The first startup I worked for had the usual free coffee, but the only food they offered was the entire salad drawer of the refrigerator filled with every candy bar imaginable. Refilled twice a day.
Within a month of us moving into that building we'd all put on about 20lbs. Every coffee break was also candy bar time. We demanded they remove them all, for our own safety.
That's what I wish the tech companies had, a way to limit the free snacks. I'd much prefer to have to tap my badge and have the machine tell me that I exceeded 300 kcal in snacks today so no more.
I'm usually very good about just not eating the random snacks and candy in the office kitchen, but every now and then they bring madeleines into the rotation and I can't resist those :) it's always a mild relief when they're in the off-again phase.
They should have filled entire salad drawer with... good salad. Put up a bouldering wall or give their employees free/cheap entrance to nearby gym and give them time to actually do it. Ie I almost never go on lunch breaks if I can go to gym instead, once it becomes a habit its trivial to keep it up. Massive efficiency boost in my own private time, at 6pm I am over and worked out already.
IT more than anything else (maybe apart from true art) is not about hours put in but efficiency of time spent. Breaks often help overcome blocks. Decent workouts and healthy lifestyle helps with better focusing mind since all is connected in each of us. Also helps with sleep which then goes back to mind and all.
Im sure the free market will help develop a solution for mammals overeating because there is no impulse control for that - ah, and here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trocar
which one was your favorite though?
Candy bar. Because office coffee is mediocre
I've worked from home for 20 years. Is office coffee still as horrible as it was? I thought startups all upgraded to $20,000 Clover brewing systems or something?
A bunch of them did, but they don't all maintain them to exacting standards over the long haul.
If you want decent coffee out of one of those fancy grind-and-brew-in-place automatic espresso machines, they need to be deep-cleaned on a regular basis, and someone needs to be actively stocking good, fresh coffee beans...
My office now has an automated machine. I’d give it a 4/10. Not great but much better than the 1/10 from the old drip machine (and the occasional 0/10 when someone brewed with a double quantity in a misguided effort to coax a more pleasant flavor from those burnt beans).
Boeing coffee was MIL SPEC.
Roasted to a standard in the cold war. MRE Jalapeno Cheese as snack!
I think they meant which candy bar
Fruits are kind of amazing. A tasty apple cut up into slices is more delicious than more or less any concoction Mars & co. can come up with.
Even more "gnarly" stuff like figs, eating them just generates such a positive reaction. And something like mango if you're lucky enough to live in places with it... If you don't have to deal with cutting it up, that's something amazing.
Getting fruit from some farm way far off in the distance to me is a feat of logistics. I always feel a bit stupid about how I reach for convenient stuff because I don't want to take a 5 minute break to do a bit of prep and cleanup.
In principle, I agree. However, I haven't had a tasty apple in ages - they're all way too sweet for my taste.
I've been thinking about how modern fruit optimize for (among numerous other things) sweetness, and whether modern fruit are actually healthy in terms of glycemic index / glycemic load / etc.
My SO is basically like "fruits _are_ filled with sugar" and they're not wrong. It feels pretty hard to make strong qualitative judgements on this stuff. Feels better than a snickers bar, surely?
The only real thing that feels kind of easy to say is that any sweet drink is probably worse for you than just drinking water. Easiest diet in the world is to just never buy soft drinks, and the extra trick is to also not replace it with orange or apple juice.
While fruits are packed with sugar, eating fruit also comes with fiber. This extra digestion slows the intake of sugar into the bloodstream, and getting fat/unhealthy from sugar comes from to much of it going through the liver. Because you may have too much sugar at a time, the liver needs help from the pancreas, which secretes insulin to store the sugar, which makes you fat.
This is biologically confused. Fructose is processed by the liver. Glucose stimulates insulin release from the pancreas. Sucrose is one glucose and one fructose, but as you might guess from the name, fruits often contain free fructose.
Fiber doesn’t slow sugar absorption by very much. It is better than, say, HFCS, but mostly because you can’t ever eat as many calories as you can drink.
Do you know if there's a good rule of thumb for how different that ratio might be? I do like having some quantitative ballpark to go along with the qualitative texture
You may be interested in the glycemic index [1] which represents how much a particular food causes your blood sugar to spike compared to pure sugar. Based on a cursory search, the GI for an apple is somewhere in the 30s which is way less than a candy bar which can be 70+.
