Exactly - bashing a former employer because they took the cookies away is not that much of a breaking news story.
If this is really about the money: Didn't we have some time ago a story about women earning less than men just because they don't ask for more?
I had read nothing about negotiation, and didn't know what I was doing. They offered a sum which was in fact an improvement over what I had been making seems to me even kind, considering her not mentioning once that she asked for a raise etc.
Maybe you should read the article - the argument was that while yes, perks were offered as a reason to accept a smaller wage, they were then gradually eliminated without changing the wage.
Sounded like it was a raise on top of whatever else they got. I'd take that kind of raise for fewer perks. They could have just as easily not given it.
Since when were they eliminated? Have you been to the Google campus? The free food is still there and it's still better than most cafeterias that you have to pay for.
Again - please read the article. This lady is writing about how free food was offered to her in exchange for a lower wage and was then gradually eliminated (which is different from completely eliminated). So yes, from what that lady writes, free food is still there, but less so than when she accepted it in exchange for a lower wage.
I never claimed to add any original research - just that the person I replied to hadn't read the article.
The real lesson for employees is to ignore the cash value of the perks when evaluating offers. Perks can be taken away, but cutting salaries is much more controversial.
Which is why some sectors treat money as a perk (bonuses). But as much as companies make sure employees understand what a "bonus" is, there's a sense of entitlement and people quit when this years bonus wasn't as big as last years.
Companies try to do the same playing-both-sides there, too, though, which is what causes some of the confusion and ire. On the one hand, it's formally just a perk that isn't guaranteed. But on the other hand, they'll often make claims about what kinds of bonuses you can expect to get -- "baseline 10% is usual" or "we've never given less than a 5% average bonus in the last decade" -- because they want potential employees to consider it as quasi-salary when evaluating the offer.
I'm writing a post on salary negotiation today, so I zeroed in on two supporting details here that you should remember for later: when pressed on price, savvy negotiators said:
1) Give us some time to think about it.
2) We are going to re-focus the discussion on a different compensation lever where we can present something you're already going to get as if it were a new incentive justifying your concession on a lever you're currently interested in.
You can do both of these as a job seeker.
(For example, if you have extra-curricular interests like many desirable tech employees do, the extra-curricular interests can be used to justify an increase in your compensation vis-a-vis a hypothetical employee who punches out of the Internet at 5 pm. It doesn't particularly matter that you're going to continue blogging and OSS regardless of the outcome of this negotiation, you just frame the discussion such that that becomes newly discovered value which gives the other party something to hang their hat on for getting you that last $10,000.)
Nope, still extra-curricular, just like the food is still theirs to make available or take away as they see fit. This is a shady tactic you and the employer can both use. I wouldn't though.
let me elaborate. if someone looks me in the eye and says, "Don't forget that we never work weekends, how much is that worth?" then they are not my friend. That's a given, it's part of a 40-hour job not to work weekends. To put a price on it and have me concede part of my salary means they don't have my interests at heart.
Now, you might say that negotiators don't have to have the other guy's interests at heart. Then maybe you can read Getting to Yes ("the Harvard principle") or even the old How To Win Friends and Influence People.
the toughest negotiators usually end up having no one to talk with but mud with a stick in it. If all you want for an employee is a mud with a stick in it, by all means, harp on about how elephants do not trample around your premises, there are no monsoons in the area, and other employees don't use the outhouse or squat outside to potentially poop on them.
But if you want a quality employee, an actual human, then the negotiation that works on mud with a stick in it will not be very compelling. Or honest. Pretty soon you won't be negotiating with another human again.
Yeah, I did both of those in my salary negotiations with Google. They talked me down from my starting salary, but they also increased my stock options & GSUs.
The other important point is - you are the only one who says "Yes" when asked "Is this acceptable to you?" If the free food is not worth $15-20K (which actually seems ridiculous - I've heard numbers for both what average employees value it at and what it actually costs Google, and they're nowhere close to that), then say "I'm sorry, I don't value my food that highly. I'll take the cash or go elsewhere." This, of course, requires that you have somewhere else to go. But remember that Google wants highly-qualified employees just as much as highly-qualified employees want to work at Google.
If you are being considered by Google and are negotiating financial terms I would venture that you have plenty of other options available to you (read Facebook and MS)
Thanks for framing it that way; I felt this relationship subconsciously but never could name it clearly.
Btw., that's pretty much what happened at my current workplace: after two years of employment I negotiating salary increase -- basing on market situation and possible other employers for me -- and ever since the owners appreciate my role in the company more.
Every "benefit" has an associated dollar value. That's it. Total them up.
Oddly, salary is a holy cow whereas beenefits are not.
Having worked as an "employee" for 13 years before going freelance, the trend I see is this: employers generally feel its AOK to reduce/remove/substitute lesser benefits to save them money. The same cannot be said for salary reductions.
This is a large part of what led me to go freelance. I control my benefits. I negotiate my rate. I get paid based on those and how hard I work.
At the end of the day, it's still a lot like being an employee but, for me, with far less a feeling of being victimized.
It won't be published until Monday (US time). Your options for finding it then include emailing me, getting the RSS feed at kalzumeus.com, following me on Twitter (@patio11), or (not a given but also not the riskiest prediction I'll make this year) checking the HN front page.
I'd suggest the books _Getting to Yes_, and Graeber's _Debt: the First 5000 Years_.
Of course the second book sounds odd, but if you're renting chunks of your life, it's vital to know about the real nature of markets, not the Disneyfied version. Many people I've spoken with are uncomfortable with the antagonistic nature of negotiation, and fail to hit the upper limit of what the employer's willing to spend. Instead of wilting, there should be a feeling of indignance.
Looking forward to it, as I just received an offer that was largely based on my github profile. Hiring manager told me they've never interviewed someone with one. So I suppose I can turn that around and say I deserve more than the typical offer.
You could also use this as a potential lever in discussing future compensation increases. If they claimed perk x was worth $y but now they are scaling it back to $z then $y-z should be put back into your base as you no longer receive the perk.
> Has rachelbythebay ever written a post that is not about bashing Google as evil or all engineers as sexist?
Suppose Hitler said exercising is good for health. Now Hitler was one sick son of a bitch, but that has nothing to do with whether exercising is good.
May be rachelbythebay holds a grudge against Google, but here she is specifically pointing out negotiators taking free food into account while negotiating, cafes closing down and shortage of food.
I don't know about you, but her article sounds pretty genuine to me.
That might be because I dislike the "green initiatives." Most of the "green initiatives" are done as a PR move or cost cutting measure, totally disregarding the employees.
At an earlier workplace, man, was I pissed when they replaced the urinal flushes with bio cubes. Thankfully, it didn't last long(1 week).
Another workplace switched off escalators after 5 in the evening, even though the escalators were the auto on/off model, and didn't consume much power when they weren't actively used. What pissed me off more was when there was some HR conference going on in the same building, the power saving mode wasn't engaged.
I remember the conversation with a senior folk:
Me: Hey, escalators are working today?
Oh, there is a HR conference going up on the 2nd floor, and people need to use it.
Me: Has it ever fucking occurred to you that there are engineers working on the 3rd floor, who regularly stay well after 5, and need to use the escalators?
Oh, you can use the stairs or the elevator in the other section? Come on, it's not a big deal - we are being green.
I don't think I've ever read a post by her previously but I'm looking at her index of posts and at least by title there sure seems to be a lot of variety.
Regardless of her previous comments on Google (I don't think sexism is relevant here) I don't think the authorship in this case warrants dismissal. I think your point about 10% salary increase is relevant, but perk-baiting itself is a very important issue that more new hires should be aware of.
I've seen this many times in many different industries. Without good advice early on I would have fallen for it myself more than once, I'm sure.
