A Look at Silicon Valley Cafeterias 238
boycottthecaf writes "The San Jose Mercury News has a story on the cafeterias of Silicon Valley companies, and how they are used to keep workers on site during lunch. Google, of course, has the cafeteria everyone envies."
Article text. (Score:5, Informative)
By Nicole C. Wong
Mercury News
For many Silicon Valley employees, there's a pecking order to valley companies. And it has nothing to do with sales or size.
It's all about the food.
For years, Silicon Valley companies have invested in their cafeterias to cut the time workers spend foraging off-campus for food, boost camaraderie and keep the troops happy, or at least well-fueled. Now some cafes are such hot spots that discerning diners from other companies are clamoring to eat there.
``Apple's the best,'' said Joseph Ruff, a programmer at Mountain View start-up TellMe Networks. ``The egg burritos, they make them nice and spicy. Network Appliance -- that had a pretty good salad bar, but it was smaller than Apple's.''
Want navrattan korma with raita, chutney and naan? $5.29 at Cisco Systems. Need something to drink? Sun Microsystems stocks 20 flavors of Odwalla juices alone. Feeling guilty? Yahoo boasts sustainably harvested seafood and antibiotic-free chicken.
Marc Marelich, eBay's general manager of food services, often sees outsiders slipping in to eat at the new cafe. And no wonder -- they can get ahi tuna salad tossed on the spot, spicy Tunisian chili with lamb and beef, or Yucatan fish tacos with pico de gallo.
At San Jose semiconductor maker Atmel, which a few years ago decided not to construct its own cafe, employees have found a prized alternative to brown-bagging it. Sales reps, engineers and even the chief financial officer cross the street to eat at BEA Systems' Tuxedo Junction Cafe. One Atmel engineer dines there so often -- three or four times a week -- that a cashier mistakenly gives him the 10 percent discount for BEA employees.
John Lawn, editor in chief of Food Management magazine, said Silicon Valley's corporate cafe scene serves some of the best food in the country. ``You'll find a cafe that's as nice as any commercial restaurant in Chicago or San Francisco, maybe better,'' he said.
Of course, you'll also find some that are worse.
Amy Flores, spokeswoman for Agilent Technologies, offered this opinion of Agilent's cafe: ``All I know is it's sometimes good, and it's sometimes bad.''
And last year, Intel decided that too many employees were avoiding lunch at the company's dining hall, which facilities planning manager Mike Dowd described as ``battleship gray'' with menu offerings ``maybe a notch above hospital and school cafeterias.''
So the cafe splashed its ceiling with paint the color of nacho cheese and revamped the menu to include inari and ebi sushi. It also lowered prices.
Now, Dowd said, ``We have more employees who are willing to have their friends come over to our house to eat, rather than go to theirs.''
Google, by far, has become Silicon Valley's most sizzling lunch site -- as elusive as French Laundry, the Wine Country restaurant where would-be patrons must call two months in advance to get a seat. Ruff, the 39-year-old TellMe programmer, has been begging a college buddy who works at Google to bring him as a lunch guest for the past year.
Google employees must make online reservations 24 hours in advance to bring visitors to the cafe. And they are limited to two guests each month, since all the lunches and dinners are free.
Google's executive chef, Charlie Ayers, cooked for members of the Grateful Dead in the early '90s. He orchestrates a 100-plus staff and announces the day's eating options only an hour before lunch. ``That's how we keep them on campus -- have that element of surprise,'' he said.
It seems to work. On an average day, 85 percent of Googlers eat at the cafe, compared with 50 percent at other valley companies.
Eric Case, a 25-year-old blogger product specialist at Google, finds that all of a sudden, his friends want to dine with him. ``They'll e-mail, `Hey, do you want to have lunch sometime next week?' What that means is, `Can I eat at Google?' ''
Broadcom counts on a
Re:Article text. (Score:5, Funny)
There was no cafetria, but Costco was accross the street. Hello samples!
