Also, frankly, fsk free snacks. Pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks, and I'll choose whether to spend it on snacks or not. And since the money spent on free snacks was probably about $20/week, it won't be a significant consideration in any of my decisions.
Bus service might be more significant in some places, but every place I've ever lived had that subsidized by the government, and long commutes are a toxic thing in themselves.
Free snacks has to be one of tech companies most profitable endeavors.
They've got a bunch of workers who cost them on the order of 1 to 4 dollars per minute. If they can spend a dollar on a snack to get 2 minutes more work out of them, they are making a killing.
Snacks aren't part of your salary for being an employee of your company, they're your company trying to make as efficient use of your work time as possible. By avoiding you walking around looking for your own snacks, by making sure you aren't hungry and therefore underperforming, etc.
The same goes for meals by the way, I can't believe the number of places that have expensive employees go buy food for themselves blocks away... they're literally throwing away money by not having cheap employees fetch it in a single batch.
You act like there is some shadowy cabal running cost benefit analysis of every decision for some evil purpose.
Maybe the free snacks are there because it’s nice to have free snacks and the boss enjoys them? Does there really need to be a more sinister reason?
I mean, I know at our company that I wanted to have drink fridges with a huge amount of interesting beverages because I enjoy drinking a different drink every day. It wasn’t me trying to improve employee performance.
There is a secret cabal running cost-benefit analyses of every decision for some evil purpose: They're called MBA's and they're everywhere. Especially in larger companies.
There is at least a little bit of a dark side to seemingly frivolous perks like snacks, foosball tables, and beer on tap- by spending relative pennies for "luxuries", management is able to paper over diminished investment elsewhere, that employees could otherwise benefit from. Or to hide work cultures that aren't as great as they look upon their first visit. Shiny distractions.
This. I work at a place that had no retirement plan, subpar health insurance, generally clueless HR and no support for career development besides "fake it til you make it".
Of course they have ping pong tables and video games and free snacks and drink fridges. The cost and logistics of putting in a couple ping-pong tables is way cheaper than giving everyone vision coverage, or matching retirement contributions.
Boy: You can't treat the working man this way. One day we'll form a union and get the fair and equittable treatment we deserve. Then we'll go too far, and get corrupt and shiftless and the Japanese will eat us alive!
Mr. Burns' Grandfather: The Japanese!? Those sandal-wearing goldfish tenders? Bosh! Flimshaw!
[Years Later]
Mr. Burns: If only we'd listened to that boy, instead of walling him up in the abandoned coke oven."
I don't know if they were being sarcastic, but I'm willing to argue for the position.
There are life altering medical conditions that can make you go blind, for that "vision coverage" as part of medical coverage makes sense. I'm excluding that from the below because by "vision coverage" most people mean "insurance for routine checkups and purchasing glasses".
For routine eye appointments and glasses - their is no high unexpected costs that need to be spread out over a large population. The costs are low and predictable. The majority of the population needs them. So the typical benefit of insurance doesn't exist - i.e. you aren't spreading large unexpected costs over a large number of people so they average out to a small consistent cost.
Meanwhile insuring these things just means that the people purchasing the product no longer have an incentive to keep the price down, and adds bureaucracy, both of which increase the cost without providing a better service.
So - why do you need vision coverage?
I'll acknowledge some counter arguments exist. Encouraging people to get frequent enough eye appointments, spreading the cost of bad eyesight to the minority of people who don't need eyeware, if government supported - subsidizing the basic need of eyeware for poor people, etc. You can make an argument in the other direction to, but I don't think either argument is obviously better, and in the end which side you agree with basically comes down to what your politics are like.
Software engineering and white collar work in general are very visual-heavy professions. It is absurd not to include health coverage as part of compensation when the job involves 40+ hours a week of staring at computer screens. It is also ridiculous that vision and dental insurance are bundled separately from "medical" coverage, but that is a different issue.
I'm assuming your total compensation is the same either way. So it's not that you're not being compensated for staring at computer screens all days, it's just a question of whether your being compensated by being given dollars or being compensated by your eye doctor and glasses manufacturer being given dollars.
Upon rereading your post, your point makes more sense. But don't you at least get discounts on the exams and eyewear? I would assume there's some justification for why vision insurance exists beyond the serious conditions you mention, and thus be an additional benefit from employers of workers who experience ocular wear and tear all day.
You get fake discounts off egregiously inflated eye exam/eyewear prices
You can easily buy prescription glasses online for less than $20 a pair, and you can get an eye exam done for $50-$100
If you use your vision insurance to buy glasses in person, though, good luck getting them for less than $150. The price of the glasses magically inflates to whatever your insurance will cover.
If my vision insurance weren't bundled with my employment as a "free" benefit I'd definitely just use $80 out of my HSA to pay for an eye exam and then buy a sack of glasses online
Once I worked in a department that had a crappy coffee maker. We got a new boss. First thing he did was get a really good coffee maker installed.
