As competition for developers heats up, companies are falling over themselves to attract the best talent. A common tactic is to offer perks, probably because someone heard Google offers free food and maybe because it sounds appealing to a manager who’s trying hard to channel their inner programmer.
Perks aren’t bad, but in my experience, the best workers don’t pay much attention to them. The best workers want to actually get work done. They care about the people they work with, their work environment, the technology and tools they can use, and the product they work on.
Of course, developers are motivated by extrinsic factors such as salary, health care, vacation time, etc. But if they are a sufficiently talented engineer to be worth hiring, they’ll also be smart enough to know the true value of a free gym membership.
Perks can make a difference, but they should be considered in the context of things developers actually care about.
Ping pong, for example, might add to the work environment for some developers. So it’s a small subset of a small subset of the overall things devs care about.
Free lunch, the real benefit is not money saving. Developers earning six figures are smart enough to know that. The benefit is saving them the hassle of arranging or queuing for lunch and being able to socialise with their team mates. They will probably end up working more instead of standing in a line somewhere, but that’s just fine for both parties.
For talented developers, it’s far more important to consider work-related perks like big displays and flexible operating system choice. Those things help developers kick ass all day long. They are more attractive to the kind of people who are able and motivated to get the job done.
(On ping pong tables specifically, they will backfire if they cause even the slightest noise disruption. Programmers need to work in quiet environments. Also, what makes you think programmers will like them more than other people you are trying to hire? It can come across as condescending to think it’s something programmers will value and others won’t.)
