[drakonka]

While it is possible to put up with a lot and still churn out work, many tech companies nowadays try to make their office and facilities a perk of the job. "Look how cool our office is. We have twenty coffee machines on each floor, a massive beautiful kitchen and bar, meeting rooms with couches! A game room. Come work for us!"

Companies that treat their office as a selling point for employees should expect to be criticised when that selling point falls short in the most important area of all - where the people they are trying to attract actually sit and work all day.

[VLM]

My advice for young devs is to pay very close attention at interview time to who's using those perks.

Ah nice k-cup machine collection but no k-cups have to bring those from home. Nice bar with beer keg tap, pity its a firing offense to drink on the job and that kegger is only for sales execs to woo customers. Nice couches in the meeting rooms, those managers and directors sitting in meetings sure look comfortable sitting there. I worked at a place with a genuine foozball table and getting caught playing foozball was a euphemism for getting downsized the next quarter, the thing seriously had dust on it like it was cursed. Maybe it was. All of that stuff is supposed to be for the trendy software dev, but its not.

Its sort of the democratization of the executive washroom. We no longer have solid marble and gold plated toilets for the executive washroom, that's so last century, today we have couches that only director level and above can sit on during meetings and kegerators that only customers can drink out of and foozball tables that no one uses. Looks nice though, doesn't it?