They are buying more than the snacks. They are buying you time, since you never need to make office grocery runs to stock your desk. Might not be a huge deal, but elimination of chores really is a perk.
Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk. It's arguable whether it's actually a perk for me to spend 8 hours in a row at my desk, but even if we accept that claim at face value, it's still not a significant factor in any decisions I make.
Perks are things you give me that I can't get for myself, like health insurance which you use collective bargaining to get a lower price on. Snacks aren't that.
And while it's anecdotal, I've seen people take multiple-thousands-of-dollars pay cuts to work at places with "a better culture" where the only discern-able differences were soda in the fridge, beer on tap, and a ping-pong table or similar: all things that if you put a number value on what it's worth to you, aren't worth it. Culture does matter, but it starts with valuing your workers enough to pay them and not use irrelevant "perks" as an excuse to pay them less.
> Okay, pay me the money you were going to spend on snacks and the money you were going to pay the person who you pay to fetch the snacks, and I'll go fetch my own snacks or order them off the internet to my desk.
Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.
You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.
Also, even if they were to give you your fraction of that back, that would count as taxable income - unless they categorize it as a "stipend" -- which requires a lot more up-front accounting/legal work on their end.
You may prefer getting $6/wk (or $5.04/wk after taxes) more instead of snacks at work, but the simple fact is that your employer provides snacks because it's in their best interest to do so. Whether it's in your interest is not the decisive factor, though they may take your opinion into consideration.
I feel like this conversation got massively side-tracked. Are you arguing in good faith that the amount of value some snacks provide to an employee is meaningful when compared to the other things the GP mentioned?
This entire thread is the reason unions are such a pain in the a$$.
You have a bunch of employees who have never run a company confidently telling with their handwaving math how things should work. You have a dozen people patting themselves and others on the back for the idea of getting a sliver of their snack budget back in salary with no concept of economies of scale.
While unionizing for backbreaking work like the manufacturing industry makes sense, in tech it is a nightmare. Let's see where Kickstarter finds itself in the next recession and see how things work out when executives can no longer make quick decisions but are forced to do everything by committee.
I'm not referring to large, faceless corporations, I'm referring to >100 person orgs. My experience can't be an outlier as there are plenty of vendors that specialize in this space, so someone out there is buying from a vendor. Here's what I found on the first page of search results:
Well I'm certainly not ordering from GrubHub either.
> Your office manager (or whoever) orders snacks from a contractor in bulk once a month (they don't make N GrubHub/etc individual orders every day). If they give you your fraction of that back, it wouldn't cover your GrubHub/etc order. Perks work because of these economies of scale.
What's the economy of scale on me getting up and going to get a fresh salad even when snacks are provided for free, because I value my health and sanity?
If you don’t value it, that’s fine. No one is holding a gun to your head and demanding you eat the snacks, but your original proposition was about using that money to buy your own snacks which doesn’t work for the aforementioned economies of scale.
Really, you think buying my own snacks doesn't work? I gotta tell you, I've been accused of many things, but being unable to buy snacks is not one of them.
Sure, maybe it costs me some minuscule amount of money: if that's your point you can have it. Congrats! You win that argument.
My argument is: pretending that snacks are a meaningful benefit in negotiating employment is a huge loss to employees. But if you want to choose your job based on the snack benefit, have fun working for reduced wages so you can sit at your desk more.
> If you don’t value it, that’s fine. No one is holding a gun to your head and demanding you eat the snacks, but your original proposition was about using that money to buy your own snacks which doesn’t work for the aforementioned economies of scale.
And before that, you said:
> You can rail against the value of these perks, but "give me the cash and let me decide for myself" doesn't work.
Buying my own snacks works just fine, because in an economy of scale, snacks simply are irrelevant. The greatest relevance they have is as a contract negotiation chip where employers try to sell them as a benefit which gets weighed against things that actually matter, like salary.
If you view snacks as an inherently important thing, I guess I can't argue with you on that, but I think most people wouldn't agree with you if they realized how much money they might be leaving behind by considering things like snacks when choosing a job.
Who are you to decide if that's worth it or not? Obviously if someone has decided to take that pay cut and switch companies it was worthwhile for them.
You might not care much for those perks yourself but it's self-evident that some people do.
People are free to make whatever irrational decisions they wish. Again, we're talking anecdotal evidence, but those people don't stay long at those companies.
I certainly won't hold it against an employer if they provide snacks.
It’s not irrational to value things differently. I place a huge premium on having a variety of drinks, snacks, and meals at my workplace. Far, far beyond the mere cost to purchase them. I make plenty of money, why would I add a huge time sink, hassle, and mental overhead for a bit of extra cash that I don’t really need?
I’ve been doing this for a long time, thanks. It’s definitely worth a few thousand dollars per year to me. That’s less than 1% of my income. Just because it’s not worth it for you means little.
