> You don't appreciate office cultures involving alcohol or dog-friendliness, and you roll your eyes and put up with them. I think the OP is complaining about

> You don't appreciate office cultures involving alcohol or dog-friendliness, and you roll your eyes and put up with them. I think the OP is complaining about this "culture" being used as a weapon to trick, mislead, and bully people. > So when you flat-out lie to your coworkers about your feelings, you're undermining the social fabric, for your pecuniary gain Any company that forces you to lie about your personal non-work related opinions in order to keep your job is incredibly toxic. > It's also disrespectful to assume that your coworkers don't know what's actually valuable to them. The problem is non-monetary benefits are misleadingly marketed to prospective employees and are thus very hard to evaluate. For example I've worked at companies that provide free dinner to employees. In reality if you took advantage of these "free" dinners you were expected to work late. Likewise I've worked at a couple of places that advertise unlimited vacation days. At all of my previous jobs in tech I have had 4-5 weeks vacation per year. So naturally I'm assuming that unlimited is at least as good. In other words taking 5 weeks off over the year shouldn't be a problem at all. Bzzzzt! Wrong. Likewise many companies say they offer great career progression and training and very few deliver. It is false advertising. Plain and simple. Actual free dinner is easily worth $5k/year to me. The ability to take extra vacation days here and there when I feel I need a break is easily worth $10k/year to me. A serious focus on career progression and a focus on training is worth another $10k/year to me. Naive sheepmullet used to get tricked into giving up $15k in salary thinking he was going to get $25k in benefits (that only cost the company $5k) and everybody would win. Jaded sheepmullet realises there is a huge asterisk next to most of these benefits and refuses to compromise on salary unless the benefits are written into his contract. For example I'd love to take a lower salary for a job that offered serious training and skills development. Lets write into my contract that you will provide me 20 days off work for self-study + 100 hours of 1 on 1 mentoring by my manager + a conference budget + a 10% pay increase at the end of each year.