My apartment in SF does not have a kitchen. Food provided by the company helped me get by! With no car, and only a handful of restaurant options within 1 mile, it's not the easiest to get by without a company cafeteria. I can sympathize with why many people would like to be able to expense food.

What does expensing have to do with your situation though? You seem to have an issue with access to food rather than how much it costs. How does the company giving you some more money help with that?

In my mind the company provides food as a perk in part so people hang around and chat without leaving the office, it also makes it more pleasant to work there.

It’s not to feed you in your own home.

Sure. That's why they do it. (Along with the fact that it's an expected perk in some circles.) Which is also why paying a meal per diem doesn't make a lot of sense. But it's also somewhat understandable why there would be a bit of grumbling about a benefit being taken away, however unavoidably.

Of course, for many employees, the elimination of commuting makes remote work a significant win financially. But others never intended to do much more than sleep in their apartments and the current situation is therefore a net negative, even just financially.

That's still a ton of entitlement...

"Oh no! I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and I have to live in my tiny apartment, buy food, and I might have to get a bigger apartment."

vs

"Oh no! I don't have a job, and I'm about to lose my apartment because I can't pay rent."

I get pretty tired of this back and forth arguing in circles over who is more entitled than whom, who has more of a right to complain, who is the most aggrieved, who has the biggest disadvantage to brag about.

Really nobody has a right to ask for anything, ever, because there's always someone who has it worse, right? The only legitimate rung of the ladder is the bottom one, and we just keep finding lower rungs to use to shame anyone higher?

Sure, there are people who live charmed lives and just don't understand what the big deal is because nothing has ever gone wrong for them. They sure as heck aren't me. But let's all just stop with the tone policing. It's 100% unproductive, and won't change anything about anybody's situation, good or bad.

"I have an apartment and a bank account right now."

vs

"I live in a tent encampment."

vs

"I live in a shantytown in a third-world country."

vs

"I am on death row."

vs

"I am on death row for a crime I didn't commit."

vs...

It's important to try to maintain perspective about our own good fortunes. But it's also human nature to feel our own pain as relative to our previous experience. Someone's always got it worse than you but that doesn't mean it's fair to expect everyone else to wander around farting rainbows with grins plastered to their faces.

All of the Googlers I know are well aware of the many ways in which we're fortunate and privileged. But we're also, you know, human, and occasionally whining about stuff is just part of the human experience.

Lots of people at Google, including many developers, don't make "hundreds of thousands of dollars." It's also just a unilateral change in the terms of their employment (unavoidable as it is during the current times) that might increase their costs by $25K? after taxes. That other people have it much worse doesn't change the fact that a fair number of people are seeing a change from what they agreed to.

Out of ~600 or some comments, this wins the award!

Thank you for really getting to the point of this article.

But I would add...

I left my job etc, but now I going to stand on soap box and write an article about and make myself sound so self righteous.

I like how living in the close proximity to the city center might seem somehow special from the perspective of suburban oriented culture even though it is usually a norm in Europe.