Free The Google Guys by Richard L. Brandt

about how free they could be with the company’s money. They thought that the lavish treatment could go on forever, no matter how large the company grew. In the prospectus for Google’s initial public stock offering, after outlining some of the freebies the company offered, Larry and Sergey warned prospective investors: “Expect us to add benefits rather than pare them down over time.”
    They have not been able to keep their word. They even used to offer $5,000 to employees who bought hybrid vehicles—the vehicle of choice for both Larry and Sergey—but ended the practice after deciding that the hybrid market had enough momentum on its own.
    In mid-2008, they shut down the free dinners at some of the cafeterias—those in buildings that don’t hold the engineers. The reasoning is that engineers are the ones who work late into the night, while everyone else has a real life to go home to. Google spokespeople say that the cafeterias in nonengineering buildings were very lightly used for dinners, and it wasn’t worth the expense to keep them open late. This event made quite a splash in tech blogs, whose writers were astounded that Google was cutting off free dinners. But the outrage was overdone. Nonengineers can still get a free meal when they work late; they just have to walk to an engineering building to get it.
    In the biggest public backtrack, Google decided in 2008 to reduce subsidies for the extraordinary on-campus daycare centers for employees’ children. When they first decided to offer on-site day care, Larry and Sergey opted to create the best daycare system venture capital money could buy. It’s an expensive perk. The centers are based on a philosophy called Reggio Emilia, which advocates a self-directed learning program for those preschool Larrys- and Sergeys-in-training, an echo of the Google founders’ own success at Montessori schools. They also boast highly paid teachers, small classes, and some of the best educational toys and learning tools.
    This backtrack made the national press. According to a New York Times article, “someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year—which nobody had noticed up until then—compared with the $12,000-a-year average subsidy of other big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle.” 6
    Not only was Google spending three times as much as other companies, but its subsidy was more expensive than getting a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford, where tuition tops out at about $34,000. So they decided to raise prices to the parents by about $17,000 a year, making the price to employees a whopping $29,000 a year. Google was dropping its subsidy from $37,000 to about $20,000—still more than other companies, but for a daycare system that is much more expensive than others.
    Parents cried, complained, and tried to get management to change its mind. This got Larry and Sergey to back off slightly on the tuition subsidy (they won’t say by how much), but they did not change their opinion about the need to backtrack on employees’ perks. According to the New York Times :
    At a T.G.I.F. in June, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.)
    In short, as Google grows, Larry and Sergey have had to grow up and smell the perks, and the aroma turned out to be a bit too rich for a company with twenty thousand employees. Success is not entirely an upward spiral. The New York Times reporter concluded that Google was becoming “just another company.”
    Eustace defends Larry’s and Sergey’s decision to cut back on perks, saying, “Over time a small number of perks multiplied by a