This is mostly ad hominem. The 10% bump happened in January 2011. From her post, it sounds like she started in the fall of 2006. It's not clear when the food started disappearing, or when she left, but it's entirely believable that she did experience the food perk loss and not the salary bump. And this happened at the same time Google was colluding with other major Silicon Valley employers to depress the wages of top talent.
I worked at a place with free food and this exact thing happened. At first it was order any two meals off seamlessweb.com a day. Then it was order one meal, which meant people ordered enough food for two or three meals once a day. Then there were spending limits. Then there was a "town hall meeting" the CEO claimed he had been doing some investigations an came across a worker who was drinking ten cans of coke a day. Out of concern for our health, they would be eliminating all beverages except water coolers. Then meals were only free for certain people. Then free meals went away.
It is easy to eliminate these kinds of perks because many people will be in favor of cost cutting. Not so for salary, not many people will argue in favor of across the board salary cuts. I'll take salary every time.
It was a funny meeting. The CEO was a hell of a salesman, he came in with a nalgene bottle and made a big show of taking big gulps while touting his new health initiatives that just happened to include cutting a perk. By the time he left people were saying it was a good thing he was so concerned for our health. He did the same speech 5 times in one day to get all the employees, must have been pretty hydrated at the end.
Coke costs all of 25c/can in bulk. Even 10 cans a day is only 2.50
Yep, and it baffles me when companies miss the forest through the trees and cut something like sodas. In the scheme of what a fully loaded engineer costs the company, even 10 cans of soda/day is minuscule (~$625/year).
As companies get bigger the same thing always seem to happen. The bean counters see the large costs of providing free X to thousands of people and/or people who work there start taking advantage of the situation (bring home a 12 pack of soda each day for all their roommates). No matter how cool the company claims to be, this seems to eventually happen to all large companies past a certain size.
It's nearly impossible for people to truly grasp that $500,000/year for 50,000 employees is the same impact as $10/year/employee. Even incredibly smart people get this wrong. It happens in business, in politics (see all the people arguing that policy X that works in country Y can't be implemented in the US because the US is Z times larger than Y), everywhere, even with people who otherwise have a very strong grasp of math and science.
On one hand, it conjures up pictures of a real slimeball, the typical "snake oil salesman".
On the other, I get the impression he is a really charismatic individual. It certainly takes some skill to stand up in front of a bunch of people, take away something from them and convince them that they are better off.
Yeah, I put that chat in the same category as talking about upgrading tools and other things the company should already have taken into account cost wise.
If your boss starts complaining about sodas, $50 license upgrades for team software, cheap HW upgrades like RAM, etc... then it's time to leave.
The most important rule of salary negotiation:
Always let them make an offer first. If you're lucky it's higher than what you would have proposed, so you'll just accept it.
If it's lower you just continue to negotiate.
I've heard that tactic before, and it's a good one.
However, how do you force them to give you a number first? The only tactic I can think of is to say 'give me market rates'. One time, they just kept pressing for more and more of a number until I blurted out something. In this case it was $80k, in a Rocky Mountain state, in 2004, fresh out of college. I don't think it worked in my favor.
I think psychologically, it is better to be the one to blurt out the first number in order to take advantage of Anchoring Bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring). BUT, I think that this only applies when you have good knowledge about their salary range, or at least the market range, because you can start the conversation at the top of the range instead of the bottom. Discreetly trading salary data with a few friends can be quite beneficial I think.
This is the exact opposite of how to successfully negotiate. Maybe if your not confident in your worth, some company might offer you more than you would have suggested. However, the art to successful negotiation is to make a first offer on the high end of what is realistic so you can set an anchor point which limits how far the company can reasonably negotiate you down.
At the end:
Or, worse, they'll assign blame to "rogue contractors" and say it was never their policy to do that. Right.
Now where have we heard that before? Rogue contractors?
I may be wrong, but... Is she implying that (in her personal opinion), Google knew and instructed them about OpenStreetMap sabotage? That's controversial at least.
Edit: I mean, I'm not defending anyone, but without proofs, I think that's a very harsh sentence.
Look at google + mocality: it's easy to understand why the contractors where doing what they were: it helped them sell something or hit quota.
Compare to Google contractors + open street map: what incentive does a contractor have to go screw up their data? In the first case I see directly why unethical people would do what they did. What exactly is the motive here? Just griefing? It makes me wonder.
The author complains that she was dissatisfied with her offer six years prior but took the job anyway. Then it turns into a rant about how she was robbed of her entitlements.
"But what happens when the economy improves? Those wounds will never heal. Anyone with half a brain will say "hey, these guys are evil!" and will bail for greener pastures."
Because they don't have bagels in the microkitchen Google is evil?
As someone who works at Google, I can assure you that the microkitchens are overflowing with drinks, snacks, fruits, coffees, and candies, The cafeterias are plentiful(24 in mountain view alone) and the food is incredibly delicious, even for a foodie like myself.
Plus, the pay is very competitive. The author must not have stuck around for this:
I wouldn't go so far as to call Google "evil" for reducing perks, but the microkitchens were a lot better before. They used to be overflowing with goodies, many perishable. After the bean-counter moment it was all dry cereal and prepackaged snacks.
For me it was just a "shrug, whatever" moment. I realized that as a growing public company Google wanted to control costs more.
And I might be weird, but excessive perks creep me out a little. I worry about it warping my mind too much. One day during my time at Google, I was in a grocery store and felt mild outrage at the thought that they were going to charge me for food.
Once you're used to a perk, it's another fishhook the company has embedded into your flesh.
I imagine her main gripe would be that the free food was treated as a component of her compensation, and then withdrawn for the perfectly rational (but unrelated) reason of cutting costs.If someone did that to my salary (and it's happened a few times, for various reasons), that would generate a certain amount of ill-will.
It's also their fault. They made an offer they weren't planning on keeping. And they lose the most - an irate employee is a dead loss to an organization, but still gets a paycheck (until they more on or get fired, which takes a long time).
Well that's human nature people get far more upset about losing something losing $20 a day in free food feels much worse than gaining the same amount in pay.
"After the bean-counter moment it was all dry cereal and prepackaged snacks."
You must be going to different MKs than I do. My experience is the MKs have always had (at least since Dec 2008, when I started) plenty of seasonal fresh fruit, pre-made salads and sandwiches in addition to the dried cereals and pre-packaged snacks. <shrug>
The perks are nice but are far from the top of the list of things that I would miss about working here - working with world class people, the opportunity to work on huge problems at scale, the amount that's invested in internal tools and processes, a culture that allows and even encourages you to question management - those are the types of things that I would miss.
yeah, i've been working there a few months, and the perks are very nice, but the people i get to work with, and the deep belief in code quality, are what makes it such a pleasure to work there. (that said, i'd be seriously upset if the shuttles were taken away).
The point is that the expensive/quality meals were presented as part of her compensation in exchange for lower salary, then this was taken away. If instead she had just gotten a higher salary, she'd still be getting that extra value in exchange for her work.
It was an advice article. I think many young graduates (that Google seems to like to recruit) should read it.
> Then it turns into a rant about how she was robbed of her entitlements.
I think you are being too hyperbolic there. It seems pretty clear that Google didn't break any laws and that the author thinks Google didn't break any laws. She made some wrong assumptions during her hiring and she is warning others not to make the same ones.
> Because they don't have bagels in the microkitchen Google is evil?
It is appropriate to use that word because Google set itself up for it by using it in its own mission statement. It is clearly a play on that. Had any other company been involved I bet the word "evil" wouldn't have been used.
It is amusing that Google offers "free lunches". I wonder how many compensation discussions include the quip, "there is no such thing as a free lunch".
Just out of curiosity, does Google gross up salaries for tax purposes? I really think the IRS needs to crack down on companies using excessive perks as non-taxable compensation.
