Spending Dinner at Work
Alley Insider does some back-of-the-napkin math and guesses that Google’s food budget is approximately $7.5k yearly per Googler. This is an interesting calculation to me, even if it’s a wild guess.
Google is one of the only places i’ve eaten at where the cafeteria at dinnertime literally feels busy. The difference in atmosphere between there and its competitors is astonishing. If you have a stint working as a programmer in Silicon Valley, do your best to visit other campuses and see how the culture and environments feel different from company to company. I do not believe that I have ever seen a dinner gathering anywhere near the magnitude of Google’s daily Mountain View cafeterias within a large tech company.
From anecdotal accounts i’ve received, it is not just that Googlers eat, then leave for home. Frequently, they’re eating as a short respite from a long workday, and go back to work, sometimes after meeting with family for dinner. I would fathom a guess that no other established, large tech company gets away with such long work hours from any of its employees as Google.
I don’t even think you’d need to invest in free meals around the clock to get this kind of behavior, either. You could still charge for lunch, but offer a free early (pre-8 or 9am) and late (post-7pm) dinner service in order to encourage people to stay past the regular hours, and still defray some of your lunchtime costs. If you even got a 15% boost in working, productive hours from your employees, I surely think that would make up for the handful of thousands of dollars worth of food you’re sending their way.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:30 am
I posted a comment about this over at news.yc.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171960
It seems to me that the cafeterias at Google are just an extension of their ruling ethos — generous and ruthless at the same time.
April 24th, 2008 at 11:42 am
That’s a really good way to put it, Neil. As someone who has only eaten there maybe 5 times, the main thing that struck me was just how many people are actually there after 6pm, as opposed to other tech companies that we know well.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Yeah, I think they’re not doing the right numbers. GOOG headcount is at 18,000. If half the workforce ends up working for an extra 1 hr/day (it’s probably closer to 2) b/c of breakfast and lunch, and assuming that an FTE hour is worth $50 to Google (probably low since the fully loaded cost for the avg knowledge work is probably about $100/hr, and the Goog’s profit margin is >25% and that’s including all operating costs), that means:
9,000 employees * 251 days * 1 hour * $50 = $113M
If it does cost $75M (again, we’ll use the worst case number, even if it’s more likely 70% of that), we’re talking about a 50% return on investment. Since we’re using worst case numbers, the direct returns are probably much higher.
And that’s before calculating any second order benefits (better retention, increased loyalty/productivity, increased morale/quality of life, increased reputation/easier hiring and recruiting - and of course free write ups. By almost every set of these important (but harder to quantify) metrics, they is a non-trivial qualitative improvement. Even if it were a complete wash, any knowledge company that could would be (and are IMO) stupid for not following suit.
Do people realize how disruptive and hard it is to replace (recruit/hire/train/etc) a high performing engineer (especially w/ the huge ramp up w/ the custom systems and processes at a cutting edge tech firm)? Does anyone realize how non-linearly time scales and what it means in terms of development productivity (Talking to lots of people, and certainly for myself, I find it takes me a couple hours for me to ramp up into a flow state, after which I get more productive (until a certain point - but again, depending on blood sugar!)). Anyway, I’ll stop railing against stupidity. I’m sure Google has run the numbers themselves. They do love doing that, so I hear.
May 13th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Jeez, what ever happened to having a life outside of work?
How’s about better long term retention, and a happier, healthier workforce if they go home once in a while?