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Comment by jknightco | Hacker News Reader

"The first set are designed to keep you at work for as long as possible..."

Jesus Christ, when will this meme die? Google doesn't provide those things "to keep you at work for as long as possible," they provide them because the company believes in the simple idea that: happy employees == productive employees.

I can't possibly understand why people think Googlers are overworked. I work between 25-30 hours a week. Most of peers work 30-35. Nobody I know works more than 40 here. (In NYC!)

There are plenty of faults to be found with this company, like any other, but this is absolutely not one of them.

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After my experience at Google I'd recommend that any company of sufficient size provide tasty convenient lunch for free. It's a huge productivity boost. At other companies, I've seen people waste an hour and a half every day assembling people to go out for lunch, order, wait, figure out how to split up the bill, drive back. Much easier to just take that off people's minds.

Dinner and breakfast aren't as useful to provide and I don't think comparatively many Googlers take advantage of them (though breakfast is nice if you have a very long commute.) I did when I was young and single, but no longer. However, I'm virtually certain that providing lunch is a very cost effective way of getting more work done and is a win/win for everyone.

Good point. I wonder how much cognitive resources are wasted during that exercise. It probably adds to mental fatigue and harms mental clarity.

I really have a hard time believing that going out to lunch with coworkers "adds to mental fatigue and harms mental clarity".

That kind of depends on where you go...

Aim for the Balmer peak.

are you being serious?

Unfortunately, morale isn't nearly as easy to measure as bottom line savings on hiring a sub-par food service.

It doesn't even have to be particularly special, just simple decent lunch.

Just remove having lunch as problem to be solved by people who have other things on their minds.

Joel Spolsky over Fogcreek does it (I know because I see the photos they post on facebook of the lunches).

http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-price-of-dev-happiness-part-thr...

They always look absolutely amazing.

Well, everyone could just bring lunch from home.

The point of employee-provided lunch is that your employees don't have to think about taking care of food. No packed lunches, no going out to eat. High quality, delicious food is at the office so that it's one less thing to take care of for your engineers.

I seem to recall the budget at Google for food service was $15 per person per meal. And the snacks and drinks in the micro-kitchens cost something like $5 per day; they used to cost more, but they also used to be a lot better.

Of course, Google provides really elaborate meals. You could probably get the cost down to something like $5 per meal, but it would mean fast-food-grade meals.

but it would mean fast-food-grade meals

Which would, of course, be completely counterintuitive to Google's goal of providing high-quality, nutritious, tasty meals to their employees.

> I seem to recall the budget at Google for food service > was $15 per person per meal ...You could probably get > the cost down to something like $5 per meal, but it > would mean fast-food-grade meals.

If the $15/meal figure is accurate and includes all expenses related to serving the meals (incl. paying kitchen staff and everything) then the food would only be a fraction of those costs. Going from serving fresh food to serving the cheapest possible garbage might only take the cost from $15 down to $10 or something like that.

Tom Wolfe wrote an interesting passage about old-time food service at Intel (http://web.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/content/noyce.html):

"At Intel lunch had a different look to it. You could tell when it was noon at Intel, because at noon men in white aprons arrived at the front entrance gasping from the weight of the trays they were carrying. The trays were loaded down with deli sandwiches and waxed cups full of drinks with clear plastic tops, with globules of Sprite or Diet Shasta sliding around the tops on the inside. That was your lunch. You ate some sandwiches made of roast beef or chicken sliced into translucent rectangles by a machine in a processing plant and then reassembled on the bread in layers that gave off dank whiffs of hormones and chemicals, and you washed it down with Sprite or Diet Shasta, and you sat amid the particle-board partitions and metal desktops, and you kept your mind on your committee meeting. That was what Noyce did, and that was what everybody else did."

Surely well below $10 per person for that level of service. :-)

  > At other companies, I've seen people waste an hour and
  > a half every day assembling people to go out for lunch, 
  > order, wait, figure out how to split up the bill, drive 
  > back. Much easier to just take that off people's minds.

Yes. I've seen this so many times.

Even in an ideal, imaginary office where everybody's super-efficient about lunch choices... having a great lunch area + choices under one roof means everybody's more likely to eat together.

I have no idea what the culture is like at Google NYC. For that matter, I have no idea what the culture is like at Google Mountain View right now. But 'round about 2006 or so, when, in my view, Google was at the very height of its reputation, my social circle included a fair number of Googlers. They seemed dazed and confused on the rare occasions that they left the campus. They socialized largely with other Googlers. They worked super long hours.

That's not scientific and who knows, maybe the people I knew weren't representative. But my strong impression at the time, based on Google people I knew, was that the campus was a gilded cage.

Well that's all dependent on the caged's perspective, right? I worked long hours when I first joined Google. I wasn't at all unhappy about it though.

I think that's fairly common. When I was young and single, when it was my first real job after university, I worked a lot too. I didn't have a lot of obligations, didn't know a lot of people in the bay area, the room for career growth was tremendous, and there was always that imposter syndrome in the back of my mind where I wasn't 100% sure if I would end up meeting expectations. But after a year with good performance reviews and maybe even getting promoted, all that tends to subside. Some people are really driven to climb the ladder or love their jobs and work more, but that's hardly unique to Google or even tech.

