Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Businesses It's funny. Laugh. Google The Internet

A Look at Silicon Valley Cafeterias 238

Posted by timothy from the google's-helps-you-find-the-food dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

A Look at Silicon Valley Cafeterias More

A Look at Silicon Valley Cafeterias

Comments Filter:

  • Article text. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01, 2005 @08:45AM (#12397510)
    Corporate cuisine: a tour

    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)

      by ForestGrump ( 644805 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @09:09AM (#12397575) Homepage Journal
      And where I used to work in the valley...

      There was no cafetria, but Costco was accross the street. Hello samples!

      Grump

    • They pay? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mindaktiviti ( 630001 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @09:21AM (#12397602)
      "Want navrattan korma with raita, chutney and naan? $5.29 at Cisco Systems."

      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)

        by Momoru ( 837801 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @10:44AM (#12398003) Homepage Journal
        Sure it's easy to say something like that when your Google fresh off an IPO and loaded with more cash then you know what to do with, but say your Sun Microsystems or even Yahoo, you've been offering free lunch to your employees to have productivity gains and now your quarterly profits have fallen....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. It's also been disputed whether these offer real productivity gains. I think read that Mark Jen (the google blogger who was fired) or someone else said that most people at google just stay for the free lunch and dinner and head home.

        • 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)

        by fm6 ( 162816 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @01:35PM (#12399113) Homepage Journal
        Wouldn't you supply your employees with free food?
        Depends on the employees. If you mostly employee geeks who work on salary and whose lives begin and end with technology, then yeah, you can certainly squeeze some extra work out of them by keeping them onsite with free meals and other such services. But I have to wonder how healthy this work-is-life philosophy is in the long run.

        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)

          by shufler ( 262955 )
          But I have to wonder how healthy this work-is-life philosophy is in the long run.

          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
      • Let's say the lunch is worth $10 to the employee, but is given to the employee free. Even then the company makes a wad of cash out of this:

        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)

        by plopez ( 54068 )
        IIRC, it would be a benefit and then the IRS would demand payroll taxes. Easier on the accounting if the employees pay.

    • Google Menu (Score:4, Informative)

      by bdude ( 880424 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @09:51AM (#12397708)
      Here you can find a sample of the google menu: http://googlemenus.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
    • But the key question is: Do they offer WiFi?

    • Re:Article text. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rodness ( 168429 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @11:45AM (#12398419)
      When I used to work at Sun Microsystems (about 5 years ago when the Santa Clara campus was very new) the food was excellent and there were routinely about 2 dozen different options for lunch each day. The cost was also so low I paid less than $5, even on an indulgent day.

      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.
      • That's still pretty expensive. Where I work, I pay like £1.50-£2.00. But then again it's just boiled vegetables and bland meat, and yesterday's-leftovers soup. I don't think I could justify spending up to $25 a week just for dinners. $10 might be closer the mark.

        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
    • I've never known the Mercury servers to be Slashdotted. This post isn't "informative" --it's just a pain.

  • bugmenot: (Score:5, Informative)

    by the_unknown_soldier ( 675161 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @08:46AM (#12397516)
    kokroaches@mailinator.com
    kokkr0

    Username and password so you odn't have to give over your DNA

  • Reg Required (Score:5, Insightful)

    by victor_the_cleaner ( 723411 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @08:46AM (#12397517)
    I think whoever submits a story that requires registration to read, should also provide their username and password so we all can read the story.
    • Or /. should make it a point not to accept stories where the main link has registration required (yes, I know about BugMeNot). It is not like these stories are earth-shattering expose's ; this is just a cute little piece meant for easy reading. SJMN should be glad for all the traffic they get from the /. hordes. Someone will surely post the text of the article, and then people won't go to their site, thereby cutting down on the page views. On the other hand, if this story had been free, people would have re

    • Re:Reg Required (Score:4, Informative)

      by kryptkpr ( 180196 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @10:11AM (#12397822) Homepage
      Are you aware that Bugmenot [bugmenot.com] has a firefox plugin [roachfiend.com]?

      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..
    • Safari users:

      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 /v iew.php?mode=bookmarklet&url='+escape(location),'B ugMeNot','location=no,status=yes,menubar=no,scroll bars=yes,resizable=yes,width=385,height=450'))

      Make sure you remove all the spaces and returns introduced by Slashdot.
      (Tip originally from MacOSXHints.)