If Google is using the perks to justify a "lower but equivalent salary" then they should be paying taxes on the non-cash compensation. If they are not, then Google is taking advantage of a shady tax dodge.
My wife works at Google. We both live in San Jose, and she frequently gets the shuttle to work in the Mountain View office. For tax reasons, I'm not allowed to get the shuttle with her to or from work, so I'm pretty sure that some if not all perks are offset somehow. Various things like the holiday gift (this year it was a galaxy nexus) are also offset for tax on your payslip. Net it works out at zero to you, as Google puts extra money into your paycheque to cover the extra tax charge.
Allowing non-employees on company transportation would threaten to make furnishing the transportation to employees a taxable event. See the same link that I posted on a sibling comment about food, just search for "transportation".
Tax tip going way back to Learned Hand: you don't have to feel guilty about structuring your affairs to take advantage of every legitimate opportunity to decrease your tax burden.
Here's a related example: US tax law allows you to deduct 50% of meals incurred on business trips. I travel internationally for a significant portion of every year, on business trips. There are two ways to calculate how much you spend on meals: 1) Actual cost 2) An approximation method which takes a per-diem rate supplied by the US government based on your location and adds one or two wrinkles not relevant here. Either is acceptable to the IRS. I keep appropriate records of business expenses, so running both the exact cost and the approximation method was trivial. The approximation overstates my actual cost on meals by several thousand dollars -- using it as the basis for my deduction saves me about a thousand bucks. That's totally kosher.
P.S. You know those beating-the-system-is-worth-bonus-points neuroreceptors that most of us hackers have? Doing taxes gives you the opportunity for that sort of thing in spades. (Though I'd probably still suggest getting someone competent to do yours -- advice which I will be taking for myself from next year on.)
This is a good point. Personally, we often hire accountants to minimize our tax burden, yet when companies do the same thing, we like to label them as "evil" (at worst) or "shirking their duty" (at best).
I'm having a hard time sympathizing. At the end of her negotiation, this was the state of the world: the company didn't want to go any higher, and some handwaving about how much food was worth was enough to convince her to fold.
Why bother calculating "effective salary"? Personally, anything that isn't cold, hard cash I view as tangential to my compensation. Even options are questionable - sometimes the salary hit over 4+ years is comparable to the additional options' value. Sure, perks can make the work environment nicer. I'll take that into consideration given competing offers. But it seems silly to attempt to fix a monetary value on these things that the company has no contractual requirement to fulfill.
> Why bother calculating "effective salary"? Personally, anything that isn't cold, hard cash I view as tangential to my compensation
During the work week, I typically grab breakfast on the way to work ($5.10 at McDonalds, plus $1.25 for a drink out of the vending machine at work). If I have lunch, it might be Subway (around $7). Maybe dinner from Wendy's ($7). Toss in a snack somewhere in there and I'm at over $20/day.
If work provided acceptable free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that would save me $5000/year. That seems big enough to me to not ignore when comparing jobs.
And if the company isn't doing so hot? It's a lot more trouble to lower salaries than it is to cut food. Hence I'd rather not sit down and assume I'm making $5000 more. Plus it puts you in the position of feeling like you need to make 100% use of your perks, or you're getting shortchanged. After all, you're not really gaining $5000 in value, if you don't eat all your meals at the office. Or take advantage of every company-sponsored event. Unnecessarily fixing values to things is a stressful way to live.
Slightly off-topic, I rather like the opportunity to get out of the office to eat lunch. That's a perk in and of itself (for me, at least). How would you value that? I could argue that it's worth the hour we spent eating out, which is surely more than the value of some catered food (unless it's some seriously fancy stuff). And you could argue back that since I'm salaried, it doesn't count... In any case, it's just not a worthwhile endeavor for me to try and conjure up numbers, when I can just reap the emotional value instead.
Yes, it can be slightly naive not to take into account benefits, especially if said benefits are written into your contract. And that's the key - if it's not written into your contract, discard it.
If you are naive and you accept a crappy offer from someone, it's not disingenuous for you years later to point out that it was a crappy offer and you were naive, as a lesson to others. The author flat-out states that she did not know much about negotiating at the time.
No true scotsman rears its ugly head. So because she actually cares to be fairly compensated, she's not right for Google? I think that says more about Google than her.
Pretty much spot on of course, anyone who was at Google 'before' can trace the dots to today.
One of the benefits of a generous set of perks is that management can adjust the expense once they get close to the end of the quarter so that the 'numbers come out right.' Google is losing that ability. It makes things like their Q4 'miss' [1] more likely.
It is of course entirely Google's prerogative on how they spend their money. And if you look at their Q4 results [2] they deposited 2.97 billion dollars into the bank in cash based on the work done by their 32,467 employees. That is $91,477 in cash for the 90 days that ended December 31st. Lets say every employee ate 3 gourmet meals a day, at a cost of $15+$25+$50 or $90, and consumed another $25 in snacks so $115 per employee per day. (and those are gonna be some fat employees!) That is 32,467 x $115 x 90 days or $335 million dollars. Or about 11 cents of each dollar they dropped into the bank. The numbers of course reflect the costs that a typical restaurant would charge that was profitable, and $25 a day in snacks? That is probably way beyond what most anyone would eat so these numbers are way over if anything.
But at some point between the original prospectus where Larry and Sergei told potential investors that they were going to spend a lot on perks like this so get used to it; to today, where sometimes elaborate explanations about social consciousness and environmental justice precede the denial of those perks. Someone decided the company's interest was to build a cash pile, not invest in quality of life benefits for the rank and file. Sad really, they are the kind of company that can afford to do it, and now they choose not to. So much for being different.
Google's Q4 miss had nothing to do with perks. They could eliminate all the perks and it wouldn't have made a dent in stock performance.
The earnings miss was by about $1/share, or $323M. That's about $10K per employee over the quarter. You really think Google spends $10K/employee/quarter on perks? I've heard numbers for the food costs, and you're overestimating by more than an order of magnitude.
I actually think perks today are significantly better than they were when I joined in Jan 2009. Cafes are open on weekends. There's more than one option for Friday dinner. They booked the whole Oracle Arena and took us all to see Cirque du Soleil. Cake played at Googleween. Random speakers like Sandra Day O'Connor, Lady Gaga, Carlos Santana, George R.R. Martin, and Bear McCreary show up for talks. We get random schwag more often.
Yes but IMHO the point about the original story is that, all this does not matter, mostly. Like to go to the Cirque du Soleil? Fine, plan a great weekend with your friends or partner. At work you need to find other things, and in my case those things are:
1) Work at things that you actually like, and not just technically. You should think the final product you are building if of some use, is well designed, you would use it, otherwise I would get frustrated (a lot).
2) Be able to make a difference, instead of working to a sub project of a sub project at the point it is not clear to you if you are seriously providing something worthwhile to the big picture. Usually complex organizations tend to fail in this regard, but some big orgs are organized in a way that splits people into small sub-groups handling their own project, so that individuals still can see their scope.
3) Have free time, that is, work for a reasonable amount of hours. You need free hours to have a life, to learn new things unrelated to your work (even if they are still about Computer Science it does not matter), to rest and preserve your health.
4) A friendly environment, where everybody is focused on exploiting the best potentials of co-workers. No envy, no power games, ability to recognize coworkers good accomplishments, and so forth.
I think that meals or other accessorial stuff are not enoguh to compensate the lack of one of the above.
Up to a point - if something has been going on for a long it can become an implied part of your contract (probably less so in the US but still a danger)
And removing these little perks to save 20$ a month can have an impact on Morale out of all proportion to the cash value.
I remember one case I dealt with where a senior manager ($200,000 pa level) was very upset over losing his business needs phone line which was worth £15 a month.
