If google provides food for employees then that's essentially indirect compensation. Employees can now use the money they would have spent on food to buy other things.

So now that they're remote and have to buy their own food they have effectively received a pay decrease.

How is it entitled to complain about a decrease in compensation for the same work?

>>If they really complained about not getting compensated for buying their own food during lockdown I think "entitled" is a fair descriptor.

I very much disagree. If you were getting food at work previously, as in - it was clearly your agreed part of compensation - then I would absolutely complain if suddenly I had to buy my own.

>> But the flipside of that is that, when there's a deadline, I'm very invested in meeting it, even if that means working a lot of hours.

Again, that's fine and if you want to do that yourself, great, everyone would love to have you as an employee. But the second your manager walks in and says "john, I expect you to work this weekend" I'd start looking for a different job. Taking personal responsibility and working harder and more hours to finish something is one thing, being told you have to because your manager demands it is unacceptable.

Agree and disagree. Without pushing a point too hard, I will ask you this - what if your employment contract states you are to receive $X,000 per year in food or food stipend? Would you be in favor of employees pushing for subsidized food while remote?

Ok, and there’s a deadline at work. There’s also a deadline at your spouses work, your kid is sick, and they took off work to look after them last time. What do you do?

My employer has killed off office perks during lockdown; it doesn't seem intentional, more of a bureaucratic thing. People are still in the office, but the management aren't, so things don't get done.

I've told them that this is an issue for morale - the old "buying the cheap toilet paper" adage comes to mind - but I'm not holding out much hope that anything will happen.

Is it a significant hardship for me to buy lunch? No. It wouldn't be a significant hardship for them to give it either.

To be brutally honest - we all need _more_ support during lockdown and restrictions, not less. In the UK, work and the supermarket are pretty much the only legal reasons for most to be outside at the moment.

A small number of people did this on the imageboard, which is widely known for collecting and upvoting fringe complaints. It is a company of like 130,000 people. A few of them are going to ask for things that seem unreasonable to others.

Google is somewhat known for being slow to fire. I personally like it. Managers are expected to try to get their reports to survive PIPs rather than using them as a boot out the door.

On paper that's fine. Do that too much, though, and your willingness to burn personal time for the company's benefit will become the norm and factor into their planning. Getting management to un-learn that is difficult and tricky and often not accomplished without the loss of several employees with that reason pointed out in the exit interview.

I mean in your last sentence, it really isn't a privilege if you have to do "intense, focused work" to get it... it then becomes compensation

Loss of said compensation does certainly warrant some conversation about it. Also I don't really appreciate it being painted as ALL Googlers when, like most things in life, a small passionate minority affected by this brought this up and most people didn't think twice about it