Afaik you can have a 30 min session every month for free. Over here it's not that unusual of a perk to have even for non-IT desk jockey jobs.
I felt it's a cheap way to keep neck issues at bay, benefiting everyone. Seems pointless to label it as something extravagant.
This is a generalisation but it's what it seems like when you have these people posting 'day in the life of twitter' 'day in the life as a google yelp elitist', etc. Where it seems like majority of the day is spent pampering oneself than actually working.
We hear about these US jobs with perks, 200k salaries, shares, benefits bumping packages to like 500k etc, while outside of the US (atleast for me) we work hard for our salaries which pale in comparison.
It's the payoff for keeping the money printing machine running.
In WAT, prior to 2016? or so? we used to get a yearly surprise steak and lobster meal around the holidays. The date was never announced in advance, but one day in December you'd show up and there'd be fresh lobster and steak and fixings. Fantastic :-)
And even if someone manage to share their actual work you likely will never see it because it's not something that goes viral.
Its just a way to pay people in things that aren't money. After a certain point more $$$ becomes meaningless to most people (its just a number at some point) and these types of perks give more bank for their buck in attracting workers than upping salaries.
Is there really a shortage of people wanting to work at these big companies regardless of perks tho?
Also 'base' compensation at Google was never that high when I was there. It was the RSUs that made it a very prosperous place to work. And those take a few years to vest and get you up into Really Good Money territory. So in the meantime, perks are key in retention.
But the key point is that Google is just swimming in stupid amounts of $$ from ad revenues. Not spending good $$ on employee retention and compensation would actually have deleterious effects on morale. Most jobs are just slinging protobufs around and keeping those $$ systems up and running-- but those systems are important to Google.
People saying Google is irresponsible with money probably haven't looked at the balance sheet. They can spend boatloads on compensation and still make more money than almost any other company.
I would not take those videos of representative of an actual “day in the life”. They obviously don’t include any actual working, as it would violate non disclosure agreements.
I've been seeing this comment a lot in the last year as the TikTok tech-worker influencers started making waves, and I've struggled to understand it.
There are even videos where non-monetary perks aren't shown, it's just the tech worker in their nice apartment using nice things they buy, and people still lose their minds thinking "this person doesn't work". Do you need to see an 8 hour long video of them at their desk? Their commutes, too?
I think we're still in the transition period where there's enormous groups of people who don't understand how social media works. Reminds me of that apocryphal story of the theater audience screaming in terror when they saw a train moving towards the camera.
The other was a Google girl who was part of the layoffs and she posted about going into the office and having breakfast and then going to these rooms to listen to music etc.
And so I wonder what these people’s roles actually are?!?
And/Or some people just really get off on being outraged/indignant.
awesome fact: some time in the late 2000s after years of trying, the masseuses were converted from contract to full-time, complete w/benefits and all the perks of being a real 'googler'! :)
don't know if that's still the case, but it was kinda awesome that the masseuses fought for this and won.