Grump
They pay? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wouldn't you supply your employees with free food? My cousin works for a Vancouver game company and they can just request whatever they want to be stocked in the fridge for free (on their company intranet forum). Also he works quite the number of hours (then again, doesn't any video game employee?) and I see the free food, huge tvs & couches, X-Boxes, pool tables etc as really a necessity because the employees stay there for so long.
So do you want to work at a company because it has a fantastic cafe? Well I'm sure you do but it also says something about the number of hours you'll be spending at that work. I guess I shouldn't be bashing this because it is great but I also wouldn't want to be making $10 / hour if you calculated how much I *really* worked at my company.
"``There are people here all hours of the night,'' said Tom Porter, senior director of corporate services. ``This gives them a chance to see their kids before they go to bed.''"
Funny, I read this is "This gives them a chance to see their kids before they go to bed [so that they can get back to their slave labour for their 2nd shift of the their 7 day / 120 hour week.]
Re:They pay? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:They pay? (Score:2)
management and investors look at the $500,000 a month you spend on your cafeteria, so its either axe that benefit or lay some people off. Either way, now as an employee I feel ripped off that I can no longer get free lunch. So morale and productivity plummet to rediculously low levels.
Well duh - you just chopped out a major benefit. At $500k/mo if you are serving 2500 employees, then that works out to $200/head. How much are they making? If it's anywhere near $100k (Sill Vally and all), then that's chick
Re:They pay? (Score:4, Interesting)
Incidentally, one way Google keeps its people onsite is by providing a free laundramat. I find the idea of my co-workers (not to mention the occasional visiting celebrity [weblogsinc.com]) seeing my literal dirty laundry deeply disturbing.
Re:They pay? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you own your own business, chances are work is your life, and better still -- you're working in a field you enjoy. There's no reason not to love working if the work you do is something you actually enjoy doing.
I think free meals (and quality, proper nutritious meals at that) are a very excellent idea. I work from home, so I can prepare good meals any hour of the day I want. When I worked for other people, this was out of
A feeding company wins big time (Score:3, Insightful)
1)First up, this perk is factored in during remuneration negotiations:"We might pay the same as Company xxx, but we give you a free lunch worth $10 x 200 = $2k tax free."
2) Next, theres the saved time. Instead of leaving for an hour to eat out, lunch only takes 15 minutes: 45 minutes of your time is probably worth more than $10.3) The time you do spend eating is probabl
Re:They pay? (Score:3, Insightful)
Google Menu (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Article text. (Score:2)
Re:Article text. (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally I found it nice to not have to leave work for a good lunch, and the time that we didn't spend driving around in that traffic meant that I could leave earlier in the day.
Despite what slave labor critics may claim, I never found it to be anything but a major perk of working there.
Re:Article text. (Score:2)
Maybe if you're a massive company you can afford to give people free food, but if you're annual profits are measured in hundreds of thousands, giving people free food could erase your profits entirely.
Personally I usually just bring sa
Stupid Karma Whore (Score:2)
Rather than registration... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Rather than registration... (Score:2)
bugmenot: (Score:5, Informative)
kokkr0
Username and password so you odn't have to give over your DNA
Reg Required (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reg Required (Score:2)
Re:Reg Required (Score:4, Informative)
I just right click in the login field, choose BugMeNot, wait 3 seconds for a login to be retreived from their servers, proceed to read story..
Re:Reg Required (Score:2)
To get a BugMeNot entry for the current page, you can add any bookmark to the Bookmarks Bar, and change its "Address" field to:
javascript:void(window.open('http://bugmenot.co m
Make sure you remove all the spaces and returns introduced by Slashdot.
