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I can understand Silicon Valley deciding to offer these services. The "free services" are designed to keep you at your desk working longer. You don't need to r

I can understand Silicon Valley deciding to offer these services. The "free services" are designed to keep you at your desk working longer. You don't need to rush out and waste part of the day if you have an intense craving for a certain type of food or need to get a haircut or do laundry. And a lot of great developers are young, fresh out of university, and the only thing they know in life is either having parents or a campus provide everything they need in life and living a semi-managed existence. Offering everything to developers is just a natural extension of that lifestyle. But I'd respect a company far more that just paid you over the market rate, didn't shell out as a company for extra services, and let you use your own money to decide what services you needed to manage your own life. As far as the office toys go (video games, pool tables, etc) there are very few times I've seen them used in any office outside of a planned holiday or office party. That said, I like some of that stuff as a decoration even if it's rarely used. It reminds me that there's more to life than just working.

shagie 5y ago
> But I'd respect a company far more that just paid you over the market rate, didn't shell out as a company for extra services, and let you use your own money to decide what services you needed to manage your own life. As a programmer, our job is to make decisions all the time - how to design the software. That leads to decision fatigue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ). One part of that is "if people are making choices that aren't important to work, they're less productive at work." Here's a decision to make - what do you have for breakfast? Where do you go for lunch? And so on... Granted, these are trivial decisions to make - but they're decisions none the less. What if... the company could give you catered breakfasts and lunches? Or even to the point of back in the dot com boom I recall tales of a big tech company that even allowed you to set the billing address for things like rent and the like and it would be a payroll deduction with the company handling it for you. Those extra services are certainly there to entice and ensnare people who don't make those decisions themselves... but they're also there to try to improve productivity.

shagie 5y ago

> But I'd respect a company far more that just paid you over the market rate, didn't shell out as a company for extra services, and let you use your own money to decide what services you needed to manage your own life. As a programmer, our job is to make decisions all the time - how to design the software. That leads to decision fatigue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue ). One part of that is "if people are making choices that aren't important to work, they're less productive at work." Here's a decision to make - what do you have for breakfast? Where do you go for lunch? And so on... Granted, these are trivial decisions to make - but they're decisions none the less. What if... the company could give you catered breakfasts and lunches? Or even to the point of back in the dot com boom I recall tales of a big tech company that even allowed you to set the billing address for things like rent and the like and it would be a payroll deduction with the company handling it for you. Those extra services are certainly there to entice and ensnare people who don't make those decisions themselves... but they're also there to try to improve productivity.