That boss left, new boss showed up, coffee maker left and an even worse one than the original was installed. No espresso! In SF!
In my experience having at least a VP who actually cares about the perk will vastly improve it. But most won’t care and will do whatever the default is.
Throwing out the "perk" of providing free performance enhancing drugs to their employees means their average employee will become less effective, either because they won't be on performance enhancing drugs or because they will be spending time walking around to get performance enhancing drugs instead of working. So the average employee is making less money for the company, so they are payed less, not more.
In numbers it goes something like they can pay you and extra buck a day for not having the coffee machine, but they simultaneously have to cut your pay 10 bucks a day for the loss in productive work being done. Your 9 bucks a day and free coffee down in the exchange.
I don't think meals work in quite the same way. If I'm looking for a snack that is a short-term immediate need. I have a stash in my desk drawer, there are often free ones in the kitchen & break-out area, and I'm happy to use those usually rather than going further afield. It doesn't save actual time because ten minutes nipping to the shop is ten minutes time I'll serve elsewhere but it can impact productive time as a 10-minute break is a more significant mental context switch than a 30-second one.
But at lunch though, is a different beast. I'm going to be away from my desk and/or meetings for at least half an hour, except on those occasions when there is an emergency so I stuff something down myself at my desk from the collection of protein bars and such in that desk draw & work through. Providing a meal doesn't give the company the same productive time benefit there at all, in fact some studies suggest it could be a detriment - taking a proper break for lunch has been shown to have a beneficial effect on concentration in the afternoon. I usually make a point of taking most of an hour to get out away from my desk, even in iffy weather, though I do currently have the luxury of working close to home so I can actually get there, eat, fuss the cat, and get back, in that time so that may not be as appealing to others.
> Snacks aren't part of your salary for being an employee of your company, they're your company trying to make as efficient use of your work time as possible. By avoiding you walking around looking for your own snacks, by making sure you aren't hungry and therefore underperforming, etc.
Free food is also tax-deductible in a way that simply giving you the extra money is not.
They are buying more than the snacks. They are buying you time, since you never need to make office grocery runs to stock your desk. Might not be a huge deal, but elimination of chores really is a perk.
Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk. It's arguable whether it's actually a perk for me to spend 8 hours in a row at my desk, but even if we accept that claim at face value, it's still not a significant factor in any decisions I make.
Perks are things you give me that I can't get for myself, like health insurance which you use collective bargaining to get a lower price on. Snacks aren't that.
And while it's anecdotal, I've seen people take multiple-thousands-of-dollars pay cuts to work at places with "a better culture" where the only discern-able differences were soda in the fridge, beer on tap, and a ping-pong table or similar: all things that if you put a number value on what it's worth to you, aren't worth it. Culture does matter, but it starts with valuing your workers enough to pay them and not use irrelevant "perks" as an excuse to pay them less.
> Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk.
Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.
You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.
Also, even if they were to give you your fraction of that back, that would count as taxable income - unless they categorize it as a "stipend" -- which requires a lot more up-front accounting/legal work on their end.
You may prefer getting $6/wk (or $5.04/wk after taxes) more instead of snacks at work, but the simple fact is that your employer provides snacks because it's in their best interest to do so. Whether it's in your interest is not the decisive factor, though they may take your opinion into consideration.
I feel like this conversation got massively side-tracked. Are you arguing in good faith that the amount of value some snacks provide to an employee is meaningful when compared to the other things the GP mentioned?
This entire thread is the reason unions are such a pain in the a$$.
You have a bunch of employees who have never run a company confidently telling with their handwaving math how things should work. You have a dozen people patting themselves and others on the back for the idea of getting a sliver of their snack budget back in salary with no concept of economies of scale.
While unionizing for backbreaking work like the manufacturing industry makes sense, in tech it is a nightmare. Let's see where Kickstarter finds itself in the next recession and see how things work out when executives can no longer make quick decisions but are forced to do everything by committee.
I'm not referring to large, faceless corporations, I'm referring to >100 person orgs. My experience can't be an outlier as there are plenty of vendors that specialize in this space, so someone out there is buying from a vendor. Here's what I found on the first page of search results:
Well I'm certainly not ordering from GrubHub either.
> Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.
What's the economy of scale on me getting up and going to get a fresh salad even when snacks are provided for free, because I value my health and sanity?
If you don’t value it, that’s fine. No one is holding a gun to your head and demanding you eat the snacks, but your original proposition was about using that money to buy your own snacks which doesn’t work for the aforementioned economies of scale.
Really, you think buying my own snacks doesn't work? I gotta tell you, I've been accused of many things, but being unable to buy snacks is not one of them.
Sure, maybe it costs me some minuscule amount of money: if that's your point you can have it. Congrats! You win that argument.