(Tip originally from MacOSXHints.)
login details from bugmenot (Score:4, Informative)
password1
Thank you bugmenot [bugmenot.com]
Cafeterias not the best value... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Cafeterias not the best value... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:1300 calories? (Score:2)
Re:1300 calories? (Score:2)
Re:1300 calories? (Score:2)
WAY low: maybe 2500 for 5'8" "sedentary" (depends a lot on body size; lots more for 6'5" than 5'5" -- law of cubes), more for "active", and a lot more for very active.
When I was in graduate school, and an active fencing competitor, summers were "endurance training" time. I'd eat 6000+ calories a day, and wind up the summer 15 pounds lighter in September than I was in May (some of that loss will have been leg-muscle bulk, however).
Re:1300 calories? (Score:2)
It depends on the amount of muscle mass you have, your overall activity level (as this influences your resting metabolic rate) and your age.
2000kCal for the average couch dweller sounds about right, of course on top of that you have to add your physical activity, but if that involves getting out of your chair, walking to the car, driving home and sitting in front of the TV or Computer you can easily live with less than 3000kCal/day.
Re:1300 calories? (Score:5, Informative)
Stay away from fat-free foods. They have lots of sugar that your liver will quickly convert into cholesterol and you will feel hungry again. The best bet is eating some fish in a Japanese or Chinese restaurant - a) it has unsaturated fat which cleans your blood vessels, b) fish doesn't have fattening growth hormones like non-organic beef or chicken and c) you will not get hungry soon and eat unhealthy "fat-free" snacks.
Cooking dinner at home would really do wonders. Restaurants tend to use the cheapest components and cook food for best taste and fastest cooking speed, not the most healthy dish. But I guess your milage may vary and it's possible to find relatively healthy restaurants.
Re:Cafeterias not the best value... (Score:2)
Re:Cafeterias not the best value... (Score:2)
Mirror at NetworkMirror.com (Score:3, Informative)
ebay cafe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ebay cafe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ebay cafe (Score:5, Funny)
The lunch lady is using her alternate account to pump of the bid price.
Re:ebay cafe (Score:2, Funny)
The Cafeterias... (Score:5, Interesting)
During the bubble, the cafeteria was practically giving away food. Actually, they were doing precisely that -- many days during the week your lunch would be paid for. One could also go down at any time and pick up soda fountain drinks for free. This, like so many things (like the free massage parlor) were not to last...
As Nortel's profits declined, so did the number of different food stalls in the cafeteria. Similarly, I couldn't even go down to pick up a glass of soda water -- the company stopped giving it away. In fact, the ice water cooler was likewise turned off. The breakrooms were stripped of their free coffee and tea (and hot chocolate, *sigh*). And their water coolers were removed. And then the styrofoam cups (and their subsequent paper brethern faced a similar fate). Then they got rid of the plates and plastic forks and spoons. Finally, when the free sugar sachets left, so did I.
I guess I can finally say I am what I ate -- unemployed.
Re:The Cafeterias... (Score:2, Funny)
a) Massage Parlor doesn't mean the same in American as it does in English
or
b) You worked for the greatest company on earth
"I'm just going to the massage parlour to work on this *problem* (nods downward)"
Re:The Cafeterias... (Score:2)
Re:The Cafeterias... (Score:2)
(Hey, it's a joke. Laugh.)
Why the hell was that flagged "Troll?" (Score:2)
Sounds like some people are a little too bitter about losing those perqs that the mere mention of them or the reasons for their existence and subsequent removal sends them into a flagging tizzy.
Sheesh... Get a grip, people.
Re:The Cafeterias... (Score:3, Interesting)
During the bubble, where my husband works, money was thrown around quite a bit and though they didn't have a cafeteria often the bosses would take the employees (there were two bosses and six employees) out to the most exclusive restaraun
Ummm.. No... (Score:2)
Saying that, there was free food at Nortel. Every second friday they had a TGIF which was all you can eat finger foods (wings, etc), beer, drinks, cookies, ice cream.... Man, I used to love those. We also had alot of working lunches or kick off parties with food.