  • login details from bugmenot (Score:4, Informative)

    by mallumax ( 712655 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @08:51AM (#12397527) Homepage
    me1@privacy.net
    password1
    Thank you bugmenot [bugmenot.com]

  • Cafeterias not the best value... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Krankheit ( 830769 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @08:51AM (#12397530)
    I need a big lunch, so I don't want to go into the cafeteria and order four lunches and four 20 ounce bottles of Mountain Dew. I prefer to go to my local Wal-Mart and pick up two of those two litre bottles of Mountain Dew, pick up some coffee at the BR Dunkin' Donuts inside Wal-Mart, and two dozen of jelly filled doughnuts. Then I get a bag of cocoa puffs, and head to Burger King to get my cheeseburger. Problem is by the time I get back to the cafeteria with all my food to sit down and eat with my laptop, lunch is usually over. :(
    • You could save yourself a lot of time by simply going to Hardee's and getting the Double Monster burger (1300 calories, 90 grams of fat). Eat two if you're feeling hungry. Of course, if you eat two, you might pass out. Don't forget fries and a drink.
    • Ironic for someone who's username is "Sickness" in German. Maybe it's the diet? :)
    • Jeeze. Perhaps you can get a desktop support job at an orphanage. Then you could just eat babies. Or you could work at a cattle ranch, where'd you could while away your lunch hours chasing steers with a fork and a loaf of bread.

  • ebay cafe (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01, 2005 @08:53AM (#12397537)
    Do eBay employees have to place bids for their meals?

  • The Cafeterias... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 10101001011 ( 744876 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @08:55AM (#12397543) Homepage
    ...are an excellent indicator, in my experience, of the success of a company. For instance, I used to work at Nortel (Nortel.ca), one of Canada's premier hihg-tech companies during the bubble.

    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.
    • I'm guessing either

      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)"


    • 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)

      by HMarieY ( 316249 )
      Not sure why the above was marked Troll. I find what was said very insightful. In fact we saw the same thing happen at the company where my husband works, though it is still around having survived the dot.com bubble. I suspect that many /.ers have observed similar trends.

      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
    • I worked at Nortel for 4 years just before the big crash. While the cafeterias were subsidised (so I hear) the food wasn't free... It was still cheaper to bag your own lunch or bring in a frozen dinner.

      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

      • In the early 70s, one software company in Pennsylvania (they sold an accounting systems for PDP-11s running RSTS/E) had a weekly Friday afternoon keg party paid for by the company.

        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)

      by still cynical ( 17020 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @10:34AM (#12397948) Homepage
      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.


      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.
    • When I was working at RIM back in 2002 before they had their layoffs (purely cosmetic, they pretty much hired the same amount of people back 12 months later, but at that point in time it was "necessary") they also started with taking away the free drinks, the coffee etc.

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01, 2005 @09:02AM (#12397558)
    Silicon Valley sucks for lunch. Seriously, it takes about 90 minutes to fight through noontime trafficjams and get to a deli for a sandwitch and then back to work. The glories of these cafaterias are just a testament to what a stinking suburban anal shithole the whole place is. Yaaah, you get a free/cheap lunch, but you also get the pleasure of staying in your cube for 9 hours straight. Say hey for wage slavery.

    • Anal (Score:5, Funny)

      by drooling-dog ( 189103 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @12:02PM (#12398553)
      anal shithole

      -1, Redundant?
    • Total agreement - that's one reason working in the suburbs sucks. Almost nothing good to eat, and what little there is is too far. Before my employer was bought by a behemouth, my biggest fear was that we'd be bought and moved to the suburbs.

      (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)

      by Watts Martin ( 3616 ) <layotl&gmail,com> on Sunday May 01, 2005 @01:43PM (#12399162) Homepage
      From where I work at Cisco, I'm within five minutes' drive of two shopping centers with restaurants, one Asian mall, and a collection of restaurants in Milpitas. It's only another ten minutes to get to a good chunk of San Jose, Fremont or Santa Clara. Obviously every fast food and sandwich shop chain exists within that radius, but so does everything from taquerias to burger dives to good sushi to the occasional "five star" restaurant like Parcel 104. (And, yes, I do actually eat at Cisco's cafe, which is pretty good.)

      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?
      • Right on. I'm in Sunnyvale, and there are tons of great places in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara within ten minutes of my office. I often have lunch with my wife and we're always able to go somewhere nice, eat a relaxing lunch, and be back in a reasonable amount of time. Of course it also helps that I, like many people in Silicon Valley, can take their lunch whenever they want and don't have a set time for it...