I was unclear, I was trying to point out that the sort of perks rachelbythebay used in her article were inconsequential with respect to the free cash flow, even giving Google the benefit of the doubt in terms of its costs by a huge margin.
When I was there and digging into this issue from the inside one of the issues was that the cafe's predict and prepare a given amount of food and that needs to be just a bit more than is actually consumed so that they don't run out. The remainder is waste, so their cost per meal has to include the cost over head of the waste. Also the preparation staff has a salary and benefits, and there is the cost of the kitchen gear (things you and I don't expressly call out in our own costs because we are the cooks and its our kitchen). But it is always safe to use the retail prices of restaurants in the area because they are demonstrably getting by on that level of return for their meals.
One of the counter arguments an executive made to me was that you couldn't predict the quarter, and I suggested you run it 'behind' so that Q4's free cash determined Q1's level of perks, that way you spent the money you had previously banked. He did not believe there was an accounting system that could deal with that sort of setup. I suggested that Google had one or two smart people who could probably figure it out. But the resolution was 'that would be too much trouble.'
And I completely agree that its their choice on how to do it. But here is the rub, really really smart people in the bay area can work anywhere. Literally walk out on friday, and before they have used up half of their accrued vacation they can be working somewhere else. So screwing around with this sort of stuff when you could afford not to, pisses them off and they leave (see rachelbythebay's comment about 'brain drain'). The secondary effect is that one of the reasons people give for wanting to work at Google is "all the really smart people there." except that the 'really really smart' start leaving, followed by the 'really smart' who start dealing with only the 'moderately smart' because their ranks are leaving.
Its an interesting chain reaction. And of course eventually all that excess money stops coming in because the people who were really responsible for it being there in the first place are now gone, and that leaves you no choice but to cut perks even further. The system often re-stabilizes at a much much lower productivity point.
I got to watch the whole sequence at Sun in the 10 years I was there, a friend of mine watched it at Oracle. When I joined Google I was optimistic that given that Eric Schmidt had been at Sun too that he also understood the dynamic that made technology companies great, vs just ok. I was mistaken.
The process is probably irreversible at this point. Google will coast on its reputation for a while, but folks inside will feel the pain of the 'missing ones', and things that used to just 'get done' will become big projects which take too long and too many people and are always behind schedule. They will keep lowering their hiring standards as the need to back fill positions of people leaving overwhelms their ability to get anything done. The ranks will swell with earnest folks who really want to do well but the ratio of smart people to earnest (but not smart) people will fall and so effort will increase without an increase in output. Revenue per employee will start to drop, and the days when 20,000 employees to get you $2B in free cash flow will be replaced by 50,000 employees and less than a billion.
I wish it were different, but sadly I don't see an out for them.
I find myself in a weird situation, in that I find this writer's writing intriguing exactly because of how much I vehemently disagree with almost all of it. It's like somehow it manages to push all the wrong buttons, in a very precise way. Usually when I read things that I disagree with it doesn't really prod at me, but for some reason almost this entire blog does. The controversy this blog always digs up on really minor topics makes me think I'm not the only one.
I think what always strikes me in her writing is the lack of any empathy in any of the rants/complaints. When I read credible arguments, I always feel like there's a bit of understanding involved, as in "these people think this, for certain reasons we've actually bothered to explore and will treat fairly, but it turns out this other thing is the case because.."
The problem is, if you don't bother to look into the other side of things, you can't have real understanding. I saw nothing in that article as to /why/ google might have done what they did, only some really petulant complaints and vague innuendo about "rogue contractors". I got the same impression from other posts, like where she accused ruby programmers of being "hipsters", because, you know, obviously you can just do everything in C++ so why bother to learn something new?
> Usually when I read things that I disagree with it doesn't really prod at me ... I saw nothing in that article as to /why/ google might have done what they did
And then from the article:
"""
but enough people finally cornered them and got them to admit it was about the cost.
"""
From what I see, you really didn't read the article.
No, it's not "of course it's because of the cost" because it could have been for another reason, and (thank God) the article wasn't about why Google would cut back on a perk. If it was, I wouldn't have read it.
Everyone knows Google cut perks to save money. If they'd told people to accept a lower salary, on the basis of the perks being worth 20k, that employee is bound to be pissed when they were taken away. They were part of the salary negotiation - to the author, that's like cutting her wage because the stock numbers were down.
I too find the writing style very distracting, but I can't quite place my finger on what it is exactly. It's very strange, though. That being said, I think the post makes a valuable point that anybody can learn about negotiating: what are they really giving you, did you expect to get that anyway (i.e. is it material to negotiations), can you reasonably claim it's not material even if it IS something special they're offering (I have allergies to about 25% of common foods, so I prepare my own food), can they take it away later, etc.
The article isn't about why Google cut costs like free cafeteria food. It's about an employee agreeing to work somewhere that is reputed to be "world class" because they were promised a benefit and then that benefit was taken away.
Google is located in an area where there aren't many restaurants close by. By offering on-site lunches, they keep the employees on campus. So instead of wasting, say, 1.5 hours getting to MtView, hunting for parking, waiting at a restaurant, eating, getting back into your car, etc., the employees just walk over to the cafe, still in work mode; or even better, take the lunch back to their offices.
Even if Google gets 1 hour of work per employee per day out of this arrangement, the lunch more than pays for itself.
So people shouldn't naively think that Google (or, for that matter, any other company) offers these perks out of the goodness of their heart; it's because it makes fiscal sense to keep employees on campus, working.
Right, the company I worked for was open about this, they wanted us at our desks.
The problem was they had no way of measuring how much productivity gains there really were but they still had a bill every month for the food. When push comes to shove it was harder to justify any theoretical productivity gains against that bill.
> So people shouldn't naively think that Google (or, for that matter, any other company) offers these perks out of the goodness of their heart.
It becomes s question of quality. It is one thing to offer free steaks at lunch (a real perk) vs offering beans and rice every day. [just using it to illustrate a point, not saying Google is serving rice and beans only]. The goal of Google is to present how they have very high quality food during interview then start scaling down the quality (and cost) until employees will still feel like driving is a hassle but now a meal is $10 vs $30.
In the end however they lose with this strategy. The people working there can read between the lines. Google might end up with better end-of-quarter bottom line, but in the long long run they will be shooting themselves in the foot.
> It is one thing to offer free steaks at lunch (a real perk) vs offering beans and rice every day. [just using it to illustrate a point, not saying Google is serving rice and beans only].
If they just offered (note: it's an offer, not mandatory) beans and rice, then the employees would just go out for lunch, defeating the purpose of the program.
The lunch has to be good enough to keep the employees there.
I've worked at Google for almost four years and found this hilarious. "The Friday morning bagel or donut supplies also were curtailed. Sure, they still existed, but you now had to go hunt for them. They were no longer set up in a microkitchen near your office. They would now appear only in certain cafes." – The same donuts and bagels are still at Google. You have to walk an extra 30 feet to the cafe to get them. Oh, and I'd take the 10% raise – which was more like a 15-20% raise after all was said and done, based on total compensation + bonus factored in – over 30 feet of additional bagel proximity any day.
Sometimes I feel like the vast majority of annoyances I face at work should have a #firstworldproblems hashtag on them.
I remember, I joined in Jan 2009 at the bottom of the recession, which was basically around the same time that all these perks were being cut. And people at work would gripe all about how the microkitchens weren't as good and they discontinued tea time and the cafes were closed on weekends. And then I'd go home to my two roommates, one of whom worked at EMC, and she would be like "We laid off 15% of the company today. I still have a job. I have to do the work of two additional people, but I still have a job."
I absolutely despise this kind of thinking. The whole "firstworldproblems" meme pisses me off. You can extend this to anything. "People in Country X are starving so it's lame of me to complain about my 2-hour commute." "Children are being beaten in Country Y so I feel bad complaining about working on the weekend once a month." Ok, I'll even pull away from the hyperbole: "my friend Bob got laid off, so I shouldn't complain about working 14-hour days because at least I have a job".
