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Comment by kevinmchugh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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