    • Re:Silicon Valley (Score:4, Insightful)

      by drsquare ( 530038 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @03:29PM (#12399974)
      Er, make your own damn sandwich? What sort of lazy fucker sits in traffic for 90 minutes to save 2 minutes at home putting some stuff between some bread? I mean, Jesus. Imagine what'd happen if there was a nuclear holocaust, how would these fuckers survive in the post-apocalyptic world?

      "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."
    • None of this touches much on evening meals or breakfast.

      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

      • . . . their strategy was to offer muffins in the morning. Since 7/8 of the staff was Indian, that went over like cheeseburgers in a sacred temple.

        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")
    • I work right over near the Santa Clara Convention Center and I have absolutely no problem driving to any one of many many different eating establishments and getting lunch. I don't run into 90 minutes of traffic, either.

      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. ;)

  • Yahooo! Company Perks! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PocketPick ( 798123 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @09:09AM (#12397576)
    Who cares if their working me 14 hours a day without overtime and I haven't seen my family in 3 months. With perks like a nice cafeteria, it's all worth it.

    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.
    • I worked at a place in the south bay area ... "battleship gray" and "maybe a notch above hospital and school cafeterias" pretty much describes it (except that should be a notch __below__). I once asked for a meatball sandwich, and the guy took some round balls he found lying on top of the fridge from a couple days ago, plunked them in the deep fryer, and slapped on a piece of provolone. I was terrified to eat that thing, but also starving. After I almost broke a tooth for the second or third time, I threw t
    • All good points. It seems like an interesting job, with fair pay, fair hours, and stability seems to the holy grail of the programming job market. However, I am sure there are people who want to point out that you have work. Others will also want to say there are those outside of the Silicon Valley elite who often have days eating 3 meals at the office, but instead of the fancy cafeteria it is a choice of the 4 food groups: - chinese takeout - pizza - the candy machine - soda

  • What they forget to mention.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mikael ( 484 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @09:13AM (#12397585)
    Many of these companies have more than 20+ building distributed across the Bay Area. It's only the main campus which has the large cafeteria and maybe other luxuries like a fitness centre (SGI's main building was across the road from the cinema multiplex).

    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.
    • What you say is true. You also forgot to mention that parking the car after your lunch-time commute can be an incredibly aggrivating experience. Nothing like driving around a parking lot in circles after being stuck in an office all morning to drive you mad. It frustrates me so much that I usually just go into work late (nobody complains when you show up if you stay until midnight once in a while) and then take a late lunch, after everything has died down. The problem with that though is sometimes the f
      • That's true - while I didn't drive to work, we would have to zig-zag through the car-park trying to find a space. Oakland was reputed to be toughes t place to find a parking space as the city council had legislated that each office block should have 10% less parking spaces than there were employees. This was supposed to reduce congestion by forcing people to use public transit, but the effect was to encourage a parking space deathmatch as everyone tried to get in as early as possible.

        There was one occasion
  • keeps those nerds from gettin restless come spring time.

    Anyone know what that stuff is that's floating in the curry?

  • The Executive Lunch room (Score:5, Funny)

    by goneutt ( 694223 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @09:31AM (#12397637) Journal
    Where they dine on the souls of that they've sucked out of the employees, feast on the marrow of the bones that they've been worked down to, and maybe a baby or two that's wondered out of the daycare center.

    GET IN MAH BELLY

  • Google's Strategy (Score:5, Funny)

    by nxtr ( 813179 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @09:37AM (#12397656)
    Apparently, you need invites to go their cafeteria.

  • Bagging it yourself? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Gleepy ( 16226 )
    And whatever happened to the good ol' days of bringing in your own lunch? I do that at the small place I'm at, and my time and money spent is minimal.
    • Well, you can, but then the cafe loses the incentive to provide tables for everyone.

      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.
      • Well, you can, but then the cafe loses the incentive to provide tables for everyone.

        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.
  • My friends that work in the financial district in san francisco have a pretty nice perk at their office. It is a huge hassle to go out for lunch there, so everyday around 10:30 someone goes around and takes orders for lunch, comes back around noonish with everyones food, the company pays for it and there are no real restrictions on whats ordered. They do a different restraunt/take out place everyday so it doesnt get boring. My buddy went from eating rice with mini hotdogs to seared ahi salads.

  • What??? (Score:4, Funny)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @09:56AM (#12397735)
    your lunchbreaks are long enough for you to actually leave your desks???

