Sorry for my lack of blog visibility. I’ve been writing code rather than English lately — we get paid more when I do that. :)

I wanted to mention another simple pleasure of JFM: the food.

My previous 19 years of employment were for big companies (Apple and Microsoft) with thousands of employees on a many-acre campus. The campus is so big that it takes 10 minutes just to walk out of it, and when you do, you find yourself in suburbia (where else could one put a many-acre campus?) and have to walk even farther to find a strip mall with good teriyaki or whatever. We’re talking at least 30 minutes of unproductive time, not counting lunch itself. (Madness!)

The big-company solution is to have food right there on campus so there’s no need to leave. Everyone is just seconds away from company food paid for by the extra productivity from the 30 minutes people don’t spend finding lunch. Of course, company food varies. Some companies invest in nice cafeterias with great food. Others provide more basic outsourced institutional catering. In any case, the end result is that everybody eats in the same place every day.

Here at JFM, the food situation is very different. We’re surrounded by hundreds of places to eat within a few minutes’ walk, and our mission is to try them all. (Well, all but the really scary ones.) Walking around downtown Seattle looking for food, we’re surrounded by real life rather than being inside a corporate monoculture. And on the best days we discover a little restaurant run by somebody who really cares about making good food, and we get to support a small business kind of like us. All this makes going to lunch a simple pleasure for me every day.

Now, about the title of this entry. You may have heard of the “Google Fifteen” — new Google employees supposedly gaining 15 pounds after hiring. That may well be an urban legend. Unfortunately, I’m beginning to think the “Jackson Five” is all too real!