[bane]

You can't. If you create a dynamic work environment with a constant influx of interesting problems to deal with, you lose the 8-by-5 solid employees with families you make up the framework of lots of successful companies. If you optimize for them, you can't get the spotlight rangers looking for hot problems to work on and recognition to go along with it.

If you cater meals, some employees will want to skip out and take the salary bump instead, others don't mind losing out on pay for free weekly massages.

Free beer? Non-drinkers feel left out. Game room? non-gamers hate it. Ping-pong, foosball, pool tables, free gym? You'll find somebody who it alienates.

You have to pick what you want your company to be and commit to it. Where would you want to work? Build that. You'll find the right people to populate it, but try to keep it open to diversity of styles and ideas.

Your best employee will probably be somebody completely different than you.

[hueving]

>If you cater meals, some employees will want to skip out and take the salary bump instead, others don't mind losing out on pay for free weekly massages.

This is a false dichotomy. If a company is so broke that offering a few free meals will impact their salary pool, they aren't going to offer the free meals at all. Anecdotally, every company I've worked at that offered free lunch paid more than any of the companies that didn't offer free meals.

[bane]

I'll still trade you 3 "free" meals a day for that money into my salary. I can use that money better, and it's a stronger negotiating point for me at my next job (while total compensation package is not).

[hueving]

The point is that it doesn't work like that. You could make the same argument about all of your office supplies, computers, and office space. "I'll take the extra bump of salary rather than you paying for the office space I will occupy." "Fire the administrative assistant, give us the extra salary, and rotate us all through phone/email/mail company correspondence duty."

They are perks designed to make working there more pleasant and efficient (if you eat there your lunch commute is gone and you are likely to converse with coworkers). They have nothing to do with your compensation.

[bane]

> You could make the same argument about all of your office supplies, computers, and office space.

No you can't. You can't make the argument because one set of things is strictly needed for you to do your job, the other is not.

[cli]

>If you create a dynamic work environment with a constant influx of interesting problems to deal with, you lose the 8-by-5 solid employees with families you make up the framework of lots of successful companies.

I have no experience with these things. Why would this be the case? Is it because "a dynamic work environment with a constant influx of interesting problems to deal with" implies longer work hours?

[bane]

Lots of very solid, very good employees don't want to be rockstar programmers. They want you to define a desired end-state, give them a due date in a few months and leave them to solve it within the bounds of their regular job hours.

If you think of an orchestra, it's like all the nameless people in the violin section vs. soloist. Optimizing for rockstars is like optimizing for soloists and that rarely works well.

They're your steady soldiers, getting the job done at the pace you set. They can be used to set organizational tempo, long-term goals, etc. They're the ones who will work for your company for 10 years and not complain too much.

But they also recognize that they're working to live, not living to work. Lots of startups want their employees to be obsesses with their work, they want all the employees to do things together, live together, marry each other, they want them to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner together.

Lots of employees find that a huge turnoff, because frankly, they have better lives than what any startup can offer.