Maybe you were in another country b
Re:Ummm.. No... (Score:2)
If you called them on Friday afternoon, someone would answer, but you could never get the person you wanted.
Re:The Cafeterias... (Score:5, Funny)
When they came for the soda, I did nothing because I wasn't a soda. When they came for the coffee, I did nothing because I wasn't a coffee. When they came for the water cups, I did nothing because I wasn't a water cup. And when they came for me, there was no one to help me because they were all down at the local 7-11 getting something to drink.
Re:The Cafeterias... (Score:2)
Of course when that started happeneing we all knew what was coming, though quite a few were in denial until they got walked out of the door.
Silicon Valley (Score:5, Insightful)
Anal (Score:5, Funny)
-1, Redundant?
Re:Silicon Valley (Score:2)
(We were bought eventually, and moved from Boston to Kendall Square, which is as suburbian and sterile and boring as you can get while being in the city, but it could have been a lot worse.)
The other bad thing about working in the burbs is that you need a car.
Re:Silicon Valley (Score:4, Insightful)
I've also worked in south San Jose, and earlier on the outskirts of Menlo Park, where that ten-minute radius included Palo Alto, Woodside and Redwood City. The range of lunch choices there was phenomenal--noodle houses to classic diners and great rather than merely good sushi.
I'm sorry your experiences have made you such a bitter, bitter guy, but if you're taking 45 minutes one way to get to a deli sandwich, either you don't work anywhere near Silicon Valley or you're refusing to eat anywhere but the One True Deli, in which case: you're a really fucking picky eater for a wage slave, aren't you?
Re:Silicon Valley (Score:2)
Re:Silicon Valley (Score:4, Insightful)
"Hey Jim, have you seen a Subway anywhere?"
"Yeah, just over there, but it razed to the ground during the apocalyptic war."
"Damnit, looks like I'm going to starve."
"But there's like fruit growing everywhere, and animals to eat."
"Yeah, like I'm going to eat fruit like some fucking commie. Damnit Jim this is America, I demand the right to never have to prepare my own food and be a big lazy fat bastard."
Re:Silicon Valley (Score:2)
Many of the places I've contracted at here serve a free evening meal. Some use Waiter.com, others have a dedicated caterer. Many Asian-dominated places like Marvell Semi had catered meals heavy on Chinese foods (they had excellent duck, but what the hell kind of vegetable is purple and looks and tastes like a lily stalk?). ESS's cafeteria offered a subsidized low-cost lunch consisting mainly by weight of rice, intended for their low-waged assembly-tes
wth is wrong with muffins? (Score:2, Interesting)
wtf? What does being Indian having to do w/ liking muffins or not? Unless we're talking about some new, wacky veal muffins I've never heard about.
(note: I'm of Indian descent--the "Vik" in my nick is short for "Vikram")
Insightful? WTF? (Score:2)
Then again, San Francisco thinks that it's part of the "Silicon Valley" so who knows, maybe that's what you're referring to.
I find that the Silicon Valley has an amazing variety of cuisine, corporate cafeterias included.
Re:Silicon Valley (Score:3, Interesting)
For the majority of IT workers who aren't, the hourly wage effectively diminishes the longer they work. From that point of view, one might indeed wonder whether free meals at the cafeteria truly compensate for an extended workday.
As for the slavery comment, it might be a bit hyperbolic, but it does capture the essence of a worker's relationship to the company. Leaving isn't really an option when you have a family to support or when the local
Re:Silicon Valley (Score:2)
Yahooo! Company Perks! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad thing is that most people probably have to use that cafeteria for breakfast, lunch and dinner since may comapnies that provide such things also mandate a 50 hr work week minimum. Don't know about anybody else, but I'd trade those benefits anyday for good pay and a chance to be out after 7 1/2 to 8 hrs.
