First they took free tea and coffee in the office (http://www.rediff.com/money/2009/apr/15bcrisis-no-more-free-...) now they are taking away WFH.
There are fewer and fewer incentives to work for IBM.
There are fewer and fewer incentives to work for IBM.
This is an argument of all things being equal. If IBM and Microsoft offer me the same package for the same job, but Microsoft offers me free coffee, I'll probably take the coffee.
If a company is going to nickel and dime you, charge you $0.25 for a coffee or force you to provide your own... they probably are going to be cheap in other places as well. If they aren't willing to give you coffee or seltzer, they are hardly going to give you good hardware or software - which is something that does affect me.
That being said, that only goes so far. I don't really care about free lunches, or if a company has some game console. I mostly just don't want to work for a company that is going to nickel and dime me because it means they're cheapskates.
Free coffee isn't really in the same realm. The most enterprisey places I've ever worked have still offered it, not because they felt like being sweethearts, but because it makes hard economic sense - people will drink coffee, and at modern professional salaries, having them spend their paid time dealing directly with all the ancillaries around it is quite literally more expensive than just buying coffee and maintaining the equipment involved. Dropping it is thus penny wise, pound foolish.
My first job after college was in a small company (now they call them startups) that had 5 people. We worked in an old building, had low end equipment, but we had free coffee and tea (and water).
It costs them next to nothing to have that basic "benefits", yearly it is probably much less then a single travel of any of their chief officers.
If they are so cheap, then they probably won't give you big money for your work (small pay increases, or none) also, for me it is a big warning sign: GET OUT.
Don't know when they started giving away coffee, but it was tried for some years and then stopped apparently. Like remote working.