Now for a rant. I know perks are suppose to help make companies attractive to potential employees they are trying to woo and boost morale. But I think it's crazy when I see the perks we get, while at the same time have to go begging for a mobile device to test on.
Contrast this with perks. When Google starting giving all their employees free food, it only cost them $100/week/employee, but everyone talked about it, and how awesome Google's perks are. The amount of positive PR and word-of-mouth that they got out of it, far dwarfed any efficiency improvements they might have gotten by simply giving their employees a slightly higher salary.
1. The company can depreciate capital expenditures and deduct their costs from income whereas the employees would not reduce their taxes by doing a kitchen upgrade or going grocery shopping
2. The employees will spend more time at work because the kitchen with free prepared food is there instead of at a restaurant or their house so it technically doesn't even need to break even to be advantageous for the company
2. In theory this is correct, are there any studies that actually show productivity gains for companies in this respect? (I think the real reason for this is because a lot of the valley companies are in the middle of nowhere and therefore it's not really feasible for employees to go looking for food). I recently visited the HQ of my company in Silicon Valley and I was not impressed by how far it was from everything else.
So you get an open bar on Friday and massages. Wow. Awesome!
My guess is that for just about any tech software startup the only really meaningful cost is salaries. In a pie chart, it would dwarf everything else. Even lease costs for an extravagant office would be minuscule in comparison.