Re:Yahooo! Company Perks! (Score:2)
Re:Yahooo! Company Perks! (Score:2)
Re:Yahooo! Company Perks! (Score:2)
Here [corporate-ir.net] is a small reference to the 50 hour work week. From my experience however, I've come to know that companies set that as the minimum, with patches where you may work much longer hours (usually around the tail-end of a release of a product or software application). At that time (which can last for as long as two months), you may easily clock in 12 hrs a day for 5 days a week. Given that these are usually salaried positions, overtime is almost never offered.
Re:The alternative (Score:2)
In all honesty, if a guy in India wants that job badly, then let him have it. The only true karma would be h
What they forget to mention.... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're not working at the main building, then you end up with at least a 20 minute freeway drive to the nearest restaurant. For anywhere upmarket, you need to book at least a day in advance, as there are usually queues outside by lunchtime (Palo Alto). If you're lucky there might be a Mexican restaurant with outside tables, or a Chinese takeaway, but all the tables are quickly taken. And the specials would be snapped up within quarter of an hour of cooking.
So True (Score:2)
Re:So True (Score:2)
There was one occasion
Re:So True (Score:2)
Because of the combination of several reasons:
(1) The majority of companies in the Bay Area don't have catering facilities. Property speculators built office blocks without any consideration for dining facilities. And the cost of high rent prohibits new restaurants from opening.
If you have a corporate campus with 3000 employees, you need a dining room of equivalent size.
After a few
Re:So True (Score:2)
Yet people at most workplaces don't have this problem, they eat sandwiches for years and years, it just becomes routine. Perhaps Americans are too focussed on food as a source of entertainment.
Employees are often required to work long hours in office buildings where having a window is considered a luxury. Consequently, lunchtime is the only time during the day that the
Saltpeter (Score:2, Funny)
Anyone know what that stuff is that's floating in the curry?
Re:Saltpeter (Score:2)
The Executive Lunch room (Score:5, Funny)
GET IN MAH BELLY
Google's Strategy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Google's Strategy (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Google's Strategy (Score:4, Insightful)
Bagging it yourself? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Bagging it yourself? (Score:2)
It's much better for team morale for everyone to be able to meet together for lunch each day. But only if there is one table large enough for the whole team (circular tables are best), otherwise all sorts of unpleasant "them and us" seniority mentalities start to creep in if employees have to choose which table to sit at.
Re:Bagging it yourself? (Score:2)
Er, how about for giving people somewhere to actually eat their dinner? I can't imagine having to eat my dinner on the filthy shop floor, although on occasion I have had to do that when the takeaway's arrived when I'm not on a break. It's pretty annoying to try to do constant manual labour whilst simultaneously eating a sloppy donner kebab.
lunch in the financial district (Score:2, Interesting)
What??? (Score:4, Funny)
cafeteria prices (Score:5, Informative)
Prices are generally better in the Bay Area locations too.
Anyone who has spent much time in and around San Jose understands why so much attention is paid to the cafeterias, there just aren't that many places to go out, those places are generally mobbed at lunch and getting there and back in a reasonable amount of time is tough. Either companies invest in cafeterias or they risk loosing a sizeable portion of their workforce for a couple hours a day.
For example, the Cisco campus stretches for miles down Tasman Drive yet only a couple of very small places and a lone Carls Jr. can be found there. There is a concentration of quick casual and fast food restaurants at McCarthy Ranch but they are filled. The InNOut Burger's drive through often snakes through the parking lot.
State of PA Government food (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course since your government servants are underpaid, the cafeteria get financial support, your tax dollars in action!
Microsoft (Score:2, Funny)
Google (Score:2, Insightful)
> Did you mean: "tofu+veggies" "mineral water"
Out For Lunch == More Productive Employee (Score:3, Interesting)
The office that my company rents is located in a nice building with a nice cafeteria that aims to please everybody from earth loving hippies to guys that eat meatballs for dessert. However, whenever I have a chance I either bring my own lunch and eat it at my desk OR go somewhere far away from the office.
