Google's hangover

Ted Dziuba isn't showing Google the love that Google has come to expect:

Google's money-wasting skills aren't restricted to equity investments. They can spend it internally too. If there's one thing that Google's liberal-leaning workforce loves, it's a good entitlement. You suffered through more than a decade of collegiate education, partly out of fear of entering the real world, and partly because you'd never heard the word "overqualified" before, so when you landed that job as a Software Engineer in Mountain View, dammit, you were entitled to some free shit.

I want a big salary. I want a stock option grant that will get re-priced when it's underwater. I want free food every day. I want a shuttle bus to cart my fat ass from San Francisco to Mountain View, because I'm young and I deserve to live in the city even though it's an intractable commute for people who don't have chauffeurs.

I want all of this, and if you take any of it away, by golly, I'm going to whine about it on an internal mailing list. If my demands are not met, well, I guess I'll whine some more, but eventually shut up because my parents told me that I don't know how good I have it, and deep down, I'm too much of a chickenshit to go looking for a new job.

I see what Google's intention is: a well-cared-for workforce is a productive workforce. An employee who eats on campus doesn't take long lunches and can get back to work faster. When you work at Google, you call these things "perks." After you've quit Google, you call it "welfare." Google is quickly figuring out what the government already knows: Once you start with entitlement programs, the amount of money you need to spend on it never decreases. While Google doesn't publish this line item, probably out of shame, it's been estimated that they spend roughly $72 million per year on food alone.