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> these types of perks give more bank for their buck in attracting workers than upping salaries. Is there really a shortage of people wanting to work at these

• cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Compensation at Google went up over the years. A lot of the serious perks were put in in the early days when Google was a much smaller company scrambling to try to get the brightest people it could. Honestly most of us who came later were merely riding the coat-tails of that era. Also 'base' compensation at Google was never that high when I was there. It was the RSUs that made it a very prosperous place to work. And those take a few years to vest and get you up into Really Good Money territory. So in the meantime, perks are key in retention. But the key point is that Google is just swimming in stupid amounts of $$ from ad revenues. Not spending good $$ on employee retention and compensation would actually have deleterious effects on morale. Most jobs are just slinging protobufs around and keeping those $$ systems up and running-- but those systems are important to Google. People saying Google is irresponsible with money probably haven't looked at the balance sheet. They can spend boatloads on compensation and still make more money than almost any other company.