Frankly, I never found Google much different at all in that respect from other places that don't have the same perks. If anything, all the amenities make it more common and acceptable to spend time away from your desk, so I felt less pressure to be at my desk N hours per day to keep up the appearance of being hard-working than at other companies.

For all those people with anecdotes about their friends working insane hours at Google: How many of them had worked at other large companies previously? How many of them had families?

Fine, but every developer I know works long hours and is squeezed for productivity. Isn't that just the reality of the field? If the choice is a) drab cage or b) gilded cage, I'll take the one with the subsidized lunch and massage chairs, thanks.

> Isn't that just the reality of the field?

Nope. I'm at a SF startup now, and work/life balance is extremely important in company culture. No one is squeezed for productivity.

You only get forced to work overtime if you can't stand up for yourself. NB: It took me a while to stand up for myself.

It's the reality if a person allows it to be. I suppose if one prioritizes his own personal life lower, or identifies himself by his commitments to his professional life or by the company he works for, then the negative connotation of "squeezed" doesn't really apply.

The reality, however, for the vast majority of programmers, is that like in every other industry there is a huge imbalance of power and more often than not employers (e.g., Google) are all too happy to exploit that imbalance, along with individual programmers' enthusiasm, to their own benefit.

Personal opinion, likely to be unpopular here: one of the reasons wages in our industry aren't higher is because of people who merely accept the "cage" as the status quo--but people who proudly enter the "gilded cage" of certain employers are the worst offenders. One need but look to the video game industry for a prime example of the above mentioned exploitation and depression of wages as an extreme example.

>>Fine, but every developer I know works long hours and is squeezed for productivity. Isn't that just the reality of the field?

I don't know any developers who work more than 50 hours a week. Most of them work 40 hours or less, and a lot of them don't even have their work hours tracked.

> Isn't that just the reality of the field?

I'm a developer and I work 37.5 hours a week. Never in my professional life in the past 8 years have I been coerced to overwork (although, due to flexible worktime, I occassionally work on a few days a bit more, and on some, a bit less).

I would never describe my work environment as a "cage" of any sort.

Please, if you are overworked, do not expect it to be a good thing or an universal rule. Rather, I would suggest you approach it from an engineers perspective - "Ok, this time allocation thing is broken, I cannot seriously work this much, I want to have a life, how can I fix this".

This rule is often quite true in the workplace: You get what you are willing to accept. It is surprising how many things you can change (within limits) if you stop accepting things because they are, make up your mind about your limits (within agreed boundaries) and politely but firmly stick to them. Usually, if you explain your point of view politely, calmly and with confidence you can get pretty good results out of negotiations if you set realistic goals.

Of course, some people enjoy working long hours but in this case I would not describe their status as 'caged'.

I work at a great company now and the hours are very reasonable. But in the past six years, most of the companies I worked for pressured me in various ways to work (unpaid) overtime. Direct management pressure is only one kind of pressure, and was not the predominant one for me.

Was it a cage, gilded or otherwise? It was certainly unfair and unpleasant.

At some point in one of the companies I worked for, when the hours became truly insane, I just decided not to do it anymore. I was still working a lot, but just chose not to work 60+ hours a week. I would say this choice led to some discomfort at that company, and I might eventually have been fired if I had not moved on.

The point is you can't negotiate your way out of everything. Some places are just bad news, and your best option is to leave, if you can. My experience tells me this is fairly common, especially in a bad economy when employers think you have limited alternatives.

Developers are generally paid pretty well. If you're being paid well, you have negotiating power.

If someone will pay you (say) $80k to work 40 hours a week, probably someone will pay you $40k to work 20 hours a week, or $75k to work 40 but have more vacation. You just need to make your desires clear during the job search process.

There is no reason that someone with high-vlue skills should be overworked and miserable. It's a choice.

Apparently that simple idea was lost at the highest levels of management during the YEARS they wantonly colluded with other tech companies, including competitors to suppress wages and cross hiring of the most talented technologists, plundering BILLIONS from the very people they claim to hold in the highest regard. Not only is that conniving, backstabbing behavior reprehensible and the epitome of "being evil" in a modern civilized society, they managed to come off looking like weak, bumbling cowards in the process. And if their attempts to suppress explicit evidence clearly detailing their feudalistic aspirations wasn't proof enough, they come back with a blatantly laughable settlement offer to make it official. Don't be fooled by the propaganda - actions always speak louder than words and Google has made clear where they stand.

I've been working in investment banking technology for top tier firms for nearly a decade and can't recall any cases where trends of thousands of current and past employees laid a billion dollar class action lawsuit on their employers. And this in a sector which employs FAR more people and is regularly accused of working employees literally to death. You've got a lot of growing up to do, Google - and I can rightfully express that sentiment in the most condescending tone possible from the safety of my moral high ground.

NYC is very different, though. The offices are in the middle of Manhattan. Very different to the isolated Google campus.

Yes, when I was there (2010-2013), the people I knew at Google generally kept business hours or close to it. I suspect the company was a more intense place to work when it was younger and fighting to get to profitability. There are probably also newer units within Google that haven't made it yet and are pushing hard to get there. But the part I was in (ads) wasn't like that.

This (that the workplace is fair, hours are reasonable, and it's generally a great place to work IMHO) is true from personal experience.

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