Wow. I cut my hours down substantially due to WFH. Pre-COVID I was doing 70+ hrs per week due to commuting into the area during the week and having nothing to do.

Now I put in maybe 40hrs per week, broken up into 1hr chunks here and there and I'm not spending over $1500/month just for a room/expenses in the area where work is.

It's great! I'm not going back to the office, like, ever.

Or are you just clocking in less, also producing less?

Once the new house is built, my office will probably be in a separate guest house.

I eat well and spend maybe $400 a month on groceries and food.

I’ve heard that Google recruiters attempt to con potential employees into some ridiculous assessment of the “free” food as a compensation benefit with numbers like those that you posited above. I can’t imagine valuing daily meals that highly.

The campus was really too big to leave for lunch unless you arrived at some stupid early hour to park underground below your office. It's a 10-15 minute walk to the south parking garage and then at least a 10 minute drive to the closest places to eat and none of those are cheaper than the cafe.

So unless you're bringing food from home you can pretty easily hit $20 for lunch per day. I doubt Cafe Macs is running a huge profit but the cost for employees is non-trivial.

I am used to pay at least 10 euros, for food + drink, unless I go to one of those special lunch time deals or street food places.

And since I am Portuguese, evenings is also a proper meal, so make it twice for the days I happen to dine outside as well.

In fact to this day I never gotten into the whole Abendbrot stuff, even though I have lived half of my life in German speaking countries.

Just explaining where I am coming from, not attacking anyone.

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-free-food-google-cafe...

You'll be able to make it healthier though, and tune it exactly to what you like.

When you get older, you start to understand food, and you are willing to pay more for it, but now you have to count calories.

Can I survive on $10 a day? I did it on $3 a DAY when my parents were on food stamps, but I am not that crazy about going back to the "franks, rice, and ketchup" menu.

Even if you value your labor/time to cook to be worth of zero dollars, when I was at Google my cafe had fresh seafood (a rotation of different types of fish, scallops, shrimps, mussel, crab, etc) and good quality regular meat dish (I particularly liked the skirt steak with guacamole), great vegan/vegetarian options, in-house made desserts including fresh made chocolate truffles every day prepared by the chef.

And that's just lunch, at one cafe, not including breakfast and dinner and options at the other 3 dozens cafes on campus.

If you can recreate all of that for two people with a $60/week budget, then kudos to you. I know I can't.

You then mention chocolate truffles. Personally if I had my employer providing ridiculous good food for free, I’ll likely live less healthy because I will eat those nice unhealthy things every day.

If I am prepping my own food I have complete control over what I buy and can choose _not_ to buy unhealthy things.

Also in my experience a reason why food prepared by a chef tastes so good: more fat used.

I assume that Google and Facebook canteens (well that’s what they are) are better than the ones offered by companies here in Germany, but I think I would still gain weight.

That probably depends on your cultural background.

Whenever I was in the US and worked for large tech companies I found the food too fat, too sweet, (interestingly same things like Kellogs are totally different in the US than in Europe), too much artifical flavor, too much cheese, too much toppings, large unhealthy portions.

The water and Cola tasted like Chlorine and were undrinkable - I guess you don't taste it when you grow up with that taste.

I had good food here an there, especially great - and expensive - steaks in NYC and once the best fish tacos in the world on a beach in San Diego, but overall the food wasn't to my liking. I was dissapointed by the food in SF, I had very high hopes from hearing all the good things but it was just average.

Food which I did like more than the food for "those two people" in general was the food in the South of France, in Sardinia, Corsica and Rome, desserts of the Middle East, in Japan and Vietnam - also Copenhagen is so underrated concerning food.

The food for "those two people" tastes natural, has no artifical flavorings and is healthy.

So it probably depends on your cultural background, as I've said.

For the last five years we're cooking most of our meals at home, maybe go out or order food once or twice a month. The food we cook isn't as exotic, nicely looking or sophisticated as the food served at Google, but it is tasty, fresh, healthy and the groceries are pretty cheap. And despite being older, my blood results are better now than when I was leaving Google.

I understand what you're saying, but still cringed at that statement. Eating well and, by extension, cooking is hardly something I would value at $0/hour and I find it mildly insulting that someone would devalue the time I dedicate to preparing meals.

If you don't like cooking and would rather dedicate some of your income to having someone else do it for you, please frame it in that way. It recognizes it is your own decision and comes off as less judgmental of others.

I can definitely relate to him because I hate spending time cooking, I don't like the prep, I don't like the drudge work, and I don't like to have to clean up afterwards. I have a finite lifespan and I don't wanna waste any of it on things that I fundamentally do not enjoy, particularly if it's entirely avoidable.

But the best part of the day is the very first fresh ground coffee with real sugar and real cream in the morning. You just can't beat it.

