How startups can compete with big company perks

- Close the company. Maybe your company just isn't open for two weeks in December or nobody has to work on Fridays during the summer. Nobody feels like they're falling behind and everybody gets a break from each other.

- REALLY flexible working arrangements. There was a story on HN about a small broadcaster that allowed an employee to go surfing whenever the waves were really great. Maybe somebody is really into Phish and gets a day off every time Phish plays a show within 500 miles or gets time off to go to March Madness if their favorite team gets in.

-Real choice in offices. Small companies often move several times in their early history. Look for opportunities to involve employees in office decision-making and let them arrange and decorate their own work areas.

-Real support of their outside lives. This one is two-fold: 1) make sure your employees have time to have lives outside of work, and 2) support those activities. Sponsor the your employee's kid's boy scout troop or let your employees use the office for gaming after hours. (Don't be creepy about it if they don't want company involvement, though.)

Here's my current running list of what I do for my employees:

1) Fully-specced new laptop every 2 years. Our CTO just specced a nearly-$3,000 Linux laptop from System76. My assistant and I have Macbook Pros.

2) Full coverage health care 100% paid for by the company, including dependents.

3) Free cell phone; we pick as a team. Currently we are all on Galaxy S4s from T-Mobile. I also gave a paid-by-the-company phone to my CTO's wife (she's helped us out around the office quite a bit as well!)

4) Company will pay your Internet bill at home (within reason; most of us have $70-$100/mo bills from Time Warner.)

5) High-end monitor + cables to plug your laptop into at the office.

6) Nice chairs. We get Aerons. I have had my most recent batch of Aerons for nearly 7 years and have moved them halfway across the country and they still look new.

7) Standup desk if you prefer (we currently have 3; 2 by Geekdesk and one I bought used from another startup founder--I use the latter one.)

8) Free snacks, drinks, and coffee at our office.

9) For executive staff, a company credit card so you can pay for parking, snacks, etc. if you're out without having to deal with expensing items.

In other words, I get my employees whatever they want and the company can afford, within reason, that takes the burden out of them having to pay out of pocket or go without the latest technology.

I'm always willing to add more to this list, but it has to be because my employees want and would use it.

Edit: to be clear, I'm referring to the perks in the article, not in the comments. Most of the comments are great.

I really don't care to eat catered food, or dry cleaning, game rooms or free massages or half a dozen other perks that startups are known for. If they have those things, that's cool, but I know too many places that skimp on salary, vacation days, insurance in favor of "cheap" perks like a twice a month in office masseuse.

At my current place, about 60 people

- individual health insurance is 100% covered.

- matching 401(k) up to 7%

- 20 days of vacation, can carry over 100% of remainder year to year. Some people from the early days have so much accrued that they're taking some well deserved multi-month vacations.

- fairly standard sick leave, I forget what it is, 80 hrs per year I think, doctor appointments taking less than half a day don't count

- 11 holidays, all are floating so we can take them whenever we want (meaning effective vacation days are 31, but you may have to work on a national holiday)

- flexible work schedule.

- free gym membership (a healthy workforce is a productive workforce)

- various public transit benefits that make taking public transit effectively free

Everyone knows (or ought to know) that the value of most of those perks has to be offset against something in the company's budget. (Namely: your paycheck[1]).

(New) startups shouldn't try to compete 1-1 with the handful of already stupendously successful startups on these items.

Far better to offer something the big boys can't: like actual responsibility (the kind that by definition, always comes with the act of taking on substantial risk); real challenge; and an opportunity (and expectation) to not only see, but contribute strategically to the whole picture -- including things like business strategy, shaping the company's hiring & general social culture, etc. Not to mention things like decent office space, lack of bureaucracy that's inevitable in any large organization, etc.

Those are what I call real perks -- not free massages, a treacly beer keg, or mediocre sushi (half price after 4p!)

[1] Actual benefits, like health insurance and paid training, are an entirely different matter of course. In these areas, the employer contribution (at scale) has a decisive leveraging benefit (i.e. generally providing more than what the employer could for herself out of pocket, dollar for dollar). But most of these fashionable "perks" out in startupland have dubious benefit at best -- and most of them I'd happily trade for the (implicit) negative offset in walking around money that goes with them.

