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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

I come to work to work - it's not for the fun perks - the perk is being paid. That's the one perk that keeps me working. Do I think having "fun" takes away from that work? No. But I don't particularly care - I'm a professional, doing professional work, and if I could get 4 walls and silence, I'd happily light the ice cream machine on fire myself. If you want to collaborate, sure, do that - go to a meeting room, or meet in your own pod, and if you really want that open office charm, go work in the lunch room.

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FAANG style employees get the best salaries in the world AND the best perks in the world. What exactly is the tradeoff here, if salaries is all you care about? Also, if all companies in the bay area moved to giving each employee an office, where do you think that money is coming from? It will cause depression in salaries.

Open offices work in favor of your salary. And despite the weekly posts on HN about open offices, hardly any employee uses it as a bargaining chip. Microsoft has open offices, and yet not once I have heard anyone on HN saying they would chose MS because of that.

> I am glad that open offices let companies give nice perks to employees even in extremely expensive real-estate markets like the valley. I would rather have a well-equipped onsite gym and a roomy cafeteria and a free ice-cream shop than that space being filled with 100 'offices'.

You're saying companies trade out having open offices for perks. I'm saying I don't care about those perks, and would rather have less perks and 4 walls.

It feels like we're being astroturfed by SV recruiters. It blows my mind when I see people playing ping pong, pool, and arcade games at work. Why would anyone spend an hour or more playing games in the office rather than just getting their work done and leaving to spend time with family, friends, pets, or hobbies?

Different strokes for different folks? If you want inclusivity for people with kids, can you not offer the same courtesy to people without families?

Our team has some middle-aged people who do a strict a 9 to 5 and that is perfectly fine. We never expect them to stay around for board games or whatever.

But that doesn't mean the rest of us can't hang out with our colleagues.

> Why would anyone spend an hour or more playing games in the office rather than just getting their work done and leaving to spend time with family, friends, pets, or hobbies?

I worked for a SV company with a ping pong table, video games, board games etc.

If you don't participate you're seen as "not a team player"... It's the same with lunches etc. They want you at the office as much as they can get/keep you there, and now they're doing their best to create "inclusive social environments".

It creates an "in" and an "out" crowd, and if someone decides you haven't hit your monthly Go Karting/drinking event/fancy dinner quotas you're the office outcast. Managers love this because it's all under the guise of "family" or "team building" etc. and it gives them a totally arbitrary metric to nickle and dime someone on.

> If you don't participate you're seen as "not a team player"

In other words, it turns what should be a recreational activity into a job requirement? While I haven't experienced that myself (but then, I don't work in SV), if I did, it would make me actively angry to have a job requirement that did nothing but take away from accomplishing what I was hired to accomplish.

Silicon valley (especially to start up ecosystem) is a meat grinder, and the meat it runs on is single new grads who are willing to work for peanuts, while only being able to afford to live in a one-bedroom flat with three roommates.

Family does not play into this picture.

> What exactly is the tradeoff here, if salaries is all you care about?

All the non-FAANG companies copy the trend of open offices (it's a cargo cult), so if you want to look at it from an utilitarian perspective, more people are actually worse off.

>...Open offices work in favor of your salary.

That is not how it works with highly profitable companies like FB, The extra cost to give people some privacy and allow them to less distracted is a tiny percent of the costs to pay the employee salaries + benefits over time. This is not a tradeoff. (Indeed, since people have been shown to be less productive in a distracted environment, employee salaries might be less than what they would be than if they were more productive.)

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