Personal preference obviously but I like getting away from work for lunch. After eating if it's nice out I'll actually just sit myself on a bench and chill. 15, 30 minutes doing that is worth so much more to me than leaving work that much earlier.

You can do that with a free lunch too.

Isn’t the purpose of the free food to make you spend more time at work? Seems logical that the alternative is more time at home.

Free food is what you make of it.

If your income as a Google engineer is so tight that you have to make sure you get the most out of breakfast and dinner, go for it (but also maybe have a long hard think). The culture may well vary between sites, but this idea that Google (and others) exclusively employ fresh college grads and try to embrace then 24x7 just isn't true. We have families just like anyone else, and they matter to us every bit as much as everyone else's families matter to them.

I for my part am happy that I get a healthy, hot meal for lunch so dinner can be a quick snack when I get home, so I have more time with the kids. The alternative is more time spent on chores.

Please stop spreading these tired tropes.

The fact that I don't have to exert ANY energy to decide on where to go for lunch vs. working downtown and having to decide between the same 5 places or spending 20 minutes pulling out and back into parking garages is very nice, and I'm nowhere near a recent college grad. Dinners also nice for those of us without anyone to go home to eat with.

I absolutely hate the "Whats for lunch today?" shuffle.

You haven’t discredited my assertion at all.

If you can eat faster, you get back to work faster. An early breakfast or tasty late dinner at work is a temptation to spend more time there.

I had a quick google and I’m not alone in my opinion. I’m not criticising the practice, it makes business sense and employees can choose not to use it.

Free food was originally introduced to Google in part because there were so few food options near the Mountain View campus that people were driving a half hour each way to spend twenty minutes eating. So yes, the goal was to get people to spend more time at work, but the alternative was “time spent sitting in traffic” rather than “time spent at home”.

(The other major driver behind food was supposedly the fact that the founders were PhD students and had found that some of their best ideas had arisen from informal discussions with other researchers over lunch, so they wanted to create an environment where employees had that same opportunity)

I don’t work for Google but my employer serves food. This is not true in my experience. Folks finish dinner at 6 and gtfo. Or they pack the food in containers on their way out and eat at home. Having the option of eating lunch within the office means I can spend less time on it and go home sooner. Same productivity, but less time spent at work.

But it's not free time at home. It's time cooking and meal planning and grocery shopping. And maybe that's with family and friends, but for many people it's probably done alone.

I would expect that for many people, especially those with kids, dinner is a time for getting together with the family.

That's the fantasy, yes. In reality, a professional working parent usually gets home after the kids eat.

I feel like this might depend on the culture, and how late you usually eat dinner etc..

Because well, kids usually don't tend to cook for themselves so the parents end up cooking for them and eating with them.

That might be my bubble though, my friends / family have jobs that allow them to leave work around 5-ish and with school ending somewhere between 4-5, it's not that much after the kids are home. (or they pick up the kids after school).

Kids definitely can and do cook for themselves? I've also known families who would make and freeze dinners for the week so the kids just had to reheat them on weekdays. Or one parent gets home earlier and has dinner with the kids, but the other one will be later.

Eating dinner, sure. Cooking and shopping and planning? Less so.

So do you get to go home 45-90 minutes earlier then? I think that is what the original comment was questioning.

Most software companies in the Bay Area have flexible time. Just like everywhere else, Google SWEs don't punch a clock. You go home when you feel you've done as much as you can for the day.

Many places allow you to set your own hours when things are good. The real questions is things like if you get in early to beat traffic and something happens in the afternoon can you still leave without being considered "not a team player" for not "just fixing that thing we need for the meeting tomorrow"? Is the same true if you didn't get in early?

Not many things are so urgent they can't wait until the following day. But if something like that did come up, you could just leave at your regular time and continue working at home to fix the problem.

I'm jealous; my current job is billed by the hour, so I have to be able to describe every hour I've worked. Mind you that's usually a fixed 8 hour / day logged on project X, so having to write them down isn't a problem. But I can't go home early without feeling guilt; I mean I can, but that also means I have to do overtime sometime else in the month, to make sure the hours all check out at the end of the month.

You have to describe every hour, but not necessarily work every hour.

You are treated like an adult so you "get to go home" whenever you choose to go home.

Seriously, if you're working somewhere where people care what time you go home, you can really do better!

"Free food" mainly means free breakfast, lunch, coffee and snacks. Hardly anyone I know stays late for dinner.

It is nice to know you're being taken care of in the (hopefully rare) cases you do have to work late. And there's probably people working in ops that have an evening shift.

Are you over 30? Dinner is big for young/single people who don't want to cook/clean or go out every day, and who like to sleep late.

I typically work ~8-4, with some occasional time in the evenings. So, yes.