1. Research-y projects. Big companies have the resources to place long-term high-risk bets on research projects that will probably fail. Some startups have a single such high-risk bet, but you can't just decide to work on whatever crazy idea you come up with because the company can't really absorb your salary for years if the bet doesn't pay off.

2. Really broad scope. One cool thing about working at a startup was that I could do whatever I wanted as long it was relevant to the startup. In fact, that was the biggest reason I went with a startup just out of school; I would have been some tiny cog on a giant team at a big company (that's not inevitable, but that's what the offers I personally had entailed). But I now have enough credibility that I can go off and do whatever I want at a big company. Since the big company has a much larger scope than a startup, there are many more things I can work on.

3. Resources. At the startup, I could take 100 machines to run an experiment and it wasn't a big deal. If I wanted to use 1000 machines I'd have to get people to ok it because I'd be eat into resources that were necessary for the company's operation. Now, if there's something I'm curious about, I can run a map reduce across the entire internet.

4. Relaxed environment. The vast majority of my team is married with kids, so the office is deserted by 5pm. There are a couple of folks I've seen stay late for a week or two to hit some deadline, but that's like one or two weeks out of the year. The startup was one of the most relaxed startups I've ever seen, but there were still month long crunches of 50+ hours/wk as some emergency came up. In principle, a startup could be as relaxed as a big company, but that's extraordinarily rare. At the big company, one of the most respected people in the office casually remarked to me that he's been at negative available vacation for all but his first two weeks at the company (and he's been here for seven years). At the startup, the most respected people all lost vacation every year because pushed up against the vacation cap.

5. This should really be like 25 or something, since it's not in the same league as the others, but I'm making a lot more money than I was at the startup.

Don't get me wrong -- there are a lot of advantages to being at a startup, and I'm glad I spent a good chunk of my career at one. I'm just saying that there's a lot I'd have to give up to go back to a startup, and the things on that list don't even make the top 30.

What doesn't scale?

- Find out what your employees REALLY like and make it part of the culture. Tofu of the month club. Concert tickets for Mongolian mandolinists. The key is this taps into people's personal identity, and helps the team bond. It is VERY hard for Google to copy things like this.

- Hire much better management. Google can no longer give large chunks of equity to new managers. A small start-up can. Outstanding managers (which are very hard to find, and need to be hunted just like outstanding programmers) will find a way to keep the best employees by challenging them and keeping them engaged with the work.

- More autonomy. A small company can say "Use your judgment on expenses" and "Give it your best guess on new technology" much easier than large companies who have to worry more about cross-organizational consistency.

These are all very hard to copy.

1. I will never again work for a very early stage startup. The equity grant given in exchange for the reduced salary(compared to larger companies) and the long hours are just not worth it.

2. Small perks like helping with chores, catered food, etc don't matter. I'd rather take a break for an hour and eat outside and go home at a normal hour.

3. "Loyalty" and "Commitment" are empty words, companies have none. They do whats in their best interest, you should do the same.

4. Startups more often than not tend to be poorly managed, and it can be frustrating dealing with it.

5. Startups with excessive hierarchy are the worst.

For example, we offer an extremely flexible leave and vacation policy. It's a great benefit because it's good for employees, good for the company, and it doesn't "cost" anything!

Better, are the ones that big companies can't really offer: like being part of something that's rapidly growing and evolving and knowing that you can have a significant impact on the entire company. Personally, I think seeing something I did make a difference is one of the most important factors in job satisfaction.

The other perk I care a lot about is parking. Even better, parking for 2+ cars, so I can leave a car at the office when I don't drive in (public transit or whatever), and stuff like leaving a car at the office if I'm out of town for a week. (company motor pool cars, even if it's just a couple old Suburbans or a Prius or something, would be fine for this too. Or a zipcar or bmwdrivenow site if they're close.)

(the other thing I want is an office, rather than open-plan, and either a secured enough space that I could leave $5k on the desk in cash without worry, or physical security in the form of a serious locking door or office safe; but those are to be productive, so they're not really perks)

None of them can actually build the end product nor work in the medium.

WHY I JOINED

1. Lack of bureaucracy. Granted, I worked at an exceptionally bureaucratic bank, but I longed for a place where I could just do something without having 10 meetings to ask permission from people who weren't qualified to decide if the project was valid or not. Projects that could have taken months took years.

