I agree about Zynga having the wrong model, but I do not think the things you mentioned are wasteful (other than repainting the dog). I do not know why people a

I agree about Zynga having the wrong model, but I do not think the things you mentioned are wasteful (other than repainting the dog). I do not know why people always assume that treating your employees well is some type of waste. Think about this -- how much does a competent IT person cost per hour? How much does an engineer cost per hour? Some engineers cost up to $100 per hour once you add all the incentives and incidental costs. Now what happens when an engineer has a broken keyboard in an old fashioned "frugal" company? He has to call tech support and he has to wait and he gets the perfect excuse not to do work. Tech support will not show up immediately, because this is a "frugal" company, so they do not have people in tech support just sitting around waiting for someone to get a broken keyboard. Oh no, they are frugal and have their support people's schedules full, which means that $100 an hour engineer gets to wait a couple of hours till the support person comes. But in "wasteful" Zynga, that same engineer can go and replace his own keyboard for 5 minutes. That office supply vebding machine seems like a brilliant idea to me. Of course it is a vending machine, so it presumably keeps track of who takes what, so nobody can just take a bunch of stuff and resell it on the street. The thing about the organic chips is a great idea too. It takes so much longer for anybody to go somewhere and buy something. And if a programmer goes out of the office he loses context, which means it may take him another hour to soak up the context of everything he was doing. Oh and if you eat unhealthy food or drink sugary drinks you can easily spend an entire afternoon in food/sugar coma. Of course one should not waste food regardless of how much they paid for this, but that can be solved by social measures. I do not know why investors get their hearts warmed up by the suffering of their companies' employees but this is usually very counterproductive. Google is very successful and is famous for their perks. Outsiders make fun of them, but Google management knows better. The better the perks, the more likely your valuable employees will stay in the office, avoid distractions and get more work done.