What about the Free Food? (Tanstaafl and Google)
..from effective tool to a messy millstone...
No discussion about early Google can avoid the ‘free food’ discussion. There’s been so many papers, podcasts and pithy articles about it1 that you could say that there’s really nothing more to say about it. It’s been completely chewed over, if you will.
What people never seemed to get was the actual point of the cafeteria in the beginning and early years of Google was the impact it had on accountability. Let me paint a picture for you: When you have 50, 100, 200, 400, or 1000 engineers/ops folks depending on each other to ship a search engine, Gmail or whatever, there’s a huge problem in maintaining accountable communication between them.
Will software engineer X deliver build Y on time so that you can ship index Z? If you’re all in the same building, the same office even, it’s extremely easy to count on each other because it’s all happening within 50 feet of you. As you grow beyond one office, one floor, one building it gets much harder to know what’s happening and you can’t count on passing someone in the hallway to get an update.
What do you do? Well, maybe if you concentrate everyone together once a day? It becomes extremely difficult to not deliver on a promise if you know you’re going to see them in the burrito line. At the very least as you’re picking out carne asada or al pastor, you can tell your colleague that something is running late, or the test you just ran had some errors.
When I started at Google, we had about 900 engineers, with about 75% in the mountain view, and the great majority of them would regularly eat at Charlie’s in building 43. It was actually difficult to *not* run into someone you’re counting on on the regular. The free lunch, which was super tasty and cared for by Charlie and the team, was the mechanism whereby the company could move in one direction2.
Oh, wait, here’s the legally required brief aside about meeting a world leader in Charlie’s cafe:
My second or third week at Google, I was waiting for my turn to tell the great taqueros what I wanted in my burrito. I looked to my left, and to my surprise it was Al Gore. He was on Google’s Technical Advisory board and was a pal to the company.
“Hey, it’s Al Gore in the burrito line.”, I said in one of those I-guess-I-said-something-out-loud-again moments.
VP Gore replied “Yup. And boy aren’t these burritos good? Not great for my mid-section, but so good.” and he sort of patted his stomach.
“Hey, can I ask you something, since we’re waiting our turn?” , I asked.
“Sure!”, Al Gore said. He also asked me my name at some point. Not so shocking, but he was actually pretty good at the whole interacting with the public thing. I might have mentioned working at State during his reinventing infrastructure thing.
“Why no security, I mean, shouldn’t you have dudes in suits around you?”, I asked.
“Well, Chris, here’s the one good thing about losing, people generally don’t want to kill you as much.” , he said in what I can recall was a peppy avuncular tone of voice.
As Google grew beyond one lunch cafe into two, three, five and many more3, this happy coincidence of accountability was over for the larger company. Now it’s worth pointing out that all companies have a problem growing and keeping projects on track. For Google, lunch wasn’t gonna cut it anymore as a management tactic.
Google’s free food became a perk for pr, recruiting and employee retention and couldn’t provide that vital engineering pulse check that I believe early Google came to rely on.
I can even tell you the moment the Free food went from a core part of what Google engineering was to well, a weird potential burden that would eventually lead to reduced quality and honestly a program I wish they had killed4.
I want to say this was in 2005 or 2006 and It was a very frothy time in the silicon valley. Rumors abounded of Yahoo employees sneaking into Charlie’s to score a free meal. Google was starting to get a little sensitive of how the food program was being used (and abused).
Google hadn’t instituted much in the way of rules around guests and family visits, I believe Google asked that you only bring family for dinner once or twice a month. It was still pretty loose though.
I’d regularly work late and take advantage of the dinner service, and one night (must have been the summer because the sun was still out) I had picked up some Indian food and had grabbed a two-top near the exit of the cafe. I think I was reading a book5. I looked up from my tray and food, and there was Larry Page, tray in hand, looking for his own table. I gestured at the seat across from me, but he wasn’t into it.
He took the seat next to me at a very large table. Maybe he was waiting for someone or a big group? It turns out that wasn’t the case6.
Shortly after he sat down and was starting to eat, about 147 people sat down at the table with him. I figured it must be some group or something that he was hosting, as most had the temporary badges on that was issued at the lobbies. Anyhow, they all sit down with Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, and the person sitting across from him says “Hi! Do you work here?”
“I do. What brings you all to google? Are you a university group or something?” , Larry said.
They were younger looking, so this wasn’t a bad guess. Google would often host academics, customers, etc., at the campus and a trip to Charlie’s was always part of the show.
“Nope, we all went to school together and our friend”, Random dude points to the end of the table, “hosts us every week here. I can’t believe the food is free. I’m at Intel, we have to pay for our food, but we don’t have to here! What do you do?”
I remember my eyebrows raising a bit at this. Larry clearly saw that I was listening, he did a full Jim Halpert fourth wall breaking thing at me, looks back at the person and says “Oh, I work on search, but I gotta go. Enjoy the food.”
I don’t think the host even noticed that Larry was there before he left. He didn’t notice me barely suppressing a guffaw, either.
The next day, a note came from the food folks that there had been some abuse of the food program. They asked that groups be registered ahead of time, and that visitors coming more often than once a month needed to be registered as well.
Over time, as the food service program grew, new cafes would open, and some would be honestly some of the best food google had ever served8, but by the 2010s, it was clearly a program on the decline. The joke about the food being better when one was a noogler was the new Eternal September. It would be a few years still before quality dropped off a cliff and Google entered the “Chicken thighs with sauce9” era of the food program where it lay moribund.
Often featuring a side story about meeting some world leader or celebrity or Rob Pike or something.
There was also a distinct vibe that if you were not based in Mountain View, you couldn’t have the same impact on Google, and that would persist for years.
When I exited in 2023, I believe google had grown to something like 44 cafes in the bay area alone?
Probably a longer, more boring article about the decline of the food program, and how an average $23/employee/day spend on microkitckens and cafeteria programs was cut in half and then quartered and what effect that had on the cafe staff and the food quality. And don’t get me started on pizza ovens being kept at 450 degrees (Fahrenheit!), I mean, you go to the trouble of having a proper oven installed and it never gets above 500 degrees?
Probably Scalzi’s Old Man’s War given the timing.
Foreshadowing!
The tables would seat 16 or even more, if you were by the stage… it was a big ol’ cafeteria!
Pintxo! We hardly knew thee.
Or cabbage with sauce, for the vegans.
That is the best Al Gore story in the world.