2. Benefits. The startup not only paid 100% of my health insurance premium, they offered great insurance. That's a big deal in the USA. I had a child who had a hospital stay. It cost me $100 out of pocket and would have cost tens of thousands otherwise. It was like having thousands of dollars added to my salary.

3. Relocation. They paid for movers to pack and ship my goods directly. I didn't have to mess with reimbursement or advances. If you're looking to get the best you can find from across the country, this can be a big deal.

3. A new language/challenge. I had started writing code in Python and loved it. It was a refreshing change.

4. Smart people. I can honestly say that the startup I worked for had the smartest staff of any place I've worked. It was intimidating at times, but I learned a lot in a very short period of time. I ended up touching a lot of parts of the system that I didn't have much experience with and it was a huge learning experience that will benefit me for the rest of my career.

5. Great hardware. I felt like I finally had enough horsepower on my development machine to actually do my job. The default was a well-equipped Mac, but other developers could choose what they needed.

6. A great location. This is less important, but was an attention-getter when they made me their initial pitch. Santa Monica, across the street from the beach/pier. I'm not sure how it could have gotten better.

WHAT DIDN'T MATTER

1. The salary. I actually took a pay cut if you factor in the cost of living. I don't regret that decision.

2. Foosball table. Some people liked playing on a break during some very long hours, but I honestly just didn't get it.

2. Free food. They went all-out with the snacks and didn't hesitate to order-in food on our frequent late-nighters. I got fat.

WHY I LEFT

1. The hours got way out of control. I knew there would be overtime, but it became far beyond what I could sustain. The startup went through a tight spot and we all pitched in to rebuild the site three times in less than a year. I've heard that the hours have leveled off and sometimes wonder if I shouldn't have stayed.

TL;DR: Hire the best, give them the tools and environment to get their job done. Make relocation a no-brainer and health insurance (in the US, at least) best-in-class. Make salary competitive, but don't get in a bidding war with other companies. Offer the best location you can, and above all, don't burn people out.

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But even when I was in my late 20's during .com bubble #1 (~1996-2002), I just wanted to be paid a decent wage for my skill set, I wasn't interested in "equity", "perks" and all that nonsense. I just wanted to bank money.

At the time I worked in Edinburgh, next to nice bars and decent food outlets. Yes there was partying and fun (but we also worked hard 12-15 hours a day), but it was on our time, and our dollar (or pound), and when we chose how to party and how much to spend doing that, it wasn't the startup's time and money or their idea of "fun", it was our hard earned cash, we spent it how we wanted (or not).

I hated that artificial...."startup fun" with pool tables, free drinks, meals etc. At lunchtime I (and my teams) wanted to go for a pint, eat a lunch that wasn't decided by the company, and you know, have free-will, and free conversation, outside of the constraints of the startup lunch room, where the founders were lurking all the time, listening in.

I didn't (and still don't) care about perks like laundry, or housecleaning, or in-house meals, healthcare, etc, just pay me properly and let me decide on these things. I'm (and was already back then) a grown up. I am able to make a sandwich for myself, I can wash my own clothes, and hoover and dust my own flat, when or if I wanted to.

I like, and have always liked, doing housework once a week (even in my early 20's!), I turn on BBC Radio 4 and listen to catchup radio (Any Questions, Westminster Hour, From Our Own Correspondents, etc) and it's peaceful, calming and helps me get away from work for a few hours, and I can reconnect with the real world outside of IT, and then return to the bubble hopefully informed about real things that matter to real people.

So, in a nutshell, pay your employees properly, let them decide what their perks are from their salary. All tha perks do is create a work camp in exchange for hard cash, pay your employees properly so they can decide when or if they want their laundry or house cleaning done, or where they wish to eat.

The more I hear about SV startup benefits, the more it creeps me out, so please, fuck off, stop becoming a developer nanny state at the expense of paying your employees a proper and fair wage. Also, to the young devs out there being sucked into this nonsense, seriously, start thinking for yourselves and stop enslaving your lives to these faux perks. Demand to be paid fairly and put cash in the bank, forget the foosball table and free drinks, it's a distraction.

ps: WRT to your employer providing, say, dual 24" monitors, a PC with i7 CPU and a decent chunk of RAM with SSD. It is not a perk, it's the tool you need for the job. The guy who is out on the road doing AA/RAC/Green Flag to fix your puncture for a fraction of the money that you earn is running around in at least $90-$100k worth of truck and tools. Why should your "startup" employer consider $2k - $3k worth of computer, which is your tool, a perk. You deserve no less than a wobble free desk, a chair that doesn't give you blisters on your backside after eight hours solid sitting and a computer that you don't want to throw out the window or brain your manager with.

