Dinner and breakfast aren't as useful to provide and I don't think comparatively many Googlers take advantage of them (though breakfast is nice if you have a very long commute.) I did when I was young and single, but no longer. However, I'm virtually certain that providing lunch is a very cost effective way of getting more work done and is a win/win for everyone.

Just remove having lunch as problem to be solved by people who have other things on their minds.

Of course, Google provides really elaborate meals. You could probably get the cost down to something like $5 per meal, but it would mean fast-food-grade meals.

If the $15/meal figure is accurate and includes all expenses related to serving the meals (incl. paying kitchen staff and everything) then the food would only be a fraction of those costs. Going from serving fresh food to serving the cheapest possible garbage might only take the cost from $15 down to $10 or something like that.

"At Intel lunch had a different look to it. You could tell when it was noon at Intel, because at noon men in white aprons arrived at the front entrance gasping from the weight of the trays they were carrying. The trays were loaded down with deli sandwiches and waxed cups full of drinks with clear plastic tops, with globules of Sprite or Diet Shasta sliding around the tops on the inside. That was your lunch. You ate some sandwiches made of roast beef or chicken sliced into translucent rectangles by a machine in a processing plant and then reassembled on the bread in layers that gave off dank whiffs of hormones and chemicals, and you washed it down with Sprite or Diet Shasta, and you sat amid the particle-board partitions and metal desktops, and you kept your mind on your committee meeting. That was what Noyce did, and that was what everybody else did."

Surely well below $10 per person for that level of service. :-)

Which would, of course, be completely counterintuitive to Google's goal of providing high-quality, nutritious, tasty meals to their employees.

http://blog.fogcreek.com/the-price-of-dev-happiness-part-thr...

They always look absolutely amazing.

  > At other companies, I've seen people waste an hour and
  > a half every day assembling people to go out for lunch, 
  > order, wait, figure out how to split up the bill, drive 
  > back. Much easier to just take that off people's minds.

Even in an ideal, imaginary office where everybody's super-efficient about lunch choices... having a great lunch area + choices under one roof means everybody's more likely to eat together.

That's not scientific and who knows, maybe the people I knew weren't representative. But my strong impression at the time, based on Google people I knew, was that the campus was a gilded cage.

I'm a developer and I work 37.5 hours a week. Never in my professional life in the past 8 years have I been coerced to overwork (although, due to flexible worktime, I occassionally work on a few days a bit more, and on some, a bit less).

I would never describe my work environment as a "cage" of any sort.

Please, if you are overworked, do not expect it to be a good thing or an universal rule. Rather, I would suggest you approach it from an engineers perspective - "Ok, this time allocation thing is broken, I cannot seriously work this much, I want to have a life, how can I fix this".

This rule is often quite true in the workplace: You get what you are willing to accept. It is surprising how many things you can change (within limits) if you stop accepting things because they are, make up your mind about your limits (within agreed boundaries) and politely but firmly stick to them. Usually, if you explain your point of view politely, calmly and with confidence you can get pretty good results out of negotiations if you set realistic goals.

Of course, some people enjoy working long hours but in this case I would not describe their status as 'caged'.

Was it a cage, gilded or otherwise? It was certainly unfair and unpleasant.

At some point in one of the companies I worked for, when the hours became truly insane, I just decided not to do it anymore. I was still working a lot, but just chose not to work 60+ hours a week. I would say this choice led to some discomfort at that company, and I might eventually have been fired if I had not moved on.

The point is you can't negotiate your way out of everything. Some places are just bad news, and your best option is to leave, if you can. My experience tells me this is fairly common, especially in a bad economy when employers think you have limited alternatives.

The reality, however, for the vast majority of programmers, is that like in every other industry there is a huge imbalance of power and more often than not employers (e.g., Google) are all too happy to exploit that imbalance, along with individual programmers' enthusiasm, to their own benefit.

Personal opinion, likely to be unpopular here: one of the reasons wages in our industry aren't higher is because of people who merely accept the "cage" as the status quo--but people who proudly enter the "gilded cage" of certain employers are the worst offenders. One need but look to the video game industry for a prime example of the above mentioned exploitation and depression of wages as an extreme example.

Nope. I'm at a SF startup now, and work/life balance is extremely important in company culture. No one is squeezed for productivity.

If someone will pay you (say) $80k to work 40 hours a week, probably someone will pay you $40k to work 20 hours a week, or $75k to work 40 but have more vacation. You just need to make your desires clear during the job search process.

There is no reason that someone with high-vlue skills should be overworked and miserable. It's a choice.

I don't know any developers who work more than 50 hours a week. Most of them work 40 hours or less, and a lot of them don't even have their work hours tracked.

Frankly, I never found Google much different at all in that respect from other places that don't have the same perks. If anything, all the amenities make it more common and acceptable to spend time away from your desk, so I felt less pressure to be at my desk N hours per day to keep up the appearance of being hard-working than at other companies.

For all those people with anecdotes about their friends working insane hours at Google: How many of them had worked at other large companies previously? How many of them had families?

I've been working in investment banking technology for top tier firms for nearly a decade and can't recall any cases where trends of thousands of current and past employees laid a billion dollar class action lawsuit on their employers. And this in a sector which employs FAR more people and is regularly accused of working employees literally to death. You've got a lot of growing up to do, Google - and I can rightfully express that sentiment in the most condescending tone possible from the safety of my moral high ground.