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Proscribed fun is hard. I can think of about 20 great engineers who would be turned off by a scotch library and free trips to the driving range (is it software
by rdouble 15y ago
Proscribed fun is hard. I can think of about 20 great engineers who would be turned off by a scotch library and free trips to the driving range (is it software for country clubs?) Substitute any of foosball, ping-pong, beer kegs, red-bull, razor scooters and whatnot. You're only going to please half the people, half the time, and probably the wrong people, because who really ever liked razor scooters and nerf guns, anyway?
Career and skill development is a perk that is really overlooked. It's a start to offer unlimited Amazon books. However, companies could go much further and offer seminars and full blown courses. It doesn't even have to be expensive corporate training. You could pay a grad student to teach a full blown machine learning course for less than half the cost of a weekend long training seminar.
- tptacek 15y agoWe would generally be happy to consider sending people to a class. But I don't think we're too different from a lot of companies with HN presences in that we're staffed mostly with people who enjoy figuring things out for themselves. It's hard for me to think of a class that's so clearly valuable to our team that it would make sense sending people to. One thing we try to do is to run internal classes. We had one on C programming that I need to get back up and running; we have a long-running one with cryptography. Businesses routinely do the equivalent of paying a grad student to teach machine learning; they just don't call it that. In the real world that's called consulting.