Let's be honest: tech company perks are ridiculous.
The ping-pong tables. The kombucha on tap. The "unlimited snacks" that somehow always run out of the good granola bars by 10 AM. The bean bag chairs that look cool in recruitment photos but destroy your back after 20 minutes. The beer fridge that's supposed to encourage "work-life balance" but really just means "keep working, but slightly drunk."
We all know these perks are generally about keeping you at the office longer. Why go home for lunch when there's a free catered meal? Why leave at 5 PM when you're in the middle of a foosball tournament? If you can bring your dog to work, then you don't worry about your dog at home and get that sweet oxytocin from petting it.
But also...
I like the perks. I like National Hot Dog Day observance.
Work Is Taken Far Too Seriously. Work is not that serious.
Especially in tech. We're not performing surgery. We're not teaching children. We're not keeping the power grid running (okay, some of us are, but most of us aren't).
We're building apps. Optimizing ad placement. Arguing about button colors. Refactoring code that worked fine. Debating whether this feature should ship in Q3 or Q4 as if lives hang in the balance.
And we do all this with the intensity of people defusing bombs.
The pressure is real—deadlines, stakeholders, competition, performance reviews. But the stakes are usually not. If your A/B test ships a day late, nobody dies. If the button is the wrong shade of blue, the world continues spinning.
We've created an environment where everything feels urgent, critical, and high-stakes. And then we wonder why everyone's stressed, burned out, and snapping at each other in Slack.
This is where the silly perks actually serve a purpose that's not entirely sinister.
The Accidental Value of Not Being Serious
I think we forget the value of just hanging out with people you spend 40+ hours a week with, remembering that they're actual people with lives and personalities and not just Slack avatars.
The perks create spaces for mingling. And mingling—actual human connection—is increasingly rare in modern work environments.
The Mingling Problem
Here's what we've lost in the optimization of work:
Everyone works from their desk. Headphones on, Slack set to "Do Not Disturb," eyes on screen. Efficient? Yes. Human? Not really.
Meetings are transactional. Agenda items, action items, parking lot items. Get in, get through it, get out. No time for "how was your weekend?"
Remote work is isolating. (I say this as someone who loves remote work.) I am more productive at home in my magical office than in an office, without question. But we're not grabbing coffee with colleagues or randomly running into people.
We've optimized away spontaneity. Everything is scheduled. Everything has a purpose. Hanging out just to hang out feels like wasting company time.
The silly perks—even when cynically deployed—create permission structures for being less serious. They're designated spaces where work intensity is allowed to decrease, where you can interact with coworkers as humans instead of as functions in the org chart.
Is this manipulative? Yes! But ultimately building a culture is just pulling different combinations of levers to get us all to act a certain way. The human connection is good. Taking a step back from work is good.
We Do Our Best Work Less Stressed
Here's the thing about the intense, serious, all-work-all-the-time culture: it doesn't actually make us more productive.
Stress makes you stupid. Your prefrontal cortex—the part that handles complex problem-solving—literally works worse under chronic stress. You make dumber decisions. You miss creative solutions. You ship bugs you would have caught if you weren't exhausted.
Grinding makes you slow. That 60th hour you work in a week is far less productive than the 40th. You're tired, your judgment is impaired, and you're probably creating more problems than you're solving.
Burnout kills productivity. Working at 150% capacity for three months might get you a short-term win, but the burnout that follows will cost you six months of reduced output.
Connection improves collaboration. When you've played foosball with your teammate, it's easier to have hard conversations about code reviews. When you've chatted about life during lunch, it's easier to ask for help when you're stuck.
The goofing off isn't wasted time—it's restoration time that makes the work time more effective.
The Balance We're Missing
The problem isn't that tech companies offer perks. The problem is when perks are de riguer props signaling 'we are a fun startup' and the place isn't actually any fun and the perks are never used, or when positioned as substitutes for fundamental improvements:
Perks are not a replacement for fair compensation. Free lunch is nice. Paying market rate is better.
Perks are not a replacement for reasonable hours. A nap pod is cool but only if you aren't at the point of collapse when you use it. For the record, I have never seen anyone use a nap pod.
Perks are not a replacement for growth opportunities. The ping-pong table is used mostly as a table and less for ping pong. Career development is meaningful.
But if the company is a decent one that you like to work for, perks are great.
They create space for:
- Taking mental breaks during the day
- Building relationships with coworkers
- Remembering that work isn't life-or-death
- Having fun, which turns out to be good for creativity and problem-solving
- Mingling, which builds the social fabric that makes teams work
The Perks I Actually Miss
When I think about the various tech jobs I've had, here are the perks that mattered:
The lunch groups. Walking to get food with a rotating crew of coworkers. Sometimes talking about work, sometimes definitely not. Having a laugh instead of eating over my kitchen sink.
The game room shenanigans. Playing Mario Kart with leadership and people at the lower rungs like myself broke down hierarchies in a way that six months of "open door policies" couldn't.
The casual Fridays (all the Fridays). Not the dress code. I worked in LA, people wore shorts and flip-flops to work. It was more the vibe. The sense that Friday afternoon was for wrapping up, not starting new things.
None of these cost much money. None of them required elaborate corporate campuses. They just required creating space for humans to be humans instead of always being workers.
In Conclusion: It's Complicated
Tech perks are silly. They're sometimes manipulative. They're sometimes deployed instead of real improvements to compensation and work-life balance. Sometimes they are a Potemkin village hiding the actual horrors.
And also? Work is too serious. We've lost the art of mingling with our coworkers. We do our best work when we're less stressed. And sometimes the silly perks create space for the human connection and mental restoration that makes everything better.
Both things can be true.
We spend too much of our lives at work to be miserable and stressed the entire time.
What tech perks did you actually value? Which ones were obviously manipulative? And more importantly: have you seen Karen from Finance? We need to talk about the yogurt situation.