Xoogler here; this information is circa 2015. The infamous perks are low-order bits for personal productivity. For example, on-site food is nice, but making it

Xoogler here; this information is circa 2015. The infamous perks are low-order bits for personal productivity. For example, on-site food is nice, but making it free actually hurts productivity: larger crowds so you spend more time waiting, you are more likely to travel between different cafes just to sample things, etc. However company-wide these are much more valuable because they improve recruiting and especially retention. Nothing hurts productivity like employee turnover! This is why they are a smart investment for the company. As for personal productivity, these were the biggest perks: 1. The shuttle. This gave me effectively two additional hours working instead of driving. 2. Fast hardware. I had a 64 GB Mac Pro, plus laptops and dev servers. Sweet! But there were also "anti-perks" that hurt my productivity: 1. Cramped and ghastly loud open office (building 40). It was difficult to focus. 2. Insufficient physical space. My job required wiring up a lot of PCBs and prototype hardware, but I had the same desk as someone just writing code. I had to "swap" my physical setups. 3. Highly distributed team. Having key team members in Asia meant ~16 hour cycle time for questions, code review, etc. (Plus expect to spend a portion of each meeting fighting with VC.) However if we take productivity as literally "producing valuable things" and not false metrics like LOC or bug fix count, then IMO these were the highest company-wide productivity killers: 1. Leadership churn, leading to project churn and cancellation. Not the healthy reevaluation of underperforming projects, but rather arbitrary "make a mark" changes associated with new directors/VPs. 2. Performance review over-weighting "creating something new" leading to unnecessary duplication. A Googler who creates a (say) new build system excels the one who adapts an existing build system. This is visible all the way to the product level, e.g. their many chat apps.