[fragmede]

If your tech company sees IT as a cost center, then you're not working for a "Tech" company as described in the article. The mythical, utopian "Tech" company the writer wanted to be at is built on top of gossip about the perks of working for Facebook and Google, where free lunch (M-F) is assumed, so the question is what are the breakfast specials and dinner options? How many free Uber credits do I get per month? When is massage-day?

IT for this kind of "Tech" company is not a cost center. There's a closet or a vending machine chock full of Apple magic keyboards and magic trackpads at ~$100 a pop, plus all the USB-C adapters that you could want (because everyone new gets a touchbar mac).

The attitude is that it's not worth anybody's time to sit there to dispense $100 keyboards or mice, and that promotes the feeling that the company just... trusts everybody there. However, it's undoubtedly more expensive to stock Apple mice and keyboards that way, than it would be to have much cheaper wired alternatives and a minimum wage worker to gatekeep - at least in terms of IT's balance sheet. However, if any employee has to taking an hour off working, to replace their mouse (starting with filing a ticket with IT), the company has lost more than the cost of basically giving away $100 keyboards in productivity.