"One we're working on is what we're calling Orange Card. We hope to turn every team member's ID into a charge card. The card will only activate after someone badges in for the day and will only work to purchase food at restaurants that are within a 10-minute walk from the office with pre-tax dollars."
Sooo, you get a slight discount on your lunch if you come into work, and you have to do it in a certain predefined radius. This is definitely the kind of plan a middle manager with not much to do during the day would come up with.
This sounds like it’s in response to the criticism many tech companies have received for providing on-site meals for employees, instead of spending money at local restaurants.
If I were a Cloudflare employee, I’d be pretty insulted by this to be honest. Why not just buy lunch for the employees? A discount, are we worth so little that the other 50-60% is just too much?
I am a Cloudflare employee. I was once a Google employee, so I'm quite familiar with the free food thing. I like the Cloudflare plan.
> Why not just buy lunch for the employees? A discount, are we worth so little that the other 50-60% is just too much?
We all accepted offers with the understanding that our salaries did not include free food. When comparing said offers against other companies that offer free food, we took that into account. The cost of the food is therefore already factored into the salaries we accepted.
I would rather be paid more and make my own choice where to eat, than be paid less and have the company decide what to feed me.
But the Google model has historically had the advantage that they paid for food with pre-tax dollars, so they could offer better food cheaper than the employee could have bought for themselves. Cloudflare's plan fixes that distortion.
The cost of food just seems negligible, and at the point where you’re putting all of this infrastructure investment into it, and offering the discount, why not just pay for it?
You mean, pay for the food that employees go out and buy with this card? Well, what's to stop someone from having a $1000 lunch at Saison every day? (It's right across the street from the Cloudflare SF office!)
You'd obviously have to put a cap on the amount people spend. But then people feel like they have to spend that much or they are missing out. This quickly leads to the obvious question: Why don't you just give us the money and let us decide how to spend it? Again, I'd rather just have the money added to my salary than have to deal with spending caps.
Every tech company I've ever heard of that offers free food does it by having the company acquire the food directly and provide it to the employees on-site. But doing that is a whole logistical thing you have to commit to, and has plenty of down sides.
The article didn't say it was his idea, but one 'carrot' that the company came up with. Tbh, it's a pretty weak one, and I think the pandemic has proven with FAANGs that people will trade autonomy and WFH over free (or cheap) food. It's a misalignment of what people actually want from their jobs, and what manager's think will 'click' with people.
It's casual work fridays with a different coat of paint.
Does everyone want to wear Hawaiian shirts at all?
Does everyone want to be forced to buy a Hawaiian shirt so that they can comply with the requirement?
For me, every day is Hawaiian Shirt Friday. I love wearing them. But I also know the difference between a proper Aloha Shirt and what most everyone else in the world calls a “Hawaiian Shirt”.
So, what works for me wouldn’t necessarily work for anyone else in the company, and almost certainly would not work as a company-wide mandate.
I appreciate the idea and that they’re trying to do something positive, but I really do want to stick with remote-only work from now on.
Even if it were his idea, it is still "the kind of plan a middle manager with not much to do during the day would come up with"; that the CEO came up with it converts the statement into a judgement of said CEO, it doesn't make the plan better.
I think it's easy to point out flaws in an imperfect solution, but it's also admirable that they're making efforts others aren't towards what they believe to be an improvement in work conditions. For that, they should be commended. Nothing is perfect, and they could do nothing.
I suspect it’s appearing that way in order to be in compliance with IRS rules to allow the food to be purchased with pre-tax dollars. The tighter they can associate it with work and convenience of the employer/in support of a company policy, the more likely they can get it to pass scrutiny.
However, if the program is designed to encourage me to come to the office, it’s dead on arrival. Giving me a discount of my marginal tax rate on prepared food doesn’t make for a cheaper lunch than what I can make at home. Restricting it to a 10-minute walk doesn’t give me more variety than I can arrange at home. In all cases, I’m better off WFH; this just makes the loss smaller (at substantial implementation complexity).
Sooo, you get a slight discount on your lunch if you come into work, and you have to do it in a certain predefined radius. This is definitely the kind of plan a middle manager with not much to do during the day would come up with.