There's no such thing as a free dinner. A worker at Google tells us the company is taking evening meals off the menu: "Google has drastically cut back their budget on the culinary program. How is it affecting campus? No more dinner. No more tea trolley. No more snack attack in the afternoon." The changes will be announced to Googlers on Monday. Workers at the Googleplex will remain amply fed, with free breakfast and lunch — dinner will be reserved for geeks only — but it's still a shocking cutback.Last year, when we aired the mildest speculation about Google cutting back on free food, commenters were outraged. Google has long milked its cafeterias for their publicity value; company executives have crowed about the company's resistance to recessions and its commitment to coddling its employees. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin even promised shareholders they'd add perks, rather than cut them. In 2004, they wrote:

A Wall Street Journal blog post claims "information technology pros will go extinct if they don’t start thinking about their jobs differently." The item, sourced to a single analyst, is a flop as a trend report. But it's a wonderful snapshot of the resentment corporate workers feel toward bureaucratized IT departments.It's not the enthusiastic geeks they can't stand, it's the control freaks who ban iPhones and create 18-month projects for themselves that could be replaced by Google Docs. But oh, the hate: “Get out of the data center,” snaps the analyst. "Eat lunch with the regular people." I tried that once. The regular people got up and left.

Rmbr, a wireless-apps startup, has developed a service which exchanges business cards electronically via text message. What, and lose the vital ritual of ceremoniously discarding the cards of the unimportant in your hotel room after a conference? [VentureBeat]

Facebook's new bosses don't let the peons throw drinking-game parties anymore, but at least the drones get to go to work in a pedestrian-friendly urban setting, right? Nope. Facebook plans to move "a substantial portion of its operations" in the first quarter of 2009 from downtown Palo Alto to one of HP's old office parks on to 1601 California Avenue, reports Palo Alto Online. The lot, about 8.5 acres in the Stanford Research Park, used to house HP's spun-off subsidiary Agilent, but by the looks of it, we would've guessed Dunder-Mifflin.

Yahoo sources told BoomTown's Kara Swisher that there's a price to be paid for management's lofty promises to shareholders. Top executives are considering "cutting costs" in Yahoo's mobile operations and the Santa Monica-based Yahoo Media Group. A Yahoo executive tells us that he doesn't buy the layoff rumors, and he's "not overly worried." So who are Swisher's sources and why are they spreading so much doom and gloom? That's just life at Yahoo, our source said:

Former network engineer David Walsh worked at Apple from 1995 to 2007 before finally realizing that when the company tags "senior" on to the front of your title, it doesn't mean much except for more work. Now he's suing Apple for violating California's labor laws. In a complaint filed in the Southern District of California, Walsh alleges Apple requires employees to work more than 40 hours a week or eight hours a day, but refuses to pay overtime and instead just "promotes" employees to new overtime ineligible titles. Apparently Walsh also had to be on call for seven day stretches every six weeks. Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis would urge Walsh to drop the suit, get out of tech, and find work in a post office. We're just happy to report finding another job to add to our list of tech's very worst. (Photo by philentropist)

[UPDATE: Sarah Carey wrote to say that her post was removed temporarily because of traffic overload. It's back up now.]

Nearly every chief information officer on the planet is worried the Olympics will take down his or her network next week, says network management tool maker Blue Coat Systems. The Wall Street Journal profiles Cathy McClain, CIO for a division of Brunswick, the maker of bowling balls and boats. It only takes 15 employees watching videos at once to affect her network. I like her solution:

It's a steampunk mouse. Duh! [Boing Boing]

"PLEASE STOP PEEING IN THE SINK
THANK YOU!
FACILITIES"

John Sterlicchi, writing for the U.K.'s Guardian, just emailed me asking for my thoughts on "this Google daycare fiasco." (The short version: Google closed an outsourced daycare facility in favor of one run in-house, and hiked prices 70 percent, far above market rates; Googlers with kids in the facility, and those on the waitlist, are furious.) He asked: "If someone outside the environs of Google and Silicon valley was looking at this, what should they think? Is Google moving away from 'do no evil'?" Good questions. Here's what I just wrote him:

