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Comment by cornellwright | Hacker News Reader

As an employer that provides free food, I think there's more to it than that in that both sides receive more value. We don't provide free food in order to pay our employees less. We provide free food because we see a lot of value in everyone eating together and employees get a lot of value in just not having to think about lunch or spend the time to go out and eat somewhere.

I think most people get more value you out of the free food than if they were simply paid what it cost to provide. In the case of free food I see it as where both employer and employee do better with the in-kind perk than the equivalent cash alternative.

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You provide free food because you get more working time out of your employees. Any other benefit your pushing is quite honestly, bullshit. They're sitting together? Great; odds are they're talking about their job and that's only beneficial to the employer.

The other problem with free food is that it starts to feel like an obligation to consume it. I like eating out about once a week otherwise I brown-bag it most of the week with yogurt, fruit and some peanut butter crackers. If you make free food a perk (1) I don't feel like i'm maximizing my benefits (2) people start to think i'm not a team player because I don't want to eat pizza/burritos/chinese/indian/<Insert Food Here> five days a week.

I fully embrace that we get more value out of providing free food than it costs us. That plus the fact that almost everyone seems to like it is enough of a reason to do it.

Is sitting together and talking about your job ONLY beneficial to the employer? I feel like better communication and more discussion hopefully leading to doing a better job is also beneficial to the employee. Working on a more successful team probably leads to higher satisfaction and better long term career prospects. Even when I've worked in places that didn't provide food, all or almost all of the team still usually ate together, just because we liked what we were doing and enjoyed one another's company.

My point is employees aren't losing anything by taking or not taking the perk. We wouldn't pay someone more not to eat the food. Aside from all the weird bad team dynamics that would cause it would also be a net-loss to the company. When people work from home, we also don't pay them any more, despite that we order less food and they have to buy/cook their own.

    Is sitting together and talking about your job ONLY beneficial to the employer?

Yes, yes it is. Unless of course they're talking about leaving in which case it might not be.

In an organization that enables and embraces employee initiatives, I have found that eatting together greatly benefits me, the employee. Cross team socializing has led to many new initiatives that were profitable for the company and for me personally (promotions and raises came as a result).

Eating together can be accomplished through culture alone but providing food is probably easier and more successful.

Putting a basket in the break room, filled with menus from nearby take-out restaurants, is even easier.

I have worked at a lot of different companies, and an ad-hoc, employee-organized lunch run is very common. The person who commits to handling the cash and picking up the food decides on the restaurant, orders are placed by a deadline, and people eat it when it arrives. If a manager or admin staffer names the restaurant, they have to say whether the cost of the meal is on the company or not.

Occasionally, someone will name a sit-down restaurant and a time of day, and people simply show up.

People who don't want to participate on any given day don't participate. They eat the lunch they packed from home, or go somewhere else.

That's how grown-ups eat lunch. If this pattern does not arise naturally, there is some dysfunction in the workplace that should probably be solved directly, rather than trying to force the pattern into existence by providing catered lunches.

I think your suggestion works well at a smaller company (<50 employees), but as the company starts moving to multiple floors/buildings and departments become a bit more isolated then the organic lunches tend to be intra-department vs inter-department. We have lunch brought in once a week. On the days we don't have lunch it is very much as you describe within each department, but on the day the company provides lunch it is very common to see engineers eating with the account management team and that is when the useful conversations happen.

That sounds like some form of confirmation bias. You may not be aware of the usefulness of conversations that happen under circumstances not favorable to you observing their content.

The company-supplied lunches lead to useful conversations in a place where you are able to judge their utility.

When people from your office go out and do not invite you, you are unable to know who is talking to whom, or what they are talking about. And you should not know, because that would make you a spying creep.

Confirmation bias is fine here, because we are trying to establish whether or not lunch being provided benefits employees. The anecdotal evidence suggests that it is beneficial to >0 employees at >0 companies, therefore the claim that it only benefits the employer is false.

You also have to show that it could not have been more beneficial for the employee to be doing something else.

You can't discount opportunity costs. If Oprah was giving away cars to everyone who went out to eat lunch at a local strip mall, you can't reasonably say that a person who found a quarter on the break room floor benefited by staying in the office to eat lunch.

You only observed the conversation that you observed. You did not observe all the potential conversations that might have occurred instead of the one you heard. The value of such conversations is the result of an expected value calculation, based on the potential benefit multiplied by the possibility that such benefit would be realized. That involves a lot of guesswork, obviously.

I don't know, This is more or less how my company works (~150 people). It scales well, because even in a larger company there is a certain amount of intermingling between teams as developers change roles over time. For example, I know a lot of people in my company because I have moved across several different teams during my four year tenure. I just throw the people I want to hang out with at lunch on a Skype group chat. Sometimes they join and sometimes they do not.

On a different note, at my company, talking about work at lunch is pretty taboo unless the topic of the lunch was previously disclosed by the initiator to be work-related. Lunch is when we talk about all kinds of other bullshit and only talk about work if we're desperately spinning our wheels on something or want to vent.