Most fruits are also somewhat acidic, which helps digestion and insulin sensitivity.
Fruits have sugar but unless you're on a diet that heavily restricts sugar intake it's not an alarming amount. A normal sized apple for example is larger by volume than a Snickers bar but has 1/4 the calories and half the sugar.
Eating too many fruits can provide too much sugar, but fresh fruits have low sugar content in comparison with any artificial sweet food.
Only dried fruits, like raisins, dried figs, dried dates, dried prunes and so on, have high sugar content, well over 50%, so they are comparable with chocolate or candy bars.
Most fresh fruits contain only around 10% sugar, with a only a few, like grapes or fresh figs exceeding 15% of sugar (but less than 20%).
This means that for most fresh fruits you can eat a half kilogram (or a pound) per day, while still avoiding an excessive sugar intake.
It seems like fruit are preferable due to fiber, sugar content equal.
> In principle, I agree. However, I haven't had a tasty apple in ages - they're all way too sweet for my taste.
You may be interested in Apple Rankings:
This is not a very good site though. It's basically "Apple Rankings of Some Random Dude" and not much else.
Where we shop (in western Europe) there are these shiny huge apples, often each of them has a separate sticker. All ultra sweet because, well, people are often stupid and our instincts are too strong for some situations that we didn't yet evolve to handle better. Sugar addiction from early age is one of them. Human liking of sugar developed during times where sweet fruits were rare and no ultra cheap refined sugar or HFCS was discovered. Companies deliver what people buy more.
Then at the side there are big bags (~3kg) of these not so appealing small apples with various flaws. These are the ones we buy, either bio or not, and they are much less sweet. They last less, presumably less chemistry within to keep rot away for longer, which is a good (even if annoying) sign.
when my parents sold my (passed away) grandfather's farm, they took a sapling of the 150 year old apple tree. Those apples are so delicious.
They're tiny and acidic, but the flavors are so complex compared to a supermarket apple that's giant and sweet.
Would have to be a branch that was spliced, and wouldn't be 150 years old, apple trees don't live that long.
Either way, the worst office snack IMHO is the apple, the person sitting next to me, taking a big bite, munching with their mouth open.
I raise you one Apple tree estimated to be around 370 years old:
https://www.ancienttreeforum.org.uk/ancient-trees/ancient-tr...
But yes, most Apple trees seem to stop bearing fruit around 50 years of age max and rarely live beyond 90-100 years as far as I can tell.
Could also be. In any case it was old and the apples tasted like nature intended them to
Graft would still produce genetically identical apples.
If you like tart apples, try Granny Smith. They are usually harvested a little bit too early, so they are often very sour and very green (the ripe version has a very slight shine of red). Their skin is thick and requires a little effort to chew. I love them.
I know I read several years ago that some zoos were cutting back on the amount of fruit they feed their animals because modern cultvars are too sweet.
This. Commercial fruits are as engineered as candy bars. Well.... Almost.
In any case, apples are often too sweet. I don't eat candy either.
A great way to boost the logistics score of fruits like mango is to buy dried. To remain true to the scientific method I didn't include dried mango because it's not provided at the office. I do frequently bring it in.
I love dried fruit, but I kind of assume it is a sneaky way of consuming more sugar. A handful of grapes is plenty, but I can eat many handfuls of raisins. Without the water bulk it is easy to over indulge.
you should try a mangosteen or cherimoya. discovering the broader fruitiverse was pretty eye opening.
Mangosteen are freaking amazing. I got addicted to them when I was living in Thailand. Impossible to get in my city here in the US East coast.
Lowtax tried to enlighten us in 2006, but we weren't ready to listen :( https://i.imgur.com/Fox9wMc.jpeg
I found it to be a US thing to cut fruit in slices (at least this is the country I see most doing this).
In France you get your apple whole and you bite into it. If someone prepare fruit for say a picnic, it will either be a fruit salad or a while fruit.
Children from kindergarten eat while fruit, or cut in two of they really cannot bite in. Adults never eat pre-cut fruit.