My argument is: pretending that snacks are a meaningful benefit in negotiating employment is a huge loss to employees. But if you want to choose your job based on the snack benefit, have fun working for reduced wages so you can sit at your desk more.
> If you don’t value it, that’s fine. No one is holding a gun to your head and demanding you eat the snacks, but your original proposition was about using that money to buy your own snacks which doesn’t work for the aforementioned economies of scale.
And before that, you said:
> You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.
Buying my own snacks works just fine, because in an economy of scale, snacks simply are irrelevant. The greatest relevance they have is as a contract negotiation chip where employers try to sell them as a benefit which gets weighed against things that actually matter, like salary.
If you view snacks as an inherently important thing, I guess I can't argue with you on that, but I think most people wouldn't agree with you if they realized how much money they might be leaving behind by considering things like snacks when choosing a job.
Who are you to decide if that's worth it or not? Obviously if someone has decided to take that pay cut and switch companies it was worthwhile for them.
You might not care much for those perks yourself but it's self-evident that some people do.
People are free to make whatever irrational decisions they wish. Again, we're talking anecdotal evidence, but those people don't stay long at those companies.
I certainly won't hold it against an employer if they provide snacks.
It’s not irrational to value things differently. I place a huge premium on having a variety of drinks, snacks, and meals at my workplace. Far, far beyond the mere cost to purchase them. I make plenty of money, why would I add a huge time sink, hassle, and mental overhead for a bit of extra cash that I don’t really need?
I’ve been doing this for a long time, thanks. It’s definitely worth a few thousand dollars per year to me. That’s less than 1% of my income. Just because it’s not worth it for you means little.
> I’ve been doing this for a long time, thanks. It’s definitely worth a few thousand dollars per year to me. That’s less than 1% of my income. Just because it’s not worth it for you means little.
Well, I'll just quote that so you can't change it, and people can decide for themselves whether they think paying thousands of dollars for snacks is a rational decision.
Irrational decisions you've been making for a long time are still irrational decisions. Irrational decisions you make with 1% of your income are still irrational decisions.
If you're saying that leaving behind massive amounts of money in exchange for cheap snacks is something you just inherently like, I guess that's not irrational, but that's a pretty unusual thing to like. But follow your heart!
However, this problem isn't solved by unions, it's solved by teaching your dev friends how to negotiate better. If they are on their 3rd job and are still getting under negotiated with snacks then I don't know what to tell you (or them).
It's kind of nice to know that you can walk 5 meters from your desk to get food, however it doesn't take long to realise that you'd rather 10 min to the nearest place and eat there instead. It gives you a bit of time outside the office,you move more and ultimately make your own decision on what you eat instead it being done by your lovely Big Corp.
People rarely do what's more benefitial to them.The best example is when a heavily overweight person with developing heart conditions is prescribed medication left and right instead of being told( and helped with) to better manage diet and levels of physical activities.
So in response to my point that people may value things differently than how someone rando on the Internet thinks they should, your response is that they clearly just don’t know what’s good for them :)
Of course people value different things- that's normal.I remember I worked for a company,where most of my team had this bad habbit of having lunch at their desk. Constantly skipping 1 hour lunch they were entitled to. Our manager used to go crazy about it and eventually had to ban it all together. Interestingly enough, while it was a busy place,there was no need not to take lunch. I always took full lunch break and enjoyed walks alongside Thames,while some others had to seek medical help because of overwork.
Eat apples on daily basis and you'll soon see the affected on your teeth and heart. They are good source of fiber, vitamins bit also have a lot of sugar. Despite all this,they are still miles better than your average Snickers bar.
Actually, speaking as a diabetic, fruits are something you have to be careful of.
There is a _lot_ of sugar in fruit. A medium sized apple has as much sugar as 8oz of Coca Cola.
The sugars in fruit are very simple, which is good and bad. They tend to spike blood sugar very quickly, but also drop back to baseline fairly quickly.
Now, there is lots of good nutritional stuff in fruit also, of course, but you could absolutely develop diabetes from eating fruit.
Given a choice between the apple and the soft drink, I'd choose the raw apple every time. Human digestion can far more efficiently work with the apple than suga-cola. The "sugar" might be the same in terms of basic numbers, but the composition is very different.
I genuinely would like to see how strong the evidence actually is for someone getting diabetes from raw fruit[1]. Especially when compared to other sources such as sugary drinks etc. My uneducated guess is that we should be able to look at primates with high fruit consumption and we'd instantly see massive diabetes populations. I doubt this is true. It would be a stretch at best.
[1] I should at this stage assert the non-inclusion of anything processed either. I'm not counting fruit juice for example. Juicing is not the same as eating the actual fruit. Less effort so the digestion process changes. Commercial juices are even worse.
