Life at Google – The Microsoftie Perspective

The food benefit isn't taxed. To get the same $3,750 food benefit via salary, your employer would have to pay you $5,000-$6,000 more in salary.

for my last company we convinced management that it was the right choice to have lunch provided in the office. We mostly went out to eat a food trucks or popular places in SF where the walk+wait time might be 45-60 minutes then you eat. So the time wasted going out to eat was much more then the cost to bring food into the office.

Then the IRS ads this benefit in kind to you income for tax purposes so the actual benefit is taxed. I would rather have an extra 3.75 k in options which are much more tax efficient.

This isn't someone sharing their experience publicly, but a copy-paste from Microsoft's internal mailing list, see the note at the top:

The following has been making the rounds on just about every internal email list I belong to in Microsoft. Here it is to share a little insight with the rest of the world. Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not. Any peek is a good peek.

So those are Microsoft employees upset about public airing of only semi-public laundry. I wouldn't mind if i wrote something like this and someone put it online, but i can see that someone else might.

Glassdoor.