> If you don't have to deal with cutting [mango] up
What's the problem? I just peel it one half at a time and cut off huge chunks or strips around the pit. Flip it and keep going.
The flip is messy but also satisfying.
>A tasty apple cut up into slices is more delicious than more or less any concoction Mars & co. can come up with.
I love apples, but this is silly.
You obviously didn't make it down to "lemon"
Well... I try to avoid junky candy bars. And actually can even be disgusting when you're not into that habit. But lots of fruits aren't great either. If I'm hungry and have to choose between an acid apple and a kit kat, I think I'd pick the latter.
Every office needs nuts and raisins
He straight-up ate someone else's salad?
"But the distribution is bimodal here because the massive upside is countered by a massive downside: You need to evade detection. Will you hide in the bathroom? Pretend you ordered the same thing? Eat it at your desk? Either way, you need to be prepared."
Pro health tip: Don't eat where you perform waste removal functions.
One of the best pieces of lore at my employer came courtesy of our "free food" slack channel. It was customary, after catered meetings, to post the location of any leftovers so the vultures could come by and enjoy a free second lunch.
Until.
Until the "cool intern" noticed food outside a conference room shortly after noon and posted it on the free food channel. Hordes of people came by to avail themselves of the food, leaving a horrified meeting organizer to fight them off while trying to post a rebuttal on slack saying that the food was NOT, in fact, available for the taking, the attendees hadn't had a lunch break yet, pleading with people to stop taking their food, etc.
>leaving a horrified meeting organizer to fight them off while trying to post a rebuttal on slack
Perhaps they should have used Discord instead
The photo made me think of a common thing at my workplace -- a conference/customer visit had too much catering, and the leftovers were deposited in the break room. They usually don't stay very long.
I ate my co workers sandwich when I was 18 at my first job at a start-up. Sometimes you gotta fuck up to learn - I never did that again.
If you eat your co-worker's sandwich twice, however... may satan take you
>Sometimes you gotta fuck up to learn - I never did that again.
How did you not know to not eat someone else's food before your first job?
Do you have brothers?
I have a brother. And we grew up fairly poor. We still know that stealing food from someone at work isn't acceptable.
I promise on behalf of teenage me to never do it again. Pinky swear.
Was it the moist maker?
> He straight-up ate someone else's salad?
... no, it's clearly a joke.
Normalize treating someone who steals someone else’s food in the workplace the same way you would treat someone who steals someone else’s medication or telephone.
Grazing on leftover Forkable lunches is one of the great pleasures of going into the office now. I eat my regular lunch at noon. At three or four, I do a lap to see if there are any unclaimed leftovers from folks who didn't make it in. I might eat one right there, or hide it in the fridge to take home later. It's like a VC-funded loot box - will I get a sandwich? Some curry? Dim sum? The possibilities are endless.
one time Doordash sent us someone else's order on accident. And THEN sent us our actual order. It was glorious.
When their order was actually better than yours. I know the feel. You know it's wrong, but it was preordained.
> Everybody likes grapes.
False.
I've heard that some med students use grapes to practice stitches, and that is how I feel about grapes.
Grapes are obviously not meant to be eaten by humans, and must serve some other, probably squeamishness-inducing, purpose.
They did Content Marketing on a grape
Warm grapes, sure.
FROZEN grapes? Ambrosia from the gods.
I've seen grapes dropped in a bowl of vodka in the freezer, then strained out and put in a bowl after they freeze. Good way to make your co-workers chill out a little.
some of us cant consume too much in the way of fruit.. FODMAP issues really limit your snacking and healthy snacking even more :-(
At one stage pre-pandemic, someone with tongue firmly in cheek, produced a wiki page with details of all the meals you could make with the office kitchen snacks and equipment. I think that eventually got removed, because the snacks changed and it was no longer accurate. No one has had that dedication since.
I do recall doing the same - partially for myself to remember all the meal hacks coworkers gave me! Putting those packaged hardboiled eggs and seaweed snacks into shin ramen is still memorable to this day.
I hope they got promoted
> “Who does that guy think he is, eating bananas and all that?” said no one ever. The social score of the banana is fully neutral. Nobody has ever thought anything of anyone for eating bananas.
