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Comment by mahyarm | Hacker News Reader

The SV jobs comes with perks that eliminate cooking, doing housework and so on. All 3 meals at work, having a laundry machine and a maid every 2 or 4 weeks plus some really basic clean up is plenty enough to keep your house cleaner than the average american. Also avoid commuting by living close to work. You also integrate fitness into your workday during lunch and so on.

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But I don't want to build my entire lifestyle around my job; it should be the other way around. What if I like cooking and eating homemade food? What if relocating to an apartment close to work isn't an option? I get that you have to make compromises, but I would much rather compromise on my job and enjoy the rest of my life than have a great job but compromise on everything else. This is exactly the kind of attitude that pushed me towards contract work instead of fulltime employment.

"But I don't want to build my entire lifestyle around my job; it should be the other way around. What if I like cooking and eating homemade food? What if relocating to an apartment close to work isn't an option? I get that you have to make compromises, but I would much rather compromise on my job and enjoy the rest of my life than have a great job but compromise on everything else."

Amen. I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks it's crazy that we as a society think it's normal to spend almost all our time chasing money.

I think there are a lot of programming jobs that don't provide every meal free and any sort of housecleaning service. In fact, country-wide, I'd say the majority provide neither of those. I feel like outside of the brand-new-startup-with-no-revenue scene, 40-45 hour work weeks are also the norm by far.

Those perks tend to be concentrated in the Bay Area, where they are worth more than elsewhere since people there tend to spend a vast portion of their income on housing.

True, but even elsewhere (I live in Portland, OR), I'm starting to feel the "hussle" attitude infecting startups. I think it has a lot to do with investments: startups with a lot of cash are more likely to overhire and overwork their developers (in exchange for great pay), whereas bootstrapped startups that have less cash can't afford to pay huge salaries, so they instead need to make their company appealing by providing a better work schedule, etc. I don't know that there's a causal relationship there, but it's just an observation I've noticed.

Might work if you don't have a family. All three meals at work? What better way to set up a freeway to divorce for any potential employees who are married?

The life insurance policy protects against divorce.

Hah. That's a good one. It's good when someone else has a dark sense of humor too.

You don't have to have the meals, many people leave by 5pm and some people bring the dinners with them when they leave at 5pm!

But for people who don't want to spend the 2hrs/day total in decent food prep & cooking, it's there for them. Maid service and such is something you usually pay out of pocket, most of the times it's just meals & a gym.

Makes you wonder WHY Facebook is building their own city, or employers provide these types of perks.

This is nothing new, it's probably THE innovation of American industrial capitalism. Mirrors precisely what happened during the steel and then auto manufacturing booms: deliberate company towns.

And the following comes to mind:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store

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