Back in the early 2000s, when Amazon announced the 2-pizza team concept, my team thought "great, we're a 2-pizza team now, let's get some pizza." Then we found out that the pizza is theoretical - you don't get a budget for ordering pizza.

What I took from Amazon's 2-pizza team concept was that I would always have to work alone.

Gosh I think it really depends on your company. Sometimes extra work needs to get done, that’s part of being a salaried employee to me. Providing food is a nice acknowledgment of work that, while it falls within the job description, falls outside of normal work hours.

Whether a job takes undue advantage of salaried employees times is another matter entirely. At my work, 36 hour hackathons would never fly, corporate fun is either paid or optional, and late nights to meet a deadline happen a couple times a year - no problems there. I’m sure that’s not how it is at Amazon but I think the problems there run deeper than the food.

> Sometimes extra work needs to get done, that’s part of being a salaried employee to me. Providing food is a nice acknowledgment of work that, while it falls within the job description, falls outside of normal work hours.

I agree extra work is sometimes required, but I'd like to acknowledged by the monetary compensation, not by pizza.

I do get monetary compensation - my salary, which I agreed too while knowing that I’d have to put in extra hours a few times a year.

>Sometimes extra work needs to get done, that’s part of being a salaried employee to me.

I'll never get this.

Part of being a salaried employee to me is that I get an agreed salary for the agreed work. Not the agreed work + whatever extra comes along the way.

I'd agree with you entirely if being salaried actually meant anything these days.

As in, you receive a fixed amount, regardless of the hours you worked, could be over the typical 40, could be under.

So, if your company is good at recognising that the "could be under" part is the fair payback for the "could be over" times, then that's awesome, and I can see why you're a fan.

My experience of salaried positions is more one sided.

Eh, after our chip fab burned down, I was part of the recovery team sent into the (not burned down, but technically part of the same building) computer laboratories. Basically our remit was, identify key machines or paperwork that needs to be retrieved, ensure anything that needs to be running is restarted, stay away from the access corridors into presumably unsafe sections leading towards the destroyed fab, and if you see anything that is out of place in a normal office building that just suddenly had its power go out (e.g. smoke damage or actual smoldering debris), retreat and report what you saw to the team surveying the damage who are trained to go somewhere actually dangerous.

Anyway they ordered us pizza and I thought that was nice. It felt like a team activity, and pizza is a team food. Also you're wearing gear, so having pizza brought in saves changing. And the insurers are out the price of a state-of-the-art chip fab, so what do they care about buying us pizza?

But obviously I'm not working unpaid overtime, the job is the job, if I need to put an extra hour in to ship the code today I can do that, if I need some time to wait for a plumber tomorrow I'll just take it, if you've got a two person job you need to hire two people not expect me to do more.

If your workplace has work-life balance problems or you feel under rewarded for your work, that's not because pizza is the problem, that's a whole separate problem and it's exactly as weird to blame pizza for that problem as it would be for management to think pizza can solve it.

In the UK at least I believe the tax rules mean the business can justify the expense of taking everybody out for food and fun (e.g. pizza and bowling, or golf plus cheese and wine if you're determined that pizza is for children although personally I would take pizza and bowling) say once a year so long there is a business purpose to the meeting, so e.g. you spend an hour attending a presentation about the corporate mission and financial projections with little relationship to your actual job, then you spend the rest of the day eating and hanging out.

so true.

also the idea of a "virtual" pizza party makes me feel kind of uncomfortable. it's like we bought you pizza so let us gawk at you while you eat it. no thanks.

i don't like looking at myself on a camera, let alone while shoving a pizza into my gob. but im sure more extroverted people would enjoy it.

Very true, I didn't consider that aspect of bloody eating on camera.

It's like trying to eat on a first date, you're terrified of dropping food on yourself, or getting sauce on your face... ...and so are they.

Double the insult if it’s some crummy Dominos pizza.