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Comment by 7Figures2Commas | Hacker News Reader

> At Hotel Tonight, which offers a mobile app for last-minute hotel bookings, CEO Sam Shank described staging the office to appear extra lively for a prospective hire. He roped in two employees for a game of ping-pong and positioned another group right by the bar...It worked: the recruit signed on and built a key piece of the company's software.

I don't know what's more disturbing:

1. That seeing employees playing ping pong and sitting at a bar would mean anything at all to a highly-sought after and ostensibly experienced candidate.

2. That CEOs apparently believe these things can convince the most desirable candidates to join their companies.

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3. that these supposed perks are so fake that the CEO has to stage employees using them.

I've worked at companies that looked "hip" by having ping pong tables and playstations/xboxs. In practice almost nobody used them as it would look like they're slacking rather than working. It was nothing but a sham, trying to make these places look less like what they actually are.

You'd be surprised. We humans are highly emotional creatures. Assuming that the top companies are all offering similar compensation packages one place can just 'feel right' based on things like these and make someone decide to choose the place without even consciously realizing it.

And they would be disappointed to find out they have been misled, as the scene was staged for them rather than representative everyday activity.

3. That the market for engineers in SV is so ludicrously overheated that CEO's feel the need to go to these lengths.

It's nuts. Get people elsewhere. Thousands of engineers across the country (or planet) would jump at the chance to work remotely for half an SV salary.

This is actually quite common for loads of companies. I worked in a startup that made the developers have a pretend meeting so we looked like "we worked together", I've worked in agencies where we spent hours of dev time setting up cable tidies around the office to look "professional" to a corporate client. In fact, I've seen these kind of faked interactions at every company I've ever worked at. I've laughed at them a number of times, and I'm not convinced that they actually work, but I've seen a lot of smart devs and business-savvy owners pull this shit, so it must have worked somewhere, right?

Anecdotally I've seen more well established companies looking for investment move entire floors of people into another floor for 6-7 hours to give the appearance of busy hardworking w/e

I remember that we didn't even plug the phones in.

these people were being paid £55k (a lot) each, to basically look pretty.

seems like a massive waste of man hours to me- but, I suppose I'm a sysadmin not a sales/CEO

a company that looks like it has a good, lively culture is way more attractive than one that does not. this seems obvious, no? clearly there was more to the interview than just pointing to a ping pong game and a bar-- the visible (albeit, staged) culture was just icing on the cake.

Well, not really. I've interviewed at a bunch of places with different cultures; however, what I see on that day is not what I think will happen in the future.

I've worked and interviewed at plenty of companies that put on the best front. Just like that ping-pong thing and similar equivalents. But as soon as I started working at these places, I realized that it's not like that and I've learned to ignore it over the years.

The "lively" culture is most likely a product of the upswing that justified the hiring. Meaning that a week later, everyone will be just as shut off as at any other company.

Based on my recruiter emails, every company wants to be appear to be the most fun place to work ever

while I'm working on exciting challenges, of course

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