npr.org — The dot-com bubble has long since burst, but one Silicon Valley perk is still alive and well: free lunch. And it's not just canned food and repeating menus. Josef Desimone, Facebook's "culinary overlord," says he offers a brand-new menu every day.
Mar 28, 2010 View in Crawl 4
therealricoMar 29, 2010
umm no not necessarily a company can write that off, and if they didn't offer the free lunch there is no reason why facebook would pass that money off to their employees.
happyscrappyMar 29, 2010
Free lunches are actually pretty rare in Silicon Valley. The perk is not really "alive and well". For those not keeping track, the cubicle is mostly dead too, although the true startups will always keep it alive, if they don't go straight to "open floorplan".
screwkevinMar 29, 2010
I'm paid enough instead to be able to go out and buy any lunch I want.
mattbdMar 29, 2010
It was great, but it's gone downhill over the last decade. We do now have a cafe in my building, which uses the same beans in its coffee as Costa Coffee, but burns them so they taste like crap, and the food is rubbish and overpriced. But there is a full-blown restaurant at another site a few hundred metres down the road, and that's not too bad.In the office we have a microwave, a fridge, a hot water dispenser and coffee machines, and that's it. It is an FTSE-100 company and there's lots of people working at that location so we do get more than a smaller company would provide.
dmurphy04Mar 30, 2010
LA Times article on the same theme: <a class="user" href="http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-fi-perks28-2010mar28,0,6006395,full.story" rel="nofollow">http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-fi-perks28-20 ...</a>
Closed AccountMar 30, 2010
the dot com bubble has long since burst? Leave it to npr to not realize that a second, much BIGGER dot com bubble has formed, and wil burst sooner or later.I guess that is why they have to force Americvans to pay for their s**tty programming.
Closed AccountMar 30, 2010
Companies that give those perks tend to pay like s**t. Google offers plenty of perks. Just not competitve wages for hte skill level.And yes...they have plenty of "average" employees.
johnnyrottenMar 30, 2010
The best reason for companies to offer free meals is that it keeps workers on site and talking to each other. I used to work for a company that provided lunch to employees. Every day, we'd gather in a big room and everyone got to know each other. Also, people would spend 30 minutes at lunch and then go back to work. When they canceled the free lunches, people stopped meeting each other, there was less cross-department discussion, and people started spending 1+ hours going out to lunch. At the same time, nobody increased their hours at work to make up for this. In the end, it cost the company more in productivity than it saved in cash.
shadowspawnMar 30, 2010
I'm a DBA. At work, you follow procedures and you know what will happen. With cooking, my family rarely has the same dish twice a year but I cherish ingredients, even have people bring spices from overseas when they are there.