[humanrebar]

Are you saying the mentality is offensive? Or is there a business justification I am missing?

Note that employers do this as well. A classic one is a manager setting a deadline that requires extreme crunches by employees. They're not necessarily compensating anyone more for that. Are the managers within their rights? Technically. The employees could quit. But they're shaving hours, days, and years off of employees without paying for it.

[Aurornis]

It’s basic expense fraud.

If a company policy says you can expense meals when taking clients out, but sales people started expensing their lunches when eating alone, it’s clearly expense fraud. I think this is obvious to everyone.

Yet when engineers are allowed to expense meals when they’re working late and eating at the office, but people who are neither working late nor eating at the office start expensing their meals, that’s expense fraud.

These things are really not gray area. It seems more obvious when we talk about sales people abusing budgets, but there’s a blind spot when we start talking about engineers doing it.

[margalabargala]

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.

[humanrebar]

> It’s basic expense fraud.

I'm making the case that mandatory unpaid overtime is effectively wage theft. It is legal in the US because half of jobs there are "exempt" from the usual overtime protections. There's no ethical reason for that, just political ones.

At any rate, I think people who want to crack down on meal expenses out of a sense of justice should get at least as annoyed by employers taking advantage of their employees in technically allowed ways.