  • cafeteria prices (Score:5, Informative)

    by rtphokie ( 518490 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @10:04AM (#12397780)
    What is interesting about cafeterias is how much they vary from site to site. The selection is much better in the bay area than the same company's cafeterias in other techie locations (e.g. RTP, Richardson, Boston, DC, Ottawa, etc).
    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)

    by astrojetsonjr ( 601602 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @10:15AM (#12397844)
    You don't need to go to the left coast to eat, you can just VisitPA (tm) in Harrisburg and eat in their cafeterias. Breakfast is the best with almost any dish you can think of. But the government is no slouch when it comes to lunch. Pork chops, pasta lots of different ways, giant salad bars.

    Of course since your government servants are underpaid, the cafeteria get financial support, your tax dollars in action!

  • Microsoft (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Apparantly, the article didn't show the Microsoft meals because they had too many bugs.

  • Google (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anne_Nonymous ( 313852 )
    > Google: "hamburger+cheese+bacon+ketchup-mayo" fries "large orange drink"

    > Did you mean: "tofu+veggies" "mineral water"

  • Out For Lunch == More Productive Employee (Score:3, Interesting)

    by $criptah ( 467422 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @11:46AM (#12398435) Homepage

    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.

    • Well, on one hand you have the 1 hour lunch where you can split up your day, so that the morning feels separate from the afternoon. And you are refreshed when you come back.

      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)

    by denidoom ( 865832 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @11:52AM (#12398470) Journal
    I don't know about anyone else but I'm so damaged from the bust if I ever bite into a free bagel I think "How much did this bagel cost? Shouldn't we be lean and mean? Why are they spending money on this crap?" It's like a bad flashback would happen and I would remember at my former company the CEO standing in front of us saying all of these positive things about profitability and being numero uno while we ate our free food. We had free free sodas as well. There were even free tampons in the ladies bathroom. When it all started to end all of a sudden there was no more free lunch day, no more free sodas, or feminine products. It's laughable, but I think any company that spends such an amount on a perk seems foolish and this again is my damaged self feeling this after so long you would think I could once again bite a free bagel and not feel the pinch of foreboding. But I do.

    • Re:free lunch guilt (Score:3, Informative)

      by chialea ( 8009 )
      > There were even free tampons in the ladies bathroom.

      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
      • 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.

        It was in a Dilbert book but I don't remember which one. The Dilbert Principle I think, but I'm not sure...

    • But how much does it really cost? If you are buying soda on a bulk basis for your employees, you can get it pretty cheap. Let's say you have 1000 employees, and you have enough for everyone to get 3 sodas a day (you really shouldn't drink that much anyhow). That's 3000 sodas a day, at probably $0.20 per soda (or less) in bulk (I'm thinking a 12 ounce can). That's $600 per day, $3000 per week, $150 000 per year. Might seem like a lot right now, but considering that the company spends at least $100k per year

      • Re:free lunch guilt (Score:3, Interesting)

        by drsquare ( 530038 )
        Don't look at it in terms on total expense, look at it in terms of profit. Say for instance your margins are pretty thin, and your annual profits are $300,000. That $150,000 a year is 50% of your profits. Also I'm sure that average wages are not 60k, probably more like 20k. Also that's just the soda. Include the food, say 250 meals a year per employee, or 250,000 meals a year. If each meal costs you $5, that's $1.25 MILLION a year. Cutting out the meals gives you over a million dollars in raw profit.

        If I b

        • 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
          • Only some bullshit PR kid would say "look, we increased our profits by 100% this year". Yeh, he looks like a hero at first, but then he looks like a fucking dumbass when some guy in the back of the room points out that he only did it by reducing expenses by 0.15% and keeping revenues the same.

            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

    • 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.

    • Man, I'm in that boat now. Being told to hold off on server purchases while execs are going to Pebble Beach to play golf. What's the point of installin OpenOffice to save Microsoft Office installs when my execs are wasting money like this?
  • I eat to live. In this day and age of corporate mongering by upper level execs (some exceptions noted: Xilinx among a few), I would voice agreement with Michael Rubin in the article: "I'd rather see the money in my paycheck."

  • It only looks good in comparison (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @02:14PM (#12399383) Homepage Journal
    to how bad it is everywhere else. Indeed:

    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?

Slashdot Top Deals

THEGODDESSOFTHENETHASTWISTINGFINGERSANDHERVOICEISLIKEAJAVELININTHENIGHTDUDE

Close