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> 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).

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.

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.