Yes, you absolutely should complain.
I just don't buy any of this. If I'm unhappy about something, then I'm unhappy about something. The tsunami that destroyed the lives of thousands of people in Country Z, while tragic, doesn't make my grievances any less valid.
It's like a new form of Godwin's Law. Any complaint can be dismissed as trivial by claiming it's a "first world problem".
If you want to feel institutional guilt because many people in the world have it worse than you, fine. I'm not going to play that game.
(General "you", here. Nostrademons, I'm not pointing specifically at you, just at the general pain this sort of thinking gives me.)
I never viewed as trying to silence people's complaints, but more as a stark way to introduce perspective - that many complaints in the first world really aren't so bad.
I agree with you, somewhat (you seem to be extrapolating out the concept into a ludicrous example). However, we're talking about a recession. National, then global. Google apparently has to start cutting corners somewhere. To whine about having to walk thirty feet to some bagels, while people around you are losing their livelihood is, at best, distasteful.
There's a huge difference between being obsequious to an evil corporate master versus simply sucking it up in recognition of tighter times.
The whole idea of free food is not good. I'd prefer to have a wide variety of the highest quality food and pay something reasonable for it.
I really don't want an incentive to maximize my consumption of food. What matters is how much you enjoy what you do it and being as healthy as you can be.
Caffe Macs at Apple does it well. The healthiest options are clearly subsidized, and desserts are not.
One thing this article doesn't point out: it wasn't Google who argued that the supposedly lower salary was offset by food - it was a person (sure, an employee or contractor of Google). Perhaps this person was reading from a recruiting script sanctioned by management. But it wasn't the big overarching company that made this argument to the author - it was a person.
Recruiters often have the wrong incentive structure. They have numbers to hit - and so they use classic high pressure tactics (exploding offers, "accept the offer now" durring the offer, misinformation, tricks) to convince people to accept. It's unfortunate that the recruiter's goals don't line up with the applicant's, but it's true. How one fixes that isn't obvious to me tonight.
I also hate the victim mentality when an employee no longer feels like they're getting what they want from their employer. If you don't like what you're getting, if the economic transaction is no longer acceptable, leave. (I respect employment laws, I think everyone should treat each other, I don't condone abusive behavior or manipulation) Employees aren't victims trapped by evil employers, they're participants in an economic transaction. If the transaction is no longer as profitable as one at another company, then that doesn't make the employer bad or wrong, it's simply time to move on.
(I worked at Google for 5 years, I left in April 2011. And when I went back for lunch one day in November with former coworkers, I had the best meal I'd had since I left.)
"One thing this article doesn't point out: it wasn't Google who argued that the supposedly lower salary was offset by food - it was a person (sure, an employee or contractor of Google)."
I'm really intrigued at how often this "excuse" is trotted out, almost word-for-word, whenever "a person who works at Google" gets caught doing something sleazy. It's almost as predictable as the first-line call center staff asking you if you've re-booted Windows. In my more suspicious moments, I wonder what the "Google aren't evil, it's just some people who _work_ for Google that do evil shit" apologists are going to say when "the script" they're all reading out of gets posted to PasteBin - complete with Page or Brin or Schimdt's signature at the bottom?
Surely if "do no evil" were and overriding company policy from the top down, "people who work for Google" would knw not do try and pull shit like this?
How is it evil for a recruiter to say "Y'know, we offer a lower salary than you're looking for, but we make up for it in perks!"
And then how is it evil for the food team or corporate finance team to say "We're wasting money in food - literally having every cafe open for breakfast and dinner but only running at 1/3 capacity - so let's cut down on the waste and suggest people walk to the adjacent building for the non-lunch meals!"
What I'm saying is that it wasn't Google upper management making the arguments about food and salary to hire. It was a person. A different person in a different department from the one deciding to cut down on food service.
Sorry - I was going more for the meta-discussion about the seemingly identical responses seen whenever Google is accused of "do evil" rather than passing any judgement on this specific case.
I do note with interest though that you seem to have now changed the discussion framing from "It wasn't Google - it was a person (who did thing under discussion)" to "How is (thing under discussion) evil?"
And, FWIW, I'd consider a recruiter using "perks" as a salary lever, when said perks are out of both the recruiter's and the job applicant's control, and at the whim of "the food team" or "corporate finance", I'd call that at least "sleazy", though probably falling short of "evil".
Having said that, I'm sure the intended public understanding of the "Do no evil" catchphrase _isn't_ "Do anything and everything that's profitable - up to, but falling just short of a legal definition of 'evil' that we might be held accountable for."
Well, in some way, the corollary of "Google isn't evil, it's just some people who work for Google that do evil shit" is "Google isn't good either, it's just some people who work at Google who do awesome shit."
Which actually, I think, is true. My boss once told me "everybody knows who the subset of people who get shit done is", and in some ways, my loyalty is to them rather than the company as an entity (it just so happens that most of them still work at Google). I mourn whenever we lose another coworker who does awesome stuff. If I were to join Parse, it'd be so I could work with Kevin again, and if I were to join Asana, it'd be so I could work with Jackie again, and if I were to join YCombinator, it'd be so I could learn from PB & company.
I'm guessing that this isn't how most outsiders see Google, since in general people don't claim credit for the work they've done at Google unless they're associated with really big-name projects. But I think there's definitely some truth to the view of a corporation as composed of individuals, some of whom are good and some of whom are bad.
the same people, curiously, never want to attribute the good things to single people. no-one here is saying "it's not google that provides the perks, but the contractors that work in the kitchens". yet the same logic seems to suit them just fine when it's negative.
The point is that the slow removal of the food perks, according to the Google logic (or the Google employee/contractor, doesn't matter) is literally decreasing employees' pay by 15-20 thousand dollars per year. But it's done in a way that is not really noticeable; or if it is, Google has selected for the type of person who won't complain too much. It's very much a boiling frog situation. Ultimately it's not "wrong" or "against the law" - as you said, if a person finds her present economic situation unviable, she can go elsewhere. But that's a really big step down from their supposed "Do No Evil" policy. Google built up a huge amount of brand equity amongst tech employees; now they appear to be spending it, so it's important that we properly debit their account.
This is such an odd argument. The individual in that salary negotiation represents Google The Company and for all intents and purposes, is Google The Company in that negotiation.
Similarly, it is the senior management of Google The Company that sets up and approves the "wrong incentive structure" for their recruiters.
This is the second post from this blog I've had the displeasure of reading on HN, and both of them make this person seem to be a congenital malcontent.
180 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadIf this is really about the money: Didn't we have some time ago a story about women earning less than men just because they don't ask for more?
I had read nothing about negotiation, and didn't know what I was doing. They offered a sum which was in fact an improvement over what I had been making seems to me even kind, considering her not mentioning once that she asked for a raise etc.
Yea, I guess they won't be doing that again, for all it got 'em.
Besides, I would imagine that in a company doing as well as Google, annual raises of this amount were usual for the performers anyway.
I never claimed to add any original research - just that the person I replied to hadn't read the article.
1) Give us some time to think about it.
2) We are going to re-focus the discussion on a different compensation lever where we can present something you're already going to get as if it were a new incentive justifying your concession on a lever you're currently interested in.
You can do both of these as a job seeker.
(For example, if you have extra-curricular interests like many desirable tech employees do, the extra-curricular interests can be used to justify an increase in your compensation vis-a-vis a hypothetical employee who punches out of the Internet at 5 pm. It doesn't particularly matter that you're going to continue blogging and OSS regardless of the outcome of this negotiation, you just frame the discussion such that that becomes newly discovered value which gives the other party something to hang their hat on for getting you that last $10,000.)