Also fasting is better for you than eating all the time.

At wet markets in China/HK/TW/SE Asia, you might be able to eat for a month on 60 USD.

Buying raw ingredients and cooking them yourself is cheaper in terms of explicit dollar costs, but if you don't enjoy cooking then you also need to assign some monetary value for having to do something that you don't like.

I think I would enjoy taking a break and cooking so free food is probably not worth $60 to me personally. It's not crazy to think that my employer gets a benefit of more than $60 through increased productivity by providing me with free food though.

Once I committed to WFH life, it became a logical next step to double down on the freedom aspects and start my own consulting firm.

That meant I needed long term thinking. I learned to cook more often and turned my entire front yard into a garden.

Overall I would say WFH has been net healthier on my mind and wallet.

It will last years though, do you NEED to cook only one thing with it?

If you cook frequently enough then it's just not an issue; there's always something with not much good life left, sure, but that's what you use next.

If course if you don't cook it's not a problem either, so it's probably unfortunately the cause of some reluctance. Maybe kits help that.

However, if 1) I cook all my food, and 2) try to have a healthy diet I spend easily the equivalent of 30USD/day. Going to a restaurant sets you back around the same amount per meal.

So, assuming I work 200 days/year going to the office and get free food would save me 6k USD/year (also assuming I cook 100% off my meals). That kind of money would pay for holidays or other stuff.

Finally, my back of the envelope math didn't include the time I spend cooking and all the "premium" stuff I get at the office like fancy drinks and snacks, which I usually don't buy when WFH.

I really think a lot of this debate is colored by Americans thinking of the American commute.

Whenever a pissing contest about grocery prices happens (and don't kid yourself, if a number has been mentioned it's not a question of when but rather an indication that the pissing has begun) you must quote a lower number than the previous person. It doesn't need to be true, it doesn't need to include critical qualifying information like location and tradeoffs, it doesn't even need to be particularly likely -- but it must be lower. So it is written. Here, I'll demonstrate:

I only spend $250 per month on groceries and I cannot imagine the disgusting excess that could possibly lead anyone to waste a single cent more!

Is the cooked-for-you food free?

Anything but free. Meal plan requirements vary.

Where I lived undergrad, we had a kitchen for a suite of rooms although I ate out a fair bit. (Many dorms did not have cooking facilities though.) Both places I went for grad school (which were actually both Ivy League) had no cooking facilities of any type.

It's not free, you are required to pay for a meal plan when you are on campus dormitory housing.

In fact I'd guess it's probably a requirement here - I don't think student halls are treated any differently to any private rented accommodation, it's probably a requirement that there be access to a (possibly shared) kitchen.

It's also quite (and increasingly) common that you're only in halls (or at least only guaranteed a place) in first year, thereafter in private rented accommodation of course you'd expect a kitchen; whereas I gather in the US the vast majority are campus universities, and provide on-campus accomodation throughout all years.

Did the "The Young Ones" not get picked up in the US

Nobody buys prepared food every day, and the costs of food are negligible for a Google employee.

You could likely do that and end up spending less money than buying food and cooking for yourself. If you don't cook you can free up your time for other revenue generating activities, chores, etc. Total cost of 2x to 4x delivered meals in my area could be $20 to $80. That's ~$320 or 80 less then the $400 number quoted in other places in this thread.

It's pretty rational behavior from the employees side of things.

And, even before Google, when I started living alone I realized I couldn't buy milk anymore because I don't drink enough milk fast enough to not let it spoil. I've switched to soy purely because it lasts months I'm my fridge safely.

I don't think you're lying, although I don't think you're correct; I'm just amazed at how different people's baseline contexts are. In your context, that's a reasonable statement, or you wouldn't have said it.

> I can't even imagine how anyone could think this was true, even in multi-generational upper-middle class urban families.

In the context of the sweep of human history of about two million years, people exclusively cooking at home being relatively recent is true [1]. Restaurants are a relatively recent invention [2] [3]. What we conceive of as normal meals is relatively recent [4].

Communal was the predominant cooking setting for many modes of cooking like baking for most of human history. This was because fuel was brutally time and energy-intensive to gather and prepare until our species started to master tool-making to a sufficient level that individual households at the mainstream level could afford the necessary tools. It literally took organizing a community to sustainably run much of what we take for granted in an individual middle class developed world household kitchen today.

Cooking over an open fire is likely the oldest mode [5], and that fire takes a fair amount of effort to sustain solely at the household scale, and the archeological evidence for humans routinely and widely making fire instead of sustaining it continuously suggests routinely and widely making fire is relatively recent (100's thousands instead of millions of years ago) [6], and even then it was common to borrow fire from a neighbor than making it, so arduous it was to make fire or expensive it was to acquire the tools. Our species only really started to relatively routinely cook during the Paleolithic age about 200,000 years ago [7], starting with open fire roasting, then proceeding from there (boiling came after roasting, ironic since boiling water is considered by us as how we start teaching children to cook) [7].