I work at an agency that used to have an office bistro for breakfast/lunch. We moved to a new office and lost the perk because it didn't have the space.

Now people just sit at their desk and check Facebook/reddit/etc over lunch — or they break into cliques. As a junior employee, I found that free lunch leveled the playing field. Senior managers couldn't hide out with only other senior managers when you all eat at the same place.

They say that the family that eats together stays together and I think that's just as true for work families.

>You provide free food because you get more working time out of your employees.

I don't see a problem with that. If I work overtime I can leave earlier on another day. Quite a lot of my coworkers leave at 12am on fridays.

I would be pretty upset if I was still at work at 12am on any day, Friday especially...

In the context of "leaving early", I suspect he meant that some of his coworkers left at lunchtime on Friday, after having worked longer earlier in the week.

Yes. I messed up the time format. I would have said 0:00 If I meant midnight in germany.

True, it does save time and thought. How much of depends primarily on location. The benefit is greater at something like a Google or Facebook campus, and much smaller at a small office in a downtown area with 20 restaurants in a 5min walk radius.

But one too often sees perks like these offered as "Well, we're a startup, we can't pay you market rate, but we feed you". And that shit ain't right.

This is such an outdated way of thinking (asses in seats). Your company then completely eliminates the possibility of remote work if this lunch time eat-along is so important to the cogs in your machine. You're not providing your employees with food because it benefits them. You're providing your employees with food because it forces them to always be working.

> We provide free food because we see a lot of value in everyone eating together and employees get a lot of value in just not having to think about lunch or spend the time to go out and eat somewhere.

This is literally saying that your employees get free food so that they can stay at work and only think about work and only eat with people from work...

Some places may make it work, but teams not being together is a huge drawback. I think Peopleware covered it and it was one of the top detriments. Something like a 50% penalty in project schedules when teams were remote. That lines up with many projects I've seen first hand, too. Calling it outdated doesn't change anything.

There's also tons of non-engineering stuff that benefits from being together, onsite. Stray comments might lead to huge import improvements. In my pervious company, there were always large things we'd find out when we'd have team leaders meet up. And this was a small 15 person business!

It takes a lot of directed effort to make remote work. The GP post about wanting people together has a lot going for it.

> but teams not being together is a huge drawback

Define together? What does that even mean? Together in the same room? I'd have to completely disagree. Teams working together is extremely important. Teams _being_ together, as in co-located, is just a preference.

> Peopleware covered it and it was one of the top detriments

Peopleware has ideas that have stood the test of time. However their opinions regarding remote work have not. The tools available to teams and engineers today are far superior to those in 2000 (not exactly sure on that date)

> Something like a 50% penalty in project schedules when teams were remote

This has absolutely nothing to do with remote work. This is just pure mismanagement. You cannot half-ass remote work. It's either a company wide culture or nothing at all.

> There's also tons of non-engineering stuff that benefits from being together, onsite

Like what?

> Stray comments might lead to huge import improvements

Just because you're not co-located does not mean you're just in silence throughout the day. There are a slew of chat clients and voice applications that allow remote teams to communicate easily throughout the day.

> In my pervious company, there were always large things we'd find out when we'd have team leaders meet up. And this was a small 15 person business!

Just because you're remote doesn't mean you don't have meetings. It also doesn't mean you never meet with people in person.

> It takes a lot of directed effort to make remote work

It takes a lot of directed effort to make any company culture work. And what exactly does "work" even mean? I've seen companies that are a complete mess and they have everyone strapped to their desks. Doing remote work right takes no more effort that doing co-location right. You just have to recognize the difference.

I've not seen remote meetings or chat clients replicate the kind of talk that goes on casually in person. I've not found them to be smoother at all. Walking around, getting into a different environment, sketching stuff on paper, even the body language and whatnot - it's just not very easy remotely. And while it takes work to make a company go, it takes more work for remote to work, overall.

It's like saying offshoring development is OK because "project management is hard and you have to be on top off things regardless".

But hey, I'm glad it works out for some people. A lot of my work is done remotely. But for core development or engineering on my own project, I'd want to be sure onsite meetings happened with fair regularity.

People work from home from time to time and it's fine. We do have a couple of remote contractors as well. I don't see how free food prevents this.

We don't tell employees what to think about or talk about at lunch. Sometimes it's work related and sometimes it's just shooting the shit. In either case I feel like both employee and company win.

I'd like to second this. Where I work we get catered lunch, and it's clearly a win-win. Getting food outside the office is at least a 15 minute round-trip and, amazingly, almost always costs more than catering.

We also have a good culture around it - people who don't feel like socializing frequently take food back to their desks instead of eating with everyone else, which I think removes some of the issues people take with the idea.

I agree with this. My employer provides free lunch three days per week and I find myself wishing it was every day. Going out and finding lunch on my own is a huge hassle and takes a long time. I'm happy to quickly pop down to the cafeteria, grab a bite, and head right back to work. Win win.

They've done a number on you!

It's also a social signal for social animals: "We are doing well, we have ample necessities, you should be with our group."

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