Don't forget the lesson though -- if you use an extra-curricular in a negotiation it's no longer extra-curricular.
let me elaborate. if someone looks me in the eye and says, "Don't forget that we never work weekends, how much is that worth?" then they are not my friend. That's a given, it's part of a 40-hour job not to work weekends. To put a price on it and have me concede part of my salary means they don't have my interests at heart.
Now, you might say that negotiators don't have to have the other guy's interests at heart. Then maybe you can read Getting to Yes ("the Harvard principle") or even the old How To Win Friends and Influence People.
the toughest negotiators usually end up having no one to talk with but mud with a stick in it. If all you want for an employee is a mud with a stick in it, by all means, harp on about how elephants do not trample around your premises, there are no monsoons in the area, and other employees don't use the outhouse or squat outside to potentially poop on them.
But if you want a quality employee, an actual human, then the negotiation that works on mud with a stick in it will not be very compelling. Or honest. Pretty soon you won't be negotiating with another human again.
The other important point is - you are the only one who says "Yes" when asked "Is this acceptable to you?" If the free food is not worth $15-20K (which actually seems ridiculous - I've heard numbers for both what average employees value it at and what it actually costs Google, and they're nowhere close to that), then say "I'm sorry, I don't value my food that highly. I'll take the cash or go elsewhere." This, of course, requires that you have somewhere else to go. But remember that Google wants highly-qualified employees just as much as highly-qualified employees want to work at Google.
If you're being considered by Google and you don't negotiate, perhaps they are the ones making the mistake.
Btw., that's pretty much what happened at my current workplace: after two years of employment I negotiating salary increase -- basing on market situation and possible other employers for me -- and ever since the owners appreciate my role in the company more.
Every "benefit" has an associated dollar value. That's it. Total them up.
Oddly, salary is a holy cow whereas beenefits are not.
Having worked as an "employee" for 13 years before going freelance, the trend I see is this: employers generally feel its AOK to reduce/remove/substitute lesser benefits to save them money. The same cannot be said for salary reductions.
This is a large part of what led me to go freelance. I control my benefits. I negotiate my rate. I get paid based on those and how hard I work.
At the end of the day, it's still a lot like being an employee but, for me, with far less a feeling of being victimized.
Thank you.
http://www.korokithakis.net/posts/secrets-power-negotiating/
Of course the second book sounds odd, but if you're renting chunks of your life, it's vital to know about the real nature of markets, not the Disneyfied version. Many people I've spoken with are uncomfortable with the antagonistic nature of negotiation, and fail to hit the upper limit of what the employer's willing to spend. Instead of wilting, there should be a feeling of indignance.
http://www.korokithakis.net/posts/secrets-power-negotiating/
Notice what she does not mention: Google massively increased salaries during the same time period, including the 10% across the board bump.
Suppose Hitler said exercising is good for health. Now Hitler was one sick son of a bitch, but that has nothing to do with whether exercising is good.
May be rachelbythebay holds a grudge against Google, but here she is specifically pointing out negotiators taking free food into account while negotiating, cafes closing down and shortage of food.
I don't know about you, but her article sounds pretty genuine to me.
That might be because I dislike the "green initiatives." Most of the "green initiatives" are done as a PR move or cost cutting measure, totally disregarding the employees.
At an earlier workplace, man, was I pissed when they replaced the urinal flushes with bio cubes. Thankfully, it didn't last long(1 week).
Another workplace switched off escalators after 5 in the evening, even though the escalators were the auto on/off model, and didn't consume much power when they weren't actively used. What pissed me off more was when there was some HR conference going on in the same building, the power saving mode wasn't engaged.
I remember the conversation with a senior folk:
Me: Hey, escalators are working today?
Oh, there is a HR conference going up on the 2nd floor, and people need to use it.
Me: Has it ever fucking occurred to you that there are engineers working on the 3rd floor, who regularly stay well after 5, and need to use the escalators?
Oh, you can use the stairs or the elevator in the other section? Come on, it's not a big deal - we are being green.
Regardless of her previous comments on Google (I don't think sexism is relevant here) I don't think the authorship in this case warrants dismissal. I think your point about 10% salary increase is relevant, but perk-baiting itself is a very important issue that more new hires should be aware of.
I've seen this many times in many different industries. Without good advice early on I would have fallen for it myself more than once, I'm sure.
So let's not shoot the messenger in this case.
This is a pointless ad-hominem attack. Suppose, hypothetically, that rachelbythebay believes engineers are all sexist and google is evil. So what?
You could make your post clearer and more useful by removing the first sentence.
ie. being green.
Lot of conjecture in this article.
It is easy to eliminate these kinds of perks because many people will be in favor of cost cutting. Not so for salary, not many people will argue in favor of across the board salary cuts. I'll take salary every time.
Yep, and it baffles me when companies miss the forest through the trees and cut something like sodas. In the scheme of what a fully loaded engineer costs the company, even 10 cans of soda/day is minuscule (~$625/year).
As companies get bigger the same thing always seem to happen. The bean counters see the large costs of providing free X to thousands of people and/or people who work there start taking advantage of the situation (bring home a 12 pack of soda each day for all their roommates). No matter how cool the company claims to be, this seems to eventually happen to all large companies past a certain size.
It's baffling.
On one hand, it conjures up pictures of a real slimeball, the typical "snake oil salesman".
On the other, I get the impression he is a really charismatic individual. It certainly takes some skill to stand up in front of a bunch of people, take away something from them and convince them that they are better off.
Probably a great combination for a CEO.
If your boss starts complaining about sodas, $50 license upgrades for team software, cheap HW upgrades like RAM, etc... then it's time to leave.
However, how do you force them to give you a number first? The only tactic I can think of is to say 'give me market rates'. One time, they just kept pressing for more and more of a number until I blurted out something. In this case it was $80k, in a Rocky Mountain state, in 2004, fresh out of college. I don't think it worked in my favor.
Now where have we heard that before? Rogue contractors?
I may be wrong, but... Is she implying that (in her personal opinion), Google knew and instructed them about OpenStreetMap sabotage? That's controversial at least.
Edit: I mean, I'm not defending anyone, but without proofs, I think that's a very harsh sentence.
Look at google + mocality: it's easy to understand why the contractors where doing what they were: it helped them sell something or hit quota.
Compare to Google contractors + open street map: what incentive does a contractor have to go screw up their data? In the first case I see directly why unethical people would do what they did. What exactly is the motive here? Just griefing? It makes me wonder.
"But what happens when the economy improves? Those wounds will never heal. Anyone with half a brain will say "hey, these guys are evil!" and will bail for greener pastures."
Because they don't have bagels in the microkitchen Google is evil?
As someone who works at Google, I can assure you that the microkitchens are overflowing with drinks, snacks, fruits, coffees, and candies, The cafeterias are plentiful(24 in mountain view alone) and the food is incredibly delicious, even for a foodie like myself.
Plus, the pay is very competitive. The author must not have stuck around for this:
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-11-09/tech/30024423...
It's unfortunate that her experience didn't end well, but this article comes across as hyperbolic and catty.
For me it was just a "shrug, whatever" moment. I realized that as a growing public company Google wanted to control costs more.
And I might be weird, but excessive perks creep me out a little. I worry about it warping my mind too much. One day during my time at Google, I was in a grocery store and felt mild outrage at the thought that they were going to charge me for food.
Once you're used to a perk, it's another fishhook the company has embedded into your flesh.
You must be going to different MKs than I do. My experience is the MKs have always had (at least since Dec 2008, when I started) plenty of seasonal fresh fruit, pre-made salads and sandwiches in addition to the dried cereals and pre-packaged snacks. <shrug>
The perks are nice but are far from the top of the list of things that I would miss about working here - working with world class people, the opportunity to work on huge problems at scale, the amount that's invested in internal tools and processes, a culture that allows and even encourages you to question management - those are the types of things that I would miss.