I have one hour for lunch. My office is the LAST fucking place on earth where I would want to spend it. Okay, I can think of worse places, but you get the point. I work with a number of certain people every day. I meet the same faces and talk about the same old things. Why not get out? I tend to overpay for my lunch because I like a nice Japanese restaurant two blocks away from my office. So what? I get to relax and forget about the job. Hell, I'd argue that having lunch away from the office makes me more productive because I come back with a fresh state of mind.
Re:Out For Lunch == More Productive Employee (Score:3, Insightful)
But on the other hand, you have the lunch at your desk, so that you can continue working and leave 1 hour earlier every day. That means missing the rush hour, getting home earlier than normal, enjoying a longer evening. Or that means you don't leave earlier, but rack up 4 extra hours M/T/W/Th so that you can leave 4 hours early on Frida
free lunch guilt (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:free lunch guilt (Score:3, Informative)
I read a book (can't remember which one, sorry), in which it was claimed that some female exec used this as a way to decide which companies to buy from -- if they didn't have sanitary supplies, they were probably going to go down the tubes fast and leave her company in the lurch.
I can see her point on this one. Having, at least, emergency supplies of sanitary suppies isn't that expensive (especially as techie companies lean heavily towards men, and
Re:free lunch guilt (Score:2)
It was in a Dilbert book but I don't remember which one. The Dilbert Principle I think, but I'm not sure...
Re:free lunch guilt (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:free lunch guilt (Score:3, Interesting)
If I b
Re:free lunch guilt (Score:2)
Obviously you don't know what you're talking about, because you never look at expenses in terms of razor-thin profits. When you do that, you get ridiculous numbers like the 50% you quoted. What does it matter if a company that brings in $100.3 million a year on $100.15 million in expenses spends $0.15 million on soda? What people are going to look at is their profit margin in terms of their revenue and expenses. Only some bullshit PR kid would say "look, we increased our profits by 100% this year". Yeh, he
Re:free lunch guilt (Score:2)
Er, no, doubling profits is double profits. If your caterings eats up half of your profits, then offering free catering is a stupid fucking idea, and the bullshit PR kid is correct in saying that they doubled the pro
Re:free lunch guilt (Score:2)
We had free free sodas as well. There were even free tampons in the ladies bathroom.
I remember the free sodas. Hell, I still have the 15 lbs I got from them. Thankfully, there's a gym down the street where I can work on getting rid of the weight, but it, alas, is not free. I've also cut back my soda intake, so it's no longer really a perk.
Re:free lunch guilt (Score:2)
Eat to live/Live to eat? (Score:2)
It only looks good in comparison (Score:4, Insightful)
Most companies are despotic tyrannies.
Most companies cheat their employees.
Most companies use their employees.
Most companies are irresponsible employers.
Most companies act unethically.
IMHO, employment sucks, no shares means you're a serf.
I've seen it time and time again; companies put the interests of the few at the top, ahead of everyone else's. Please, don't say it's their right. No one has the right to be abusive, evil, irresponsible, greedy or stupid.
Oh, and yes they are all stupid. It's stupid to believe that the bottom line, i.e. personal financial gain is more important than ethical behavior. Furthermore, it's simply monetary fundamentalism to believe that more money necessarily equates to a better life. In fact, too much money is like too much sugar. Just try living off of candy cane for a while and you'll soon see that eating the pure condensed essence of sweetness is hardly the way to satisfy a good appetite. In truth, America is simply rotting away from the decay of excess.
I've asked this before and I'll ask it again; if democracy is so grand, why aren't more companies democratic?
Re:Wow, slow news day. (Score:2)
Re:erm.. (Score:2)
Re:erm.. (Score:2)
As someone recently started working at an IT company (but not in the Valley), I found the article/discussions very interesting.
Re:erm.. (Score:2)
Tomorrow's Story: "Google installs infra-red auto-flushing system in toilets. Aren't they great? I want to work there!"
Re:Wow, they have lunch in California? (Score:4, Funny)