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A Look at Silicon Valley Cafeterias
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."
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
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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. :(
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Do eBay employees have to place bids for their meals?
...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.
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.
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.
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.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
keeps those nerds from gettin restless come spring time.
Anyone know what that stuff is that's floating in the curry?
"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.]
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
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
Apparently, you need invites to go their cafeteria.
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.
Gleepy the Hen. More intelligent than the average hen.
Here you can find a sample of the google menu: http://googlemenus.blogspot.com/
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.
your lunchbreaks are long enough for you to actually leave your desks???
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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.
The chili is good. Just watch out if someone gives you the finger instead.
Of course since your government servants are underpaid, the cafeteria get financial support, your tax dollars in action!
Apparantly, the article didn't show the Microsoft meals because they had too many bugs.
> Google: "hamburger+cheese+bacon+ketchup-mayo" fries "large orange drink"
> Did you mean: "tofu+veggies" "mineral water"
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.
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.
Lane Myer: I have great fear of tools. I once made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee condemned it.
anal shithole
-1, Redundant?
Dude, starving yourself will just push your metabolism down and encourage you to continue being sedentary and overweight. I bet you have cold hands and feel dizzy for most of the day. Get an iPod with star trek audiobooks and walk or jog for half an hour in the morning fast enough to breeze rapidly but not so quickly to get wasted and discouraged. Now reward yourself by eating a nice breakfast with eggs and sausage. Exercise and energy boost will make you feel warm for the rest of the day, burning lots of thermal energy. On the other hand, you probably won't be very hungry for lunch, so you get eat something light and with lots of vitamins. Do they have a Fresh Choice in your area?
Stay away from fat-free foods. They have lots of sugar that your liver will quickly convert into cholesterol and you will feel hungry again. The best bet is eating some fish in a Japanese or Chinese restaurant - a) it has unsaturated fat which cleans your blood vessels, b) fish doesn't have fattening growth hormones like non-organic beef or chicken and c) you will not get hungry soon and eat unhealthy "fat-free" snacks.
Cooking dinner at home would really do wonders. Restaurants tend to use the cheapest components and cook food for best taste and fastest cooking speed, not the most healthy dish. But I guess your milage may vary and it's possible to find relatively healthy restaurants.
I know there are ways to bypass registration, or one could just register, but that is a lot more painful than this post. Grandparent deserves the karma.
I have freaks! I did something right...
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?
Words to men, as air to birds.
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 probably spent brainstorming/discussing a business related problem anyway. Even if you're discussing personal stuff you'd probably have talked about this during working hours anyway.
Essentially you get a meal, the company gets 1 hour of your time + is seen as a "nice company" because they give a perk.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
. . . 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'd suggest you don't use Slashdot as your only news source, or you will suffer permanent brain damage.