There is a simple experiment you can conduct today to validate this on your own: with nothing but a flint suitable for knapping (which in itself is an accomplishment to de novo achieve), and plain cotton clothing (to give you a head start), work out what it takes to start a fire, sustainably gather fuel, sustainably gather calories and nutrition, and scale it up to a minimum genetic variability group. It is incredibly exhausting, and prone to all kinds of failure modes.

The sheer amount of agonizing, brutal, incremental effort over the millennia it took our ancestors to "just" get to the stage to develop agrarian systems (and there is even debate if even that was a prudent choice [8] [9] [10], though for the record I'm pro-agriculture) is mind-boggling. By comparison, our current state of civilization is just LARP'ing "grinding", and gamers talking about grinding take that to yet an entirely different level. I give our ancestors their due: they were a set of some tough hombres, and we collectively do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants.

[1] https://food52.com/blog/17568-the-centuries-old-form-of-publ...

[2] https://www.history.com/news/first-restaurants-china-france

[3] https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/03/home-cooking-food-h...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692

[5] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230980-600-every-hu...

[6] https://www.livescience.com/when-did-humans-discover-fire.ht...

[7] https://lithub.com/why-and-how-exactly-did-early-humans-star...

[8] http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/538/was-adopting-ag...

[9] https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/agricult...

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118

Of course they do? When I've been crunching, like just putting insane hours in, I've gone weeks without cooking and just ordering in. It costs a fortune, even at Google salary - or in my case, 'SF' salary. Not to mention the cost of living is already absurd due to rent - your salary gets eaten up faster than you might imagine.

I get what you are trying to say, but empirically false

I know many people who don't cook at all and live solely on prepared food.

(Never cooking is very, very rare here in The Netherlands so I'm curious about any anecdata here).

These are broad strokes, but my experience in rural America and in SF bears this out, rich people eat out very often and tend to be fit and the very poor also eat out more than average but tend to be obese. Everyone else is in the middle.

In The Netherlands, the cuisine tends to be really simple, and salad-kits and meal-kits are extremely popular. The fanciest food that people 'cook' is often a soup or pasta, and I'd say it's extremely rare for anyone to make pasta or sauces from scratch.

In my case, my family prepares almost all of our own food anyway. And more than a few days of eating prepared food begins to affect my health. But that doesn't mean a worker who lives on prepared food wouldn't value the benefit of free food at work.

From home, I whip something up from my kitchen every day

I'd say I spend <$10 a day on food with good quality organic local ingredients.

Most people definitely don't, at $1825 a month that's already more than the median cost of rent in the U.S.

When I get paid 200$ per hour, saving 20-30$ but losing 2h is totally not worth my time.

I would rather spend that time with family or my hobbies.

How about if your commute is <20 minutes one way?

Some of us don't really object to 90 minutes a day of quiet time where we can read tbh.

a) 3 meals prepared for me saves me time and money. I love to cook but I don't have tons of time anymore and I don't have a a good kitchen. If I want to save time via delivery I end up spending tons more, and I don't think I eat as healthy.

b) The food was ridiculous. I've eaten a lot of good food, I've eaten in numerous countries, and Dropbox's food was god tier.

c) Tons of snacks, little treats, etc. Wine as well. Given the incredible quality of the food I wouldn't be surprised to find that I was eating quite a lot in terms of money.

It was such a quality of life win, especially as someone who loves food, to just have insanely good meals every single day. Even if ultimately it probably saved me closer to 1000 a month than 5000.

ADDED: This subthread to me is such a bizarre look into a certain bubble of SV. [See also apparent disagreements with the statement that spending $60/day in restaurants is somehow abnormal.]

I remember the Japanese cafe at Google was very good at one point. This article has some pictures to give you an idea:

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-free-food-google-cafe...

Can't stand work canteens... something about the smell of food really puts you off eating.

It feels very forced.

Prefer an impersonal sandwich shop where I just have a wall to stare at than being in something attached to my workplace.

I am surprised that the IRS hasn't gone after this like HMRC has in the UK

But the companies are presumably eating the cost.

I ate some of the best meals I've ever had while working there. After a certain point that matters more to me than an extra N dollars a year.

For me getting home before dinner would be a massive plus to getting a free meal.

(/s)

The dinner is also often relatively early, so you still have quite a lot of time after the commute (granted, if your commute is 1+ hour then it's far from a dream routine).

What I like is having the option, for example I had a late sports club that was close to work, so it was more interesting to grab a quick bite and stay there to go to the club and return home after.

I wonder, on some deeply dystopian level, if tech companies do this on purpose to keep their a large proportion of their employees single.