Lunch (On Site: Fill & Download for Free

I’ve had the pleasure of working at least a year at each of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon since 2012.At Microsoft I’ve worked at many of their Redmond area buildings, and will be describing main campus.At Google I worked at the Kirkland campus, though I’ve also seen the Seattle campus and the main campus in the bay area.At Amazon I worked in the Fiona building in downtown Seattle, though I visited many of their other buildings, and also Lab126 down in the bay area.In a nutshell, Google has the best amenities in every dimension. Microsoft has the second-best, but still noteworthy. Amazon, not so much.At Google you get free breakfast, lunch, and dinner: high quality food with a decent variety, indications of healthiness, free drinks, free coffee from a barista, often an on-site gym and on-site trainers, on-site massage, on-site physicians, nice table tennis areas, cool open areas, great workplace kitchens with lots of free interesting drinks and snacks including fresh fruit and bread, good free parking, easy access to a great running trail, fun and innovative decorations for the workplaces, nap pods, annual Christmas gifts, and so on. I mean, you really couldn’t ask for more.At Microsoft they have easily accessible cafeterias with a good variety of food, but you have to pay (subsidized) for it. Free drinks and coffee in the workplace kitchens, changing rooms for bike commuters, walking / running trails, an on-campus store with reasonable discounts and merchandise, OFFICES and newly built out open plan that’s almost as nice as Google’s, free parking, access to on-site physicians, free flu-shots and health checks, free gym club membership (or a $800 annual ‘get fit’ allowance you can use for fitness related stuff), Good food choices near by, commuter busses with wi-fi and a good bus transit center, small self-serve markets (with good prices) for snacks. Again, a very comfortable place to work but definitely a step down from Google.Finally, at Amazon you get - coffee supplies that you or a colleague can put into the communal brew-pot, water, access to vending machines, not-so-nice open plan, adequate desks and chairs, adequate hardware, parking you pay for (you can get on a wait-list for garage parking for $100-$200 a month, otherwise you’re on-street parking), a couple of cafeterias with alright food that is more expensive than Microsoft. I liked many things about working at Amazon, but the facilities and amenities are the worst I’ve seen at the high-tech places I’ve worked.Google = ridiculously good, Microsoft = quite good, Amazon = OK.

One morning, a user, for whose company I had recently installed Oracle Financials, called me at my office to tell me: “The entire system is dead and unresponsive. Nothing you installed is working at all.” This was accompanied by the usual hysteria, name-calling, blaming, etc. (Silicon Valley). After trying to talk her through everything that I thought could be the problem, I told her I had to drive up to her company anyway for a lunch meeting, so just leave everything just the way it was and I would fix it when I arrived on site. When I got on site, I found that she was “clicking” on an MS Word doc that was the procedure manual for how to operate the Oracle system. She accessed this Word doc from a shortcut on her desktop and it opened up to an image/screenshot of the Oracle sign on form, and that Word image was what she was using to try and access Oracle. I showed the user where the actual Oracle sign on shortcut was, and the system came up just fine. I never got any Thank You for my brilliant “solution”, the user just kind of glared at me like: “Well, this is all somehow your fault anyway.” Well, I guess that’s why they call it “Support”.Update: To all of you who have viewed and upvoted: Thank you. May your IT careers be long and prosperous. And may your support experiences never be as surreal as this one. If you are ever in the Wine Country,stop by and say Hi. Matt

We serve between 70–100 meals daily on-site. We also do packed lunches for various organizations around town, so that’s another 100 meals a day.For this kitchen:Those aren’t bad numbers.Answered as part of my question session on "Working at a soup kitchen", June 2017.