One Engineer’s Love Affair with ZeroCater

http://blog.zerocater.com/one-engineers-love-affair-with-zerocater

by arram • 15 years ago

43 21 15 years ago

blog.zerocater.com

rhizome6• 15 years ago

I like ZeroCater, but "[t]he team that eats together stays together" is BS in my book.

hartror• 15 years ago

Perhaps you would like to provide some of your reasoning behind that statement?

Certainly in my somewhat limited experience coworkers who are friends generally work better together and are more likely to ride out the bad times.

The theory goes that eating together is a natural environment for people to establish a rapport that carries through to their working relationship.

rdouble2• 15 years ago

It's a headache for those who don't like to eat lunch.

joebadmo3• 15 years ago

Joel Spolsky made a good case for eating lunch together in a blog post earlier this year: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/04/28.html

There are many cultures, too, in which eating together has a lot of significance for a relationship. It's a very basic biological necessity that I think has deep, tribal roots as a bonding experience.

I think it can be especially important for nerds, too, in that we're not gregarious or socially outgoing by nature.

inuhj• 15 years ago

I prefer not to eat with my coworkers or even see them outside of work. Work is stressful enough and we're all great friends when we're there...but we all understand that we spend too much time together and would rather not spend our lunch breaks or weekends talking about work because it isn't productive. We hit the same points over and over again. It's a never ending meeting.

rhizome6• 15 years ago

I think it can be especially important for nerds, too, in that we're not gregarious or socially outgoing by nature.

Well how does this work, then? "Some people don't like olives, that's why we have an olive-eating contest every Thursday."

danilocampos3• 15 years ago

Sounds like an awful book.

Assuming good coworkers, team lunch is hugely beneficial for unstructured communication. Everyone gets together, regardless of role, and just talks. People learn about each other, learn about the state of the business and figure out when someone they don't often talk to is actually in a position to help them out.

It's also literally true – the team eating together begins and ends their meals simultaneously, meaning that productivity resumes at the same time for everyone. This makes things really easy when you're working on projects with multiple people.

Team lunches are magic with the right crew.

kordless2• 15 years ago

I dunno. Loggly CEO here. We seem to stay pretty well connected at lunch. At some point our size will cause us to splinter, but for now it's awesome. I love these guys!

BTW, free food in our office at Bush and Kearny Tuesday/Thursday! Swing by if you want to talk about zombies or anything else controversial. (Hey, we're ex-Splunk and LookSmart after all!) :)

rhizome6• 15 years ago

We seem to stay pretty well connected at lunch.

Selection bias.

kordless2• 15 years ago

We've been using ZeroCater since the very early days. As Dave said in the article we went away for a while but then came back because of the variety and how easy it made it for us. Just fire and eat.

martian• 15 years ago

ZeroCater is great! We have used them a few times and been impressed with the quality and variety. My only complaint would be that take-out food can be greasy and unhealthy sometimes. It'd be great if ZeroCater could cater to the "healthnut" crowd.

My company usually has healthy, seasonal lunches cooked by an in-house chef, but when she is not available we use ZeroCater. The discrepancy between healthy home-cooked food and sort-of health catered food is more visible when switching back and forth.

That said, the ZeroCater guys are great and I'm quite impressed with the service. If your startup isn't eating together yet, you should. It's definitely worth the cost!

One Engineer’s Love Affair with ZeroCater

Related Stories