[stefco_]

> But as we grow in size, we also plan to grow in the diversity of our perspectives and backgrounds — which is even more reason not to add a bunch of extraneous or overly specific perks. Especially as our team diversifies, we can’t (and shouldn’t) strive to have a one-size-fits-all office or benefits package.

This is a great point about bringing in diverse hires. If you optimize your perks to appeal to you, then you're likely to bring in people with the same interests as you, and there are often strong correlations between interests and demographics. I would certainly rather work somewhere with neutral-seeming perks than a place where everyone was bonding over a bunch of perks I couldn't care less about.

One of my friends is in an office environment where they play Quake III for an hour a day. This perk is actually a mandatory bonding session. I love Quake III, but he doesn't, and he feels like it's both a waste of time and a reinforcement of a specific type of company culture that he doesn't really relate to. He doesn't really mind it, but he has specifically listed it as one of the reasons he is considering finding another job.

Having a more typically "professional" office setting, combined with some more flexible perks (like flex funds for wellness), strikes me as a good way to avoid filtering people out and inadvertently selecting for an overly specific company culture.

In particular, if you're worried that hackers who fall outside of the white/male/straight/cis gendered hacker stereotype are not coming to your company in sufficient numbers, you want to avoid sending implicit signals that your company is only into things that seem to appeal to this stereotype. Perks are one source of those implicit signals.

[djhworld]

> One of my friends is in an office environment where they play Quake III for an hour a day. This perk is actually a mandatory bonding session

I've been a gamer for most of my life, but this would horrify me as a perk as it's completely exclusionary (which backs up your point)

Imagine being the employee that doesn't play games, it's like mandatory doing office sports

[greenyoda]

"Imagine being the employee that doesn't play games..."

Even worse, imagine being the employee who is a veteran with PTSD, or the employee who was a refugee from a war zone like Bosnia who associates the sound of gunfire with their parents being killed.

[stefco_]

Yeah, exactly. And gaming in particular definitely has a lot of the same demographic skewing that SV is trying to move past, so things like this don't help with those efforts.

[lewiscollard]

> Having a more typically "professional" office setting, combined with some more flexible perks (like flex funds for wellness), strikes me as a good way to avoid filtering people out and inadvertently selecting for an overly specific company culture.

This is an extraordinarily good insight.

> I love Quake III, but he doesn't, and he feels like it's both a waste of time and a reinforcement of a specific type of company culture that he doesn't really relate to.

Even if I did love Quake III proper (hey I am prone to OpenArena from time to time :)) I could not imagine anything that would force me to hate any given thing more than doing it as part of Mandatory Fun Time.