As someone who cannot stand the smell or taste of bananas, I'll certainly judge you for trying to eat one near me.
https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-equality-minister-pau...
All rooms must be banana-free before the minister enters, according to new revelations.I always find it fascinating to discover another banana hater; we are a vanishingly small minority.
I remember eating them as a young child and not hating them, but something changed and by the time I started college even the smell was nauseating to me. It's not as extreme a reaction as it used to be, but my stomach will still start turning after smelling them for a few minutes.
There are dozens of us, dozens!
Only since I got COVID in 2022. That and sharp cheeses. I did pick up a taste for buffalo chicken though, which I previously found disgusting.
A bit of tangeant but I see that the beef jerky reads "No nitrates added*" with:
"Except for that which naturally occurs in sea salt and celery powder"
Now you may ask, why celery powder ?
It turns out that in order to avoid adding "synthetic" (?) nitrates and to add "natural" ones, manufacturers add/boil products in celery extracts which contains a lot of nitrates.
Ironically, the "natural" route can result in equal or even higher nitrate levels compared to traditionally cured products. From a chemical standpoint, your body doesn’t distinguish between synthetic and natural nitrates. Both can convert into nitrosamines under certain conditions (like high heat), which are compounds of potential health concern.
Yeah we frequently shop in France and I was ham 'without nitrate additives' for some time in naive effort to make food kids eat more healthy. Of course then there is 'natural celery extract'.
Stopped doing that some time ago as per info I saw here and then in few articles, buying now just one with less salt (although considering cooking our own, its supposedly not that difficult and have a friend who does it).
Sometimes road to hell is really paved with good intentions, or at least appearance of such. Having 0 doubt manufacturers know exactly what's going on, but they just find their profit within rules and expectations of society, consequences are for others to pick up.
This is not always the case, see https://www.quechoisir.org/actualite-jambon-cuit-que-valent-... (in French).
Summary: a test of no-nitrate ham confirmed the claim. The test is done by one of the best known consumers magazine.
I once bit into a lemon like that. It ate away some enamel on my teeth and they were sensitive for a few weeks. 0/5
When I lived near a pick-your-own apple farm I often ate 10+ apples a day. After about 5-6 my teeth would get sensitive. Couldn't stop eating them, though- wholly unlike a store apple: crisp, sweet, sour.
You can’t compare the two
This was actually a great post and made me aware of your product for the first time.
I eventually landed here: https://getlago.com/docs/guide/self-hosted/
It would be nice if there was a feature matrix for self hosted premium vs open features, since that's the first thing self-hosted people are going to be looking for.
Also, I'm looking at your Lever page, but no SWE roles are listed. Maybe if this post really does numbers, that'll be changing soon!
Hey! We actually are hiring for SWEs. We don't publish them because we want to make sure we can reply to everyone instead of getting thousands of applications.
But HN has always been a great source so if you're interested in finding out more, feel free to email talent@getlago.com
I think the comparison you're looking for is on the pricing page.
Needing to get up and go to the trash can should be +1 not -1. Anything that increases your trips to anywhere from your stationary office chair needs to get points to win
Grapes: "No half-eaten evidence of prior gluttony remains. No trash is created. The perfect snack." Did they eat the stems too?
Stems, a bowl to hold the grapes, somewhat sticky fingers, seeds (unless you get the engineered no-seeds variety). Yeah, can't vouch for the logistics of grapes.
Have you eaten grapes? They don’t make your fingers sticky, they have a decidedly non-sticky skin. Most of the varieties I see at the supermarket are seedless.
Picking them off the stem you might occasionally get some juice on the fingers. Not a big deal but more than you'd get from a Quest bar or something. Seedless is a lot more common in the US than EU, I think.
If you want something even more detailed than Cabel Sasser’s annual sanck and cereal showcase is something else
I'd also recommend the Mike and Tom Eat Snacks podcast. It's a master class in being entertaining while filling time.
Oh, clicking on this link when hungry was a mistake
this is who I look up to
Misses the best office snacks: (1) a handful of nuts, (2) a boiled egg.
I love eggs, but the hard-boiled egg is the reason I didn’t eat them for 25 years or so. I know some do, and I wish I could be in your camp because they are so easy to find, but… no.