The perks are just nice extras.
It was an advice article. I think many young graduates (that Google seems to like to recruit) should read it.
> Then it turns into a rant about how she was robbed of her entitlements.
I think you are being too hyperbolic there. It seems pretty clear that Google didn't break any laws and that the author thinks Google didn't break any laws. She made some wrong assumptions during her hiring and she is warning others not to make the same ones.
> Because they don't have bagels in the microkitchen Google is evil?
It is appropriate to use that word because Google set itself up for it by using it in its own mission statement. It is clearly a play on that. Had any other company been involved I bet the word "evil" wouldn't have been used.
Just out of curiosity, does Google gross up salaries for tax purposes? I really think the IRS needs to crack down on companies using excessive perks as non-taxable compensation.
If Google is using the perks to justify a "lower but equivalent salary" then they should be paying taxes on the non-cash compensation. If they are not, then Google is taking advantage of a shady tax dodge.
http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15b/ar02.html#en_US_2011_pu...
Tax tip going way back to Learned Hand: you don't have to feel guilty about structuring your affairs to take advantage of every legitimate opportunity to decrease your tax burden.
Here's a related example: US tax law allows you to deduct 50% of meals incurred on business trips. I travel internationally for a significant portion of every year, on business trips. There are two ways to calculate how much you spend on meals: 1) Actual cost 2) An approximation method which takes a per-diem rate supplied by the US government based on your location and adds one or two wrinkles not relevant here. Either is acceptable to the IRS. I keep appropriate records of business expenses, so running both the exact cost and the approximation method was trivial. The approximation overstates my actual cost on meals by several thousand dollars -- using it as the basis for my deduction saves me about a thousand bucks. That's totally kosher.
P.S. You know those beating-the-system-is-worth-bonus-points neuroreceptors that most of us hackers have? Doing taxes gives you the opportunity for that sort of thing in spades. (Though I'd probably still suggest getting someone competent to do yours -- advice which I will be taking for myself from next year on.)
Why bother calculating "effective salary"? Personally, anything that isn't cold, hard cash I view as tangential to my compensation. Even options are questionable - sometimes the salary hit over 4+ years is comparable to the additional options' value. Sure, perks can make the work environment nicer. I'll take that into consideration given competing offers. But it seems silly to attempt to fix a monetary value on these things that the company has no contractual requirement to fulfill.
During the work week, I typically grab breakfast on the way to work ($5.10 at McDonalds, plus $1.25 for a drink out of the vending machine at work). If I have lunch, it might be Subway (around $7). Maybe dinner from Wendy's ($7). Toss in a snack somewhere in there and I'm at over $20/day.
If work provided acceptable free breakfast, lunch, and dinner, that would save me $5000/year. That seems big enough to me to not ignore when comparing jobs.
Slightly off-topic, I rather like the opportunity to get out of the office to eat lunch. That's a perk in and of itself (for me, at least). How would you value that? I could argue that it's worth the hour we spent eating out, which is surely more than the value of some catered food (unless it's some seriously fancy stuff). And you could argue back that since I'm salaried, it doesn't count... In any case, it's just not a worthwhile endeavor for me to try and conjure up numbers, when I can just reap the emotional value instead.
It seems disingenuous for her to complain about it later.
One of the benefits of a generous set of perks is that management can adjust the expense once they get close to the end of the quarter so that the 'numbers come out right.' Google is losing that ability. It makes things like their Q4 'miss' [1] more likely.
It is of course entirely Google's prerogative on how they spend their money. And if you look at their Q4 results [2] they deposited 2.97 billion dollars into the bank in cash based on the work done by their 32,467 employees. That is $91,477 in cash for the 90 days that ended December 31st. Lets say every employee ate 3 gourmet meals a day, at a cost of $15+$25+$50 or $90, and consumed another $25 in snacks so $115 per employee per day. (and those are gonna be some fat employees!) That is 32,467 x $115 x 90 days or $335 million dollars. Or about 11 cents of each dollar they dropped into the bank. The numbers of course reflect the costs that a typical restaurant would charge that was profitable, and $25 a day in snacks? That is probably way beyond what most anyone would eat so these numbers are way over if anything.
But at some point between the original prospectus where Larry and Sergei told potential investors that they were going to spend a lot on perks like this so get used to it; to today, where sometimes elaborate explanations about social consciousness and environmental justice precede the denial of those perks. Someone decided the company's interest was to build a cash pile, not invest in quality of life benefits for the rank and file. Sad really, they are the kind of company that can afford to do it, and now they choose not to. So much for being different.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/technology/googles-strong-...
[2] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2011/Q4_google_earnings....
The earnings miss was by about $1/share, or $323M. That's about $10K per employee over the quarter. You really think Google spends $10K/employee/quarter on perks? I've heard numbers for the food costs, and you're overestimating by more than an order of magnitude.
I actually think perks today are significantly better than they were when I joined in Jan 2009. Cafes are open on weekends. There's more than one option for Friday dinner. They booked the whole Oracle Arena and took us all to see Cirque du Soleil. Cake played at Googleween. Random speakers like Sandra Day O'Connor, Lady Gaga, Carlos Santana, George R.R. Martin, and Bear McCreary show up for talks. We get random schwag more often.
1) Work at things that you actually like, and not just technically. You should think the final product you are building if of some use, is well designed, you would use it, otherwise I would get frustrated (a lot).
2) Be able to make a difference, instead of working to a sub project of a sub project at the point it is not clear to you if you are seriously providing something worthwhile to the big picture. Usually complex organizations tend to fail in this regard, but some big orgs are organized in a way that splits people into small sub-groups handling their own project, so that individuals still can see their scope.
3) Have free time, that is, work for a reasonable amount of hours. You need free hours to have a life, to learn new things unrelated to your work (even if they are still about Computer Science it does not matter), to rest and preserve your health.
4) A friendly environment, where everybody is focused on exploiting the best potentials of co-workers. No envy, no power games, ability to recognize coworkers good accomplishments, and so forth.
I think that meals or other accessorial stuff are not enoguh to compensate the lack of one of the above.
And removing these little perks to save 20$ a month can have an impact on Morale out of all proportion to the cash value.
I remember one case I dealt with where a senior manager ($200,000 pa level) was very upset over losing his business needs phone line which was worth £15 a month.
When I was there and digging into this issue from the inside one of the issues was that the cafe's predict and prepare a given amount of food and that needs to be just a bit more than is actually consumed so that they don't run out. The remainder is waste, so their cost per meal has to include the cost over head of the waste. Also the preparation staff has a salary and benefits, and there is the cost of the kitchen gear (things you and I don't expressly call out in our own costs because we are the cooks and its our kitchen). But it is always safe to use the retail prices of restaurants in the area because they are demonstrably getting by on that level of return for their meals.
One of the counter arguments an executive made to me was that you couldn't predict the quarter, and I suggested you run it 'behind' so that Q4's free cash determined Q1's level of perks, that way you spent the money you had previously banked. He did not believe there was an accounting system that could deal with that sort of setup. I suggested that Google had one or two smart people who could probably figure it out. But the resolution was 'that would be too much trouble.'
And I completely agree that its their choice on how to do it. But here is the rub, really really smart people in the bay area can work anywhere. Literally walk out on friday, and before they have used up half of their accrued vacation they can be working somewhere else. So screwing around with this sort of stuff when you could afford not to, pisses them off and they leave (see rachelbythebay's comment about 'brain drain'). The secondary effect is that one of the reasons people give for wanting to work at Google is "all the really smart people there." except that the 'really really smart' start leaving, followed by the 'really smart' who start dealing with only the 'moderately smart' because their ranks are leaving.
