One of the things that I thought about when I was working at Google was how screwed up some of the engineers were going to be post Google. The ones at risk were people who came from school right into Google and found "work" to be not unlike academia. A friend of mine who was a VP over at another big tech firm in the valley at the time said they tried not to interview people whose first and only job was Google.
That said, I've also seen companies where folks have done many similar things to what Google has done (food, vacation options, variable salary packages) and made them work in non cash-rich environments.
The interesting difference is 'revenue per employee' or RpE which is an interesting metric to track. In information businesses where the product doesn't have a "COGS" in the traditional sense, it really is a function of the value that the employees are creating on a day in and day out basis. So you can model your expenses by using taking RpE as your gross revenue, then subtracting off salary, monthly benefits, vacation, and overhead to get your 'gross margin per employee' (GMpE) and if you choose to allocate some fraction of that margin into what I think of as "lifestyle" benefits (onsite massage, or snacks, or what not).
If you take that approach its possible to really talk in real terms about "high tech" work environment vs the business. As a founder/CEO/manager you can get a sense of when something is "too much" and when you can afford to loosen things up a bit.
That said, when Google employees were responsible for over $50,000 per quarter of free cash flow on a per capita basis, and Google decided to save a few cents by changing from OdWalla juice to an off brand, saving perhaps $250 per employee per quarter, I thought it was probably a pretty stupid move.
$250 in savings per quarter seems pretty generous... or I'm vastly underestimating the average per-capita consumption of Odwalla juice amongst Googlers.
Even a $1/serving savings would imply an average of 250 Odwalla juices consumed per employee, per quarter, which works out to something like 3.8 per day. That seems extraordinarily high, especially in light of the plethora of beverages that Google makes available to their employees.
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One of the things that I thought about when I was working at Google was how screwed up some of the engineers were going to be post Google. The ones at risk were people who came from school right into Google and found "work" to be not unlike academia. A friend of mine who was a VP over at another big tech firm in the valley at the time said they tried not to interview people whose first and only job was Google.
That said, I've also seen companies where folks have done many similar things to what Google has done (food, vacation options, variable salary packages) and made them work in non cash-rich environments.
The interesting difference is 'revenue per employee' or RpE which is an interesting metric to track. In information businesses where the product doesn't have a "COGS" in the traditional sense, it really is a function of the value that the employees are creating on a day in and day out basis. So you can model your expenses by using taking RpE as your gross revenue, then subtracting off salary, monthly benefits, vacation, and overhead to get your 'gross margin per employee' (GMpE) and if you choose to allocate some fraction of that margin into what I think of as "lifestyle" benefits (onsite massage, or snacks, or what not).
If you take that approach its possible to really talk in real terms about "high tech" work environment vs the business. As a founder/CEO/manager you can get a sense of when something is "too much" and when you can afford to loosen things up a bit.
That said, when Google employees were responsible for over $50,000 per quarter of free cash flow on a per capita basis, and Google decided to save a few cents by changing from OdWalla juice to an off brand, saving perhaps $250 per employee per quarter, I thought it was probably a pretty stupid move.
$250 in savings per quarter seems pretty generous... or I'm vastly underestimating the average per-capita consumption of Odwalla juice amongst Googlers.
Even a $1/serving savings would imply an average of 250 Odwalla juices consumed per employee, per quarter, which works out to something like 3.8 per day. That seems extraordinarily high, especially in light of the plethora of beverages that Google makes available to their employees.