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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

Altho the massage therapists were hardly used by alot of people and maybe that's due to them being booked out or difficult to obtain bookings. I still think Google/Facebook/Twitter are just giant daycare centers for adult babies.

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.

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> I still think Google/Facebook/Twitter are just giant daycare centers for adult babies

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.

> 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?

Compensation at Google went up over the years. A lot of the serious perks were put in in the early days when Google was a much smaller company scrambling to try to get the brightest people it could. Honestly most of us who came later were merely riding the coat-tails of that era.

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.

If you're talking about TikTok videos, those are recruitment tools and I don't expect they're representative.

Yeah some of them were TikTok. I don't know if it's gloating or recruitment tools, I'm just observing as a non-US person that's never seen perks even remotely similar.

Social media is played up like reality TV. Perks are good but working at a faang is 90% just work, like anywhere else.

What is the other 10% that we do?

Posting on social media

The best perk at Google was the food. That, and the great $$. All the other stuff is mostly just window-dressing.

It's the payoff for keeping the money printing machine running.

For sure. Frankly even food I didn't care much for. But sure. 401k and health care were the only must haves for me. People keep saying $$ but it was largely dependent on the quality of counter offers and refreshers were pretty average.

Food was worse in MTV than in some other offices. I worked out of WAT and our food was pretty fantastic for years, and NYC and TOR were even better when I visited. MTV had a lot more variety but nothing stellar from what I experienced. Smaller sites could do fancier stuff with their budget because less people.

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 :-)

Even if it's not a recruitment tool, you won't see people sharing them actually working because: 1) it's boring; 2) they don't want to risk sharing something confidential.

And even if someone manage to share their actual work you likely will never see it because it's not something that goes viral.

Most Americans never see perks like that, I don't. But most Americans don't work for companies that make buckets and buckets of cash per employee.

> 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

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.

I haven’t seen any of their apartments. I’ve only seen the ones at the office. The tiktok girl about Twitter and she spent most of the morning being lazy then having a meeting in a pod then being lazy.

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?!?

> I think we're still in the transition period where there's enormous groups of people who don't understand how social media works.

And/Or some people just really get off on being outraged/indignant.

> it seems like majority of the day is spent pampering oneself than actually working

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.

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