If I were a Cloudflare employee, I’d be pretty insulted by this to be honest. Why not just buy lunch for the employees? A discount, are we worth so little that the other 50-60% is just too much?
I am a Cloudflare employee. I was once a Google employee, so I'm quite familiar with the free food thing. I like the Cloudflare plan.
Why not just buy lunch for the employees? A discount, are we worth so little that the other 50-60% is just too much?
We all accepted offers with the understanding that our salaries did not include free food. When comparing said offers against other companies that offer free food, we took that into account. The cost of the food is therefore already factored into the salaries we accepted.
I would rather be paid more and make my own choice where to eat, than be paid less and have the company decide what to feed me.
But the Google model has historically had the advantage that they paid for food with pre-tax dollars, so they could offer better food cheaper than the employee could have bought for themselves. Cloudflare's plan fixes that distortion.
The cost of food just seems negligible, and at the point where you’re putting all of this infrastructure investment into it, and offering the discount, why not just pay for it?
You mean, pay for the food that employees go out and buy with this card? Well, what's to stop someone from having a $1000 lunch at Saison every day? (It's right across the street from the Cloudflare SF office!)
You'd obviously have to put a cap on the amount people spend. But then people feel like they have to spend that much or they are missing out. This quickly leads to the obvious question: Why don't you just give us the money and let us decide how to spend it? Again, I'd rather just have the money added to my salary than have to deal with spending caps.
Every tech company I've ever heard of that offers free food does it by having the company acquire the food directly and provide it to the employees on-site. But doing that is a whole logistical thing you have to commit to, and has plenty of down sides.
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If I were a Cloudflare employee, I’d be pretty insulted by this to be honest. Why not just buy lunch for the employees? A discount, are we worth so little that the other 50-60% is just too much?
(A little late, but had to reply...)
I am a Cloudflare employee. I was once a Google employee, so I'm quite familiar with the free food thing. I like the Cloudflare plan.
We all accepted offers with the understanding that our salaries did not include free food. When comparing said offers against other companies that offer free food, we took that into account. The cost of the food is therefore already factored into the salaries we accepted.
I would rather be paid more and make my own choice where to eat, than be paid less and have the company decide what to feed me.
But the Google model has historically had the advantage that they paid for food with pre-tax dollars, so they could offer better food cheaper than the employee could have bought for themselves. Cloudflare's plan fixes that distortion.
The cost of food just seems negligible, and at the point where you’re putting all of this infrastructure investment into it, and offering the discount, why not just pay for it?
You mean, pay for the food that employees go out and buy with this card? Well, what's to stop someone from having a $1000 lunch at Saison every day? (It's right across the street from the Cloudflare SF office!)
You'd obviously have to put a cap on the amount people spend. But then people feel like they have to spend that much or they are missing out. This quickly leads to the obvious question: Why don't you just give us the money and let us decide how to spend it? Again, I'd rather just have the money added to my salary than have to deal with spending caps.
Every tech company I've ever heard of that offers free food does it by having the company acquire the food directly and provide it to the employees on-site. But doing that is a whole logistical thing you have to commit to, and has plenty of down sides.