Lost amidst the hullabaloo over Fox's $350 million new LA headquarters for MySpace and its other Web properties: Just how bad the parking is at MySpace's current office. A former employees tells me that finding a spot in the morning regularly took an hour of circling. In announcing the new office, Fox Interactive CEO Peter Levinsohn reminded employees he had "communicated with you about our space and parking challenges." Anyone have that memo? I'd love to read it. In the meantime, consider this: MySpace won't completely move into the new facility until 2010, meaning its engineers will continue to spend countless hours circling parking lots instead of coding for the next two years. Plenty of time for Facebook to widen its technical lead over Rupert Murdoch's aging social network.

Go to an almost-Ivy League and come away with a 3.5 GPA? Have "excellent customer-service experience" and a "strong knowledge of the community, area and region" around Mountain View? Then you might be glad to know that Google is hiring a new "corporate concierge" who's job responsibilities will include "making restaurant reservations, ordering flowers, recommending places to dine." We copied the whole job description below, but we're pretty sure Google already has a candidate in mind. (Hint: He's famous for starting a directory that would be perfectly handy doing this job.)

An old joke about San Francisco's economy is that half the people are in the business of selling t-shirts to the other half. Any Valley denizen quickly accumulates a wide assortment of corporate logos in their laundry. But be careful which company's brand you're sporting around the office.

Totally irrelevant newsweekly-turned-listicle-magazine US News & World Report brings you a straight-talking list of ten tips for managing an office full of 20-somethings, according to old business dude G.L. Hoffman. His pointers include "Add value," "Let them use their media," "They want standards," and "Expect varied, non-chain-of-command type communications." Whatever that means. As an actual 20-something, I'm communicating up G.L. Hoffman's chain of command that this list is straight up crapola. You are old and your advice is dorky, Mr. Hoffman! And too long—we 20-somethings have no attention span (or respect for our elders), due to drug use. After the jump, five real tips for managing an office full of 20-somethings, should you ever find yourself in such an unlucky position:

A Yahoo employee writing the blog Sambog.com writes: "I still like the Yahoo! brand and continue to use Yahoo! News, Finance, Mail and Flickr. I love the culture, the environment and the fun stuff." But the disclaimer only comes after ten reasons why he'd leave the company. A list which our tipster tells us "sums Yahoo! up completely," below.

A tipster tries to convince us Google's cutting cost and clamping down on hiring:

Apple will move into a new New York office tower going up on 510 Madison, taking two floors. The building is still under construction, but developer CBRE Richard Ellis has a live construction cam you can use to follow its progress. Glancing at sketches,we expected more from design-obsessed Apple. Other than the pictured garden terrace, and a for-tentants-only indoor pool and health club, the place looks pretty much like every other Manhattan office tower.

It's a measure of the fluorescent-lit hellishness of the modern cubicle maze that we're consumed by nostalgia for office cultures that none of us remember. Part of the attraction of AMC's Mad Men is the show's depiction of Madison Avenue at the start of the 1960s, populated by hard-drinking chain-smoking womanizing ad executives and their large-breasted secretaries: in equal measure politically incorrect and glamorous. Or one can go further back to a Victorian era of flattering lighting, mad inventors' laboratories and a belief in technological progress which is only now coming back into fashion. In these period office environments, computers look out of place; but some customizers have solved that problem.

Silicon Alley Insider turned up a defender of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's change-in-control severance package — someone bold enough to join Yahoo in May. (Confused? A tip: Just remember that the phrase "joining Yahoo" is the opposite of the more commonly used phrase "leaving Yahoo.") Critics called the plan, whose cost was estimated at as high as $2.5 billion, a "poison pill," saying it creates incentive for employees to leave the company after an acquisition.