm not sure what you're getting at.

> "He thinks the lavish perks at many technology companies, especially the free on-campus meals, are a disguised form of mind control, designed to get employees to work 12- or 14-hour days."

I can't agree with this, and I have some experience with both sides of it.

I have worked at a company that does not provide much of anything in the way of perks (Amazon) and a company which is known for them (Google). I've NEVER felt pressured to put in more hours at Google, while at Amazon it was more or less a constant of existence.

As with all anecdotes, your mileage may vary, but I think it has little to do with the perks and more to do with broader company culture. At Amazon, the lack of perks and long hours become badges of honor that you share with your peers. Looking back on it, it feels rather toxic.

Funny how quickly things change when someone offers to hand you a lot of money. Granted, someone's opinions can change, but I feel like the first quote especially describes a personal philosophical value that wouldn't change on a whim.

"Dropcam will come under Nest’s privacy policy, which explains that data won’t be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer’s permission. Nest has a paid-for business model and ads are not part of our strategy. In acquiring Dropcam, we’ll apply that same policy to Dropcam too."

Looks like nothing will change about that straightforward business model.

While technically accurate that statement is really misleading. Nest makes a significant amount of revenue from utility companies who pay up to $50 per thermostat per year for Nest agreeing to turn down their usage during peak times.

This is a very different model than paying someone for a product. While you buy Nest's product, you are still the product (and selling you is a better business for them long-term).

Nest has only recently started operating in the UK so I don't think that any UK energy companies have yet jumped onto that bandwagon. But still I must ask for a source for your claim.

Does the owner of the nest have the option to override such feature? Just because I have a nest in my home doesn't mean my home is well suited to kill the heating during peak times. Yeah it might save me a few quid and the energy company a bunch more killing my heating during peak times. But I am not going to sit in a cold house just because the energy company decide what is best for me. If I can override it or disable it. far enough. But that is like your ISP killing your connection because everyone in your street is watching netflix at the same time you are trying to just have a few good irc take rooms open at the same time.

In a pay per use case (which most net connections don't) we are used to pay what we use. If I need my house heated because I am cold, I want to be able to heat my home.

Throwing a guess out there... I think this applies more to Air Conditioning usage in the US. I'm an expat in MA, my company sends out a few emails in the summer along the lines of 'we are reducing our energy consumption at the request of the power provider, all non essential lighting will be turned off and cooling systems tuned to 'optimal' temperatures'

this is to avoid brownouts. If I recall, the same does no happen in the UK other than everyone making a cuppa at a break in coronation st. (o;

So the utility company pays their customers, who in turn lower their bills by using less energy? Why?

During high demand the utility may be purchasing the energy for rates much higher than they are collecting from the customer.

No, the utility pays Nest. The customers get nothing.

source please.

"Rush Hour Rewards is a service that helps you earn money back from your energy company by using less energy when everyone else is using more.

http://support.nest.com/article/What-is-Rush-Hour-Rewards

Nest's demand response program is called Rush Hour Rewards. They have a good explanation of it on their website [1], but they claim that customers can opt out at any time, customers receive rewards through their electricity supplier.

From what I can gather from tweets by participating customers, they do it because it's cool and exciting not because of the financial rewards.

[1] http://support.nest.com/article/What-is-Rush-Hour-Rewards

It sounds like they pay Nest based on:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2014/01/13/nest-gives...

"Nest founder and CEO Tony Fadell told Forbes last month that his company had struck deals with close to 20 utility companies, who paid Nest $30 to $50 per thermostat annually, to manage the energy usage of Nest customers who had opted into their utility’s demand-response program.

As part of the program, Nest temporarily take over the healing and cooling of a homes for a set period, perhaps a few hours, and customers are notified that an “event” is set to happen some time beforehand. When Nest does this over multiple homes in a neighborhood or county it can, Fadell claimed, lower energy costs for utilities by 50%, by re-routing peak energy being used in empty homes.

“We know how many people are home during those times,” he said “We know which homes have cooling, we can go through the data and we can say we believe we’re a five megawatt power generator or 10 megawatts in this county. That’s what we can deliver – 50-60% of the energy that was consumed in that window has been shifted away.”

