[freddie_mercury]

My point wasn't really about whether things are cheap or not. My point is that the post I replied to came across as typical developer "every other job in the world except mine is easy" that you constantly see in HackerNews.

"You don't need metrics - just a suggestion box." Implied: managing the comforts for humans in an office is easy! (So easy that places like Facebook and Google have entire Experience Teams dedicated to it....)

In the real world it is always more complicated. There are always tradeoffs -- if you put in couches then maybe there's no room for quiet pods or a PlayStation or a lunch room or whatever. Always have on-going maintenance costs (who orders & pays for the fruit when the office admin is on holiday? Yet another thing to always remember and have to handover), and just the mind space required to deal with things. How do you know the office manager isn't picking the most expensive option every time? How do you know you're serving the vast majority who won't put something in the suggestion box? Etc.

[speedplane]

How about something even more basic and central: your manager/boss/CEO has to balance challenging you to push the boundaries of what you can do without making you hate him and/or the company or burning you out.

Motivating someone to the near peak of their ability is generally the goal, but it's not easy... quite a bit harder than figuring out where to put the couch.