I like hard boiled eggs, but they are kind of stinky.
It also depends how long you cook them.
pretty negative social score on the boiled egg
Best / funniest lead-gen blog post I've read in ages. Bravo!
An entertaining read, even if I disagree with a lot of the ratings. Bananas get 1/5 for logistics?! They are the perfect portable snack. Grapes are definitely not guilt free - most table grapes are way too sweet for my taste. I can eat a handful and then I am done.
Also, there is a special place in hell for people who steal other people's lunches. That's one thing I could never understand. What's the thought process?!
Nice. I’m similarly spoiled for choice now. Past workplace:
1. Swiss Miss Hot chocolate mix
2. Starlight Peppermint Mints
3. Lemonade
4. Peanut butter
For variety, I tried many combinations. Some: 1+3: bad, 1+2, 2+3: good, 1+4: awesome
Not the same a 3+4 but there are lemon roasted peanuts, I've not had them, but lemon roasted pistachio's are really good.
For some reason, my first thought when I saw this was to think back to this other recent post: https://www.scottsmitelli.com/articles/ideal-candidate/ I feel like these are linked in some hard to describe way.
The Cliff's Builders Bar (chocolate mint edition) is actually pretty good. This person has no taste.
They’re terrible. Those things are for people who dont like food and just need to consume for energy.
Incredibly accurate. I hate eating and would eat one of those every morning for 2 years.
You shovel it down and go about your day.
Tastes and feels like you're eating mud, but who cares, only lasts a minute.
Nope, mint and chocolate are great individually but intended to remain separate. Protein bars in and of themselves are questionable, but combined with an unholy combination of foods this product is bad.
Mint and chocolate is a classic combination. You have weird taste buds.
I'll agree mint chocolate protein bars are fit to be spewed out of the mouth of God, but you're attacking Andes mints here. An Andes mint is a tiny bit of perfection.
I've had no problem completing the "ate every snack in our kitchen" part. Reviewing them, though, is a level of dedication I don't have.
It's a labor of love
Is Series A is the "office snacks" round?
I assume you hire a catering service to stock the snacks and fridges, and that they work out deals with some vendor?
A lot of those catering services get close to free Snacks to fill Tech offices.
Their bet is that you will like them and get used to them and buy them once you get used to them (And I sadly must say that worked on me).
Why buy when you can stea- uhh "take one for the road"?
hahahahaha great article and definitely a lead generator
totally shocked how grapes managed to get a 5/5 on logistics though, theyre a nightmare
shilling for the grapes industry
seedless ones aren't
Free beef jerky sure is a nice office snack. Stuff tends to be more pricey that most carb based snacks
Really needs a scatter plot or something. A ranking.
Was expecting something like an ELO rating.
I learned recently that Elo isn't an acronym but the last name of its inventor, Arpad Elo.
I also learned the Pilates (exercise) isn't a reference to Pontius Pilate or something, it's the last name of Joseph Pilates. That's right, you have Joey Pilates to thank for those funky machines.
This may not be the best for lead gen, but it's great for recruiting!
This person has zero taste. The mint builder's bar is awesome.
Funny article. Interesting product too.
Disappointed that microwaved yesterdays fish is not reviewed.
Social score: "No don't so it just go ahead and steal my lunch please!"
Next time I do this I'll add "hardboiled egg from a ziploc bag"
That was a great use of my time - thanks for the entertainment
beef jerky:
"There’s a plastic bag to discard and one of those weird silica gel packets you can’t eat. I rate this 4 out of 5 because it creates plastic trash, but par for the course."
olives:
"Their wetness makes you unable to use your keyboard without washing your hands. Plus they produce pits, which need to be stored in an additional bowl. I love olives, but their logistics score would be zero."
the two are in my eyes almost equivalent, you need to wash your hands after eating jerky, and it has (worse) waste, yet one scores much higher than the other.
The last one absolutely sent me. Good job!
That was a great read.
This is what corporate blogs should be, not SEO slop.
> If you want to make sure everyone believes you’re a sociopath, go ahead and have a straight up lemon. If not, don’t.
Decided. I'm going into my next appraisal meeting and staring my manager down while eating a lemon like an apple.