Frankly this sort of thing should be ignored, if not explicitly encouraged, by the company.

Engineers are very highly paid. Many are paid more than $100/hr if you break it down. If a salaried engineer paid the equivalent of $100/hr stays late doing anything, expenses a $25 meal, and during the time they stay late you get the equivalent of 20 minutes of work out of them- including in intangibles like team bonding via just chatting with coworkers or chatting about some bug- then the company comes out ahead.

That you present the above as considered "expense fraud" is fundamentally a penny-wise, pound-foolish way to look at running a company. Like you say, it's not really a gray area. It's a feature not a bug.

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alt227 13 hours ago | parent [-]

> Like you say, it's not really a gray area. It's a feature not a bug.

Luckily that comes down to the policy of the individual company and is not enforced by law. I am personally happy to pay engineers more so they can buy this sort of thing themselves and we dont open the company to this sort of abuse. Then its a known cost and the engineers can decide from themselves if they want to spend that $30 on a meal or something else.

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sokoloff 12 hours ago | parent [-]

To give them enough money to buy that $30 meal as a personal expense, you need to pay them around $50 in marginal comp expenses.

It can be a win for both sides for the employees to work an extra 30-90 minutes and have some team bonding and to feel like they’re getting a good deal. (Source: I did this for years at a place that comp’d dinner if you worked more than 8 hours AND past 6 PM; we’d usually get more than half the team staying for the “free” food.)

	▲	alt227 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I have found that the success of things like this depend greatly on so many factors such as office type, location, team moral, management style, individual personalities, even mean age etc. I have worked in places where the exact opposite of what you describe happens. As OP says, people just stop working at 6 and just start reading reddit or scrolling their phones. No team bonding and chat because everyone is wiped out from a hard day. Just people hanging around, grabbing their food when it arrives, and leaving. We too had more than half the team staying for the “free” food, but they definitely didnt do much work whilst they were there.