Its an interesting chain reaction. And of course eventually all that excess money stops coming in because the people who were really responsible for it being there in the first place are now gone, and that leaves you no choice but to cut perks even further. The system often re-stabilizes at a much much lower productivity point.
I got to watch the whole sequence at Sun in the 10 years I was there, a friend of mine watched it at Oracle. When I joined Google I was optimistic that given that Eric Schmidt had been at Sun too that he also understood the dynamic that made technology companies great, vs just ok. I was mistaken.
The process is probably irreversible at this point. Google will coast on its reputation for a while, but folks inside will feel the pain of the 'missing ones', and things that used to just 'get done' will become big projects which take too long and too many people and are always behind schedule. They will keep lowering their hiring standards as the need to back fill positions of people leaving overwhelms their ability to get anything done. The ranks will swell with earnest folks who really want to do well but the ratio of smart people to earnest (but not smart) people will fall and so effort will increase without an increase in output. Revenue per employee will start to drop, and the days when 20,000 employees to get you $2B in free cash flow will be replaced by 50,000 employees and less than a billion.
I wish it were different, but sadly I don't see an out for them.
I think what always strikes me in her writing is the lack of any empathy in any of the rants/complaints. When I read credible arguments, I always feel like there's a bit of understanding involved, as in "these people think this, for certain reasons we've actually bothered to explore and will treat fairly, but it turns out this other thing is the case because.."
The problem is, if you don't bother to look into the other side of things, you can't have real understanding. I saw nothing in that article as to /why/ google might have done what they did, only some really petulant complaints and vague innuendo about "rogue contractors". I got the same impression from other posts, like where she accused ruby programmers of being "hipsters", because, you know, obviously you can just do everything in C++ so why bother to learn something new?
And then from the article:
""" but enough people finally cornered them and got them to admit it was about the cost. """
From what I see, you really didn't read the article.
Good luck Engineers!
Even if Google gets 1 hour of work per employee per day out of this arrangement, the lunch more than pays for itself.
So people shouldn't naively think that Google (or, for that matter, any other company) offers these perks out of the goodness of their heart; it's because it makes fiscal sense to keep employees on campus, working.
The problem was they had no way of measuring how much productivity gains there really were but they still had a bill every month for the food. When push comes to shove it was harder to justify any theoretical productivity gains against that bill.
In most of the US, you're entitled, by law, to a lunch break of at least 30 minutes.
You can thank unions for that.
It becomes s question of quality. It is one thing to offer free steaks at lunch (a real perk) vs offering beans and rice every day. [just using it to illustrate a point, not saying Google is serving rice and beans only]. The goal of Google is to present how they have very high quality food during interview then start scaling down the quality (and cost) until employees will still feel like driving is a hassle but now a meal is $10 vs $30.
In the end however they lose with this strategy. The people working there can read between the lines. Google might end up with better end-of-quarter bottom line, but in the long long run they will be shooting themselves in the foot.
If they just offered (note: it's an offer, not mandatory) beans and rice, then the employees would just go out for lunch, defeating the purpose of the program.
The lunch has to be good enough to keep the employees there.
People got laid off and were unable to find work, possibly ending their careers, and you're complaining about bagels being cut? Seriously?
I remember, I joined in Jan 2009 at the bottom of the recession, which was basically around the same time that all these perks were being cut. And people at work would gripe all about how the microkitchens weren't as good and they discontinued tea time and the cafes were closed on weekends. And then I'd go home to my two roommates, one of whom worked at EMC, and she would be like "We laid off 15% of the company today. I still have a job. I have to do the work of two additional people, but I still have a job."
Yes, you absolutely should complain.
I just don't buy any of this. If I'm unhappy about something, then I'm unhappy about something. The tsunami that destroyed the lives of thousands of people in Country Z, while tragic, doesn't make my grievances any less valid.
It's like a new form of Godwin's Law. Any complaint can be dismissed as trivial by claiming it's a "first world problem".
If you want to feel institutional guilt because many people in the world have it worse than you, fine. I'm not going to play that game.
(General "you", here. Nostrademons, I'm not pointing specifically at you, just at the general pain this sort of thinking gives me.)
There's a huge difference between being obsequious to an evil corporate master versus simply sucking it up in recognition of tighter times.
My complaint is with her outlandish rhetoric around Google cutting back on some extravagances during a global recession.
I really don't want an incentive to maximize my consumption of food. What matters is how much you enjoy what you do it and being as healthy as you can be.
Caffe Macs at Apple does it well. The healthiest options are clearly subsidized, and desserts are not.
Recruiters often have the wrong incentive structure. They have numbers to hit - and so they use classic high pressure tactics (exploding offers, "accept the offer now" durring the offer, misinformation, tricks) to convince people to accept. It's unfortunate that the recruiter's goals don't line up with the applicant's, but it's true. How one fixes that isn't obvious to me tonight.
I also hate the victim mentality when an employee no longer feels like they're getting what they want from their employer. If you don't like what you're getting, if the economic transaction is no longer acceptable, leave. (I respect employment laws, I think everyone should treat each other, I don't condone abusive behavior or manipulation) Employees aren't victims trapped by evil employers, they're participants in an economic transaction. If the transaction is no longer as profitable as one at another company, then that doesn't make the employer bad or wrong, it's simply time to move on.
(I worked at Google for 5 years, I left in April 2011. And when I went back for lunch one day in November with former coworkers, I had the best meal I'd had since I left.)
I'm really intrigued at how often this "excuse" is trotted out, almost word-for-word, whenever "a person who works at Google" gets caught doing something sleazy. It's almost as predictable as the first-line call center staff asking you if you've re-booted Windows. In my more suspicious moments, I wonder what the "Google aren't evil, it's just some people who _work_ for Google that do evil shit" apologists are going to say when "the script" they're all reading out of gets posted to PasteBin - complete with Page or Brin or Schimdt's signature at the bottom?
Surely if "do no evil" were and overriding company policy from the top down, "people who work for Google" would knw not do try and pull shit like this?
And then how is it evil for the food team or corporate finance team to say "We're wasting money in food - literally having every cafe open for breakfast and dinner but only running at 1/3 capacity - so let's cut down on the waste and suggest people walk to the adjacent building for the non-lunch meals!"
What I'm saying is that it wasn't Google upper management making the arguments about food and salary to hire. It was a person. A different person in a different department from the one deciding to cut down on food service.
I do note with interest though that you seem to have now changed the discussion framing from "It wasn't Google - it was a person (who did thing under discussion)" to "How is (thing under discussion) evil?"
And, FWIW, I'd consider a recruiter using "perks" as a salary lever, when said perks are out of both the recruiter's and the job applicant's control, and at the whim of "the food team" or "corporate finance", I'd call that at least "sleazy", though probably falling short of "evil".
Having said that, I'm sure the intended public understanding of the "Do no evil" catchphrase _isn't_ "Do anything and everything that's profitable - up to, but falling just short of a legal definition of 'evil' that we might be held accountable for."
Which actually, I think, is true. My boss once told me "everybody knows who the subset of people who get shit done is", and in some ways, my loyalty is to them rather than the company as an entity (it just so happens that most of them still work at Google). I mourn whenever we lose another coworker who does awesome stuff. If I were to join Parse, it'd be so I could work with Kevin again, and if I were to join Asana, it'd be so I could work with Jackie again, and if I were to join YCombinator, it'd be so I could learn from PB & company.
I'm guessing that this isn't how most outsiders see Google, since in general people don't claim credit for the work they've done at Google unless they're associated with really big-name projects. But I think there's definitely some truth to the view of a corporation as composed of individuals, some of whom are good and some of whom are bad.
Similarly, it is the senior management of Google The Company that sets up and approves the "wrong incentive structure" for their recruiters.