> I’ve been doing this for a long time, thanks. It’s definitely worth a few thousand dollars per year to me. That’s less than 1% of my income. Just because it’s not worth it for you means little.
Well, I'll just quote that so you can't change it, and people can decide for themselves whether they think paying thousands of dollars for snacks is a rational decision.
Irrational decisions you've been making for a long time are still irrational decisions. Irrational decisions you make with 1% of your income are still irrational decisions.
If you're saying that leaving behind massive amounts of money in exchange for cheap snacks is something you just inherently like, I guess that's not irrational, but that's a pretty unusual thing to like. But follow your heart!
However, this problem isn't solved by unions, it's solved by teaching your dev friends how to negotiate better. If they are on their 3rd job and are still getting under negotiated with snacks then I don't know what to tell you (or them).
It's kind of nice to know that you can walk 5 meters from your desk to get food, however it doesn't take long to realise that you'd rather 10 min to the nearest place and eat there instead. It gives you a bit of time outside the office,you move more and ultimately make your own decision on what you eat instead it being done by your lovely Big Corp.
People rarely do what's more benefitial to them.The best example is when a heavily overweight person with developing heart conditions is prescribed medication left and right instead of being told( and helped with) to better manage diet and levels of physical activities.
So in response to my point that people may value things differently than how someone rando on the Internet thinks they should, your response is that they clearly just don’t know what’s good for them :)
Of course people value different things- that's normal.I remember I worked for a company,where most of my team had this bad habbit of having lunch at their desk. Constantly skipping 1 hour lunch they were entitled to. Our manager used to go crazy about it and eventually had to ban it all together. Interestingly enough, while it was a busy place,there was no need not to take lunch. I always took full lunch break and enjoyed walks alongside Thames,while some others had to seek medical help because of overwork.
Eat apples on daily basis and you'll soon see the affected on your teeth and heart. They are good source of fiber, vitamins bit also have a lot of sugar. Despite all this,they are still miles better than your average Snickers bar.
Actually, speaking as a diabetic, fruits are something you have to be careful of.
There is a _lot_ of sugar in fruit. A medium sized apple has as much sugar as 8oz of Coca Cola.
The sugars in fruit are very simple, which is good and bad. They tend to spike blood sugar very quickly, but also drop back to baseline fairly quickly.
Now, there is lots of good nutritional stuff in fruit also, of course, but you could absolutely develop diabetes from eating fruit.
Given a choice between the apple and the soft drink, I'd choose the raw apple every time. Human digestion can far more efficiently work with the apple than suga-cola. The "sugar" might be the same in terms of basic numbers, but the composition is very different.
I genuinely would like to see how strong the evidence actually is for someone getting diabetes from raw fruit[1]. Especially when compared to other sources such as sugary drinks etc. My uneducated guess is that we should be able to look at primates with high fruit consumption and we'd instantly see massive diabetes populations. I doubt this is true. It would be a stretch at best.
[1] I should at this stage assert the non-inclusion of anything processed either. I'm not counting fruit juice for example. Juicing is not the same as eating the actual fruit. Less effort so the digestion process changes. Commercial juices are even worse.
> They are buying more than the snacks. They are buying you time, since you never need to make office grocery runs to stock your desk. Might not be a huge deal, but elimination of chores really is a perk.
Wrong. This is the complete opposite of what's happening. They aren't eliminating a chore you'd need to do. You're going to work 9-5 whether they provide free snacks or not, and you're going to snack. If they don't provide them, you're going to leave and go get them somewhere else. They're providing snacks to keep you from leaving the office. They get you at your desk longer. It's not a perk. It's a cheap way to extract more labor.
If your job is more fulfilling than walking to a store and standing in line (and most programming jobs are IME), then it's win-win. Company gets something they want, I get something I want, we're both happy.
Or you could just buy snacks at the same time as all your other grocery shopping? I guess if you literally never go to the grocery store it's a perk, but otherwise it's questionable at best.
I remember when I was working on one of the big4, whenever we were getting "snacks" we would EACH pick from a menu what EACH wanted,and EACH was getting exactly what they wanted. Some were going for the ribs, some for the salad, and we would all sit and enjoy our lunches/late dinner together. Not all perks had to do with junkfood.
As you said, that stuff is lunch/dinner, rather than snacks. Certainly that's a more valuable perk that some pretzels and sodas (or whatever). It's also less common.
No, they’re trying to make sure you never leave the office. A walk down the street to the nearest grocery store is a nice break, but not one the company wants you taking.
You know, with the advent of Amazon and other Task Rabbitty to-your-door delivery services, did they really save me any chore here? I can get just about anything delivered to my door stop within 48 hours, why is it trouble for me to get my preferred snacks at all?
I can have them delivered for very little premium. If my co-workers and I pool our orders we can reduce the impact of those deliveries (or rotating pickup), and have more choice about what snacks we get.
Donut and coffee clubs (and similar) in offices have worked this way forever.