> They are buying more than the snacks. They are buying you time, since you never need to make office grocery runs to stock your desk. Might not be a huge deal, but elimination of chores really is a perk.
Wrong. This is the complete opposite of what's happening. They aren't eliminating a chore you'd need to do. You're going to work 9-5 whether they provide free snacks or not, and you're going to snack. If they don't provide them, you're going to leave and go get them somewhere else. They're providing snacks to keep you from leaving the office. They get you at your desk longer. It's not a perk. It's a cheap way to extract more labor.
If your job is more fulfilling than walking to a store and standing in line (and most programming jobs are IME), then it's win-win. Company gets something they want, I get something I want, we're both happy.
Or you could just buy snacks at the same time as all your other grocery shopping? I guess if you literally never go to the grocery store it's a perk, but otherwise it's questionable at best.
I remember when I was working on one of the big4, whenever we were getting "snacks" we would EACH pick from a menu what EACH wanted,and EACH was getting exactly what they wanted. Some were going for the ribs, some for the salad, and we would all sit and enjoy our lunches/late dinner together. Not all perks had to do with junkfood.
As you said, that stuff is lunch/dinner, rather than snacks. Certainly that's a more valuable perk that some pretzels and sodas (or whatever). It's also less common.
No, they’re trying to make sure you never leave the office. A walk down the street to the nearest grocery store is a nice break, but not one the company wants you taking.
You know, with the advent of Amazon and other Task Rabbitty to-your-door delivery services, did they really save me any chore here? I can get just about anything delivered to my door stop within 48 hours, why is it trouble for me to get my preferred snacks at all?
I can have them delivered for very little premium. If my co-workers and I pool our orders we can reduce the impact of those deliveries (or rotating pickup), and have more choice about what snacks we get.
Donut and coffee clubs (and similar) in offices have worked this way forever.
I worked for a company that IPO'd at the time for around $4.4 billion.
Shortly after IPO they wanted everyone to go on call. The terms sucked bad, the requirements significantly affecting personal time and the compensation for time on call and loss of personal time less than minimum wage for the pleassue. I'd of been better off working minimum wage out of hours given I'd have to loose personal time anyway. The conditions where non negotiable and I was told they didn't need to re-issue contracts etc, I'd have to go on call with no say in it. In real terms going on call was a pay cut with more accountability.
On refusing to go on call, my manager and his manager used the line "What about the free food and perks, take one for the team". It's about the worst thing they could of said.
Free food being a small salad counter / deli bar and free soft drinks non which I utilized as didn't fit my fitness diet and as you said likely only a few dollars per week extra per member of staff for them to provide a few snacks.
After previously being labelled a high performer etc not long after (days) late on a Friday afternoon HR called me in to sign my resignation papers and go on gardening leave.
I'd welcome free snacks. I work on IND airport property, we have 30 minute lunches, the 2 refrigerators will store maybe food for 20 people yet we have 100ish on day shift, McDonald's is the closest anything and in traffic during a typical lunch period will take you 20-25 minutes on a good day to get to and get back and we can NOT eat at our desks (that we share with another shift). Then of course there are 3 microwaves to reheat your food, for 100ish people.
Some free fruit or something would be awesome for when you're not feeling what you brought or need something in addition other than bloomed chocolate and stale chips from a vending machine that the vendor refills once every 1 week to 6 weeks with no rhyme or reason. The soda machine sells out in 3-4 days and the vendor comes once every 2 weeks if we're lucky. The tap water comes out milky white at first and even if you let it run if you fill a mug and let it sit for a half hour, dump it out, the next day there will be white build up. Do that for a week and then heat the mug and it'll flake off printer paper thick pieces.
I'd totally take free snacks, but yeah I'd be happier with more money.
When I was at OpenAI for a meeting a couple of June's ago I was absolutely floored when they were like "we cater 2 meals a day, you're welcome to stay for lunch" and the guard/receptionist immediately offered me a chilled drink as I was checking in. I was like "wait, did I die and go to heaven?!"
Tax free when a company buys them. I prefer the free snacks even at an even money exchange, but realistically, you'd see about $12/week on a $20/week rerouting.
If $8/week is something that affects your decisions, you might benefit from unionizing for higher pay. ;)
If you want to play the tax game, let's talk about reimbursing large purchases like a vehicle, personal laptop that you aren't monitoring, education costs, or housing. There isn't a situation where I'm going to care about snacks.
Office perks are tax efficient. They aren’t subject to payroll taxes and are a deductible business expense. Not having any perks at all would be wasteful.
Also notable - there are companies that provide 'free' perks for your staff where a few of them are concrete and the rest are discounts on things from their marketing partners.
Honestly, I'd be tempted to sign up and then tell incoming employees the truth thereof.
Bus service might be more significant in some places, but every place I've ever lived had that subsidized by the government, and long commutes are a toxic thing in themselves.