Edit: bit hazy on my age back in .com #1, but the sentiments remain the same.

I've had experiences with a number of employers and also tried managing both groups of kids and devs so I'll share my thoughts (kids are easier).

Everyone has to eat. The easier you make this for people the better; apart from anything else hungry brains don't work properly so it's the company that looses out. A small kitchen including a microwave, toaster and fridge should be bare essentials. Make sure you have knives, cutlery and bowls/plates; potentially more if you have people working silly hours (eg enough facilities to knock up a plate of food). Don't baulk at supplying a minimum of tea/coffee/sugar/milk, nice water and potentially snacks too. If people are using the milk too quickly for whatever reason, it's really simple; buy more. Previous places have done Pizza Friday (weekly, monthly or quarterly) which is always nice. It brings the entire office together which is great for getting to know colleagues and amazing things can happen when distant arms of the business sit down together over food.

Be easy with timekeeping and have some sympathy for the length of people's commute. This isn't possible with all roles, but my current contract doesn't have start/finish times or even an amount of hours in it -and it's amazingly liberating. Lots of our people have silly commutes (I'm driving for about an hour and a quarter) but I don't think anyone has a stressful one. Everyone (who's in) tries to get in before 10am (we never schedule meetings earlier) so people arrive between 7-10 and tend to leave some time around 4-8. If you get stuck in traffic and end up running late then it's annoying but it's not _stressful_.

With the right team, this seems to work extraordinarily well. People are happy and healthy and personally invested in doing a good job and take pride in it. When a deadline looms, something serious breaks or even if you've just got happily engrossed in something interesting then no one bats at eyelid at being in the office at >10pm. We have an on-call rota, but most people have set up personal alert systems so we get notified when we're not holding the phone -it's a matter of pride and respect both to our customers but also to each other. -tldr: bosses often expect people to work late but all is doom if you're not at your desk ten minutes before your official start time.

It's very distancing and disjointing to know you can't put anything down (from thoughts in a notebook, spare laptop charger, _my_ selection of random cds and usb sticks), basically make provision for future and be able to find it in weeks to come. I think physical carries across to the mental too; my brain finds it easier to resume from where it left jobs at home time when my general workspace is in the same state in the morning. At the very least people should be given a locker or a set of draws they control, especially if they're out of the office for periods of time. In technical roles I find hotdesking and hot-computering sucks more balls than imaginable; it's awful to the point where I actually used "sucks more balls" on HN. Oh, and if you have to refuse me local admin rights (and even if you don't), give people a couple of VPSs in a safe DMZ that they have root (and snapshot/rollback ability) on.

Open office culture can be fantastic (your mileage (or relevancy) may vary), but please don't think I mean stick everyone together in a big echoy room where you can't hear yourself think. If you're working on a laptop then really it shouldn't matter where you're doing it so make sure people get just as good wireless at their desk as in the office next door, the quiet room or outside next to the pond. Open culture should mean that no one is afraid to ask questions and that no one takes questioning personally and is willing to explain anything. If you're having a meeting or discussion (that isn't specifically private/privileged) then anyone is welcome to sit or wander in, listen and ask questions or offer explanations. Everyone gets to put forward their best ideas and then you pick them all apart with everyone else and hopefully all come to a consensus. Personally I love it when people see flaw in my 'obvious' ideas well before I've tried implementing them and then explain exactly why it sounds great but here's the key you missed -or simply, it's nice to know we've got each others backs. All this relies on good people and good leadership, but when dev, ops, networking and even sales and management are all on the same page then great things will happen.

Night/Shift workers: If you're a 24/7 operation then you've got people that work even odder times than the rest. Night and shift workers (I've seen 7-7 is relatively common and people end up out of sync with the rest of the business. Make sure they don't miss out when people get fed or when the office comes together -these are the people keeping stuff going when everyone else is asleep or enjoying weekends; imho it deserves more respect than is usually awarded to it.