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Comment by moultano | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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. :-)

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.

  > 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.

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?

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.

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