The services makes Nest a middle man for utility companies, meaning that Google itself will now play a role in managing energy efficiency programs across wide swathes of home and even counties – something that Google has been keen to do for some time."

This is pretty much why I wouldn't buy a Nest. I don't need a 3rd party knowing when I'm not home.

As opposed to the people driving by who definitely will know, and may actually rob you based on that information?

You can't actually tell if I'm home by driving by. You'd need to get out and walk.

That is, assuming you know the schedule of my automated lights and can accurately guess if I'm home or not with blackout curtains over my windows :P

Even my neighbors don't know when I'm home half the time.

I'm an odd duck.

http://www.pge.com/en/myhome/saveenergymoney/plans/smartac/i...

When demand exceeds supply, brown-outs occur which means a lot of unhappy customers and, considering utilities' monopoly status, calls for investigations.

Wouldn't a for-profit utility company want customers to turn their usage up?

You make no money when your system fails because it's overloaded. Also, most utilities need to purchase energy from other areas, at a significant premium, during peak usage days.

Most customers pay a fixed rate per kWh, but the cost to the utility is dynamic. When the grid is near capacity, electricity may be sold at an order of magnitude below its marginal cost to the utility.

Here in northern California, our utility (PG&E) is experimenting with "peak day" pricing. During peak hours of certain days, electricity costs increase by ~10x. In return we enjoy a lower baseline rate the rest of the year, encouraging us to shift consumption to off-peak hours. It's a great idea for everyone involved.

This and Uber's "surge pricing" are perfect examples of how technology enables more efficient markets.

The latter quote about the free food is just an ignorant comment. I'm sure once the guy talked to some actual Googlers and saw how it really plays out, his fears were assuaged.

(It's true that my free Google lunch keeps me at work around lunch time, but I don't feel pressure for me to work beyond the 38 hours a week they pay me for. In fact, Google has a lot of programs to help its employees maintain a good work/life balance. Of course there are crunch times, but I feel free to spend less time working at other times to balance it out.)

38 hours? Are you not salaried?

Salaried Google employees, officially at least, work a full-time schedule according to the local standard workweek, which varies by jurisdiction. That's 40 hours in the US/UK offices, 37 hours in the Denmark offices, 38 hours in the Australian offices, etc. And enneff's profile indicates he's in Australia.

Interesting. I know several Googlers in the SV area and none of them work on a 40/hr schedule like that. They work like a regular salaried person where they just do the appropriate amount of work to get their tasks completed on schedule. Sometimes they will have a relaxed week where they only work ~20 hours and other times they will be in a code sprint and do 60-70 hours.

I meant average, yeah, not necessarily that you work the same hours every week. However countries also vary a bit in how normal it is for people to work outside of a standard daytime, M-F workweek.

I think even in the U.S., it's only really in the Valley (and maybe also in NYC finance) where a regular salaried job has wild week-to-week variations in working hours. Occasional variations, yes, but in most industries it's expected that you'll work standard hours most of the time (e.g. 8-5, M-F), deviating only when there is some major issue. Every engineering company I've heard of works like that, for example. The main exception is that people do do quite a bit of email outside of work hours.

There are all sorts of practicalities that rely on a predictable work schedule: scheduling your carpool, arranging childcare dropoff/pickup, etc. How does that work in the tech industry? Do people at Google not have carpools, kids, etc.?

That's pretty much what I said. I work more in the crunch times, less in the slack times. But my variance isn't that wide. My working week is between 28 hours and 48 hours, but most weeks are just 38 hours.

Totally agree with you. So called perks like gaming consoles are a bit silly indeed, and would fit his point better. But food is different, as we all need to eat.

Read the last section of the article.

I have said this many times before - everyone's ethics has a price. You just need to find the price. (Yeah yeah, there are exceptions in history but I am talking of the norm)

Not really that funny. Most humans aren't brands. They change opinions and views based on new information.

I hate to be cynical, but I think this statement is a well calculated PR move to make people comfortable with one of the most invasive possible devices there is. You are giving Google access to an always-on camera in your house!

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