A deep-tissue massage. Housekeeping and laundry services. A haircut after lunch.
For most, that’s a vacation at an all-inclusive resort. For many Silicon Valley workers, it was just a typical day at the office.
Over the past two decades, the tech industry became famous (or infamous) for its “perks culture,” a custom of providing employees with fanciful and luxurious amenities. Companies like Google and Meta tried outflanking one another in offering the most extravagant extras on Skittles-colored campuses as they competed for talent.
How it’s pronounced
/pərks kəl-chər/
But widespread industry layoffs and an expensive pivot to building artificial intelligence led to a decline of perks culture. Tech companies have started scaling back on the goodies that differentiated their workplaces.
Salesforce, a software maker, last year got rid of a ranch retreat for employees and nixed a monthly “well-being” day off for salespeople. Netflix has unofficially walked back its generous parental-leave policy by guiding employees to take less time off, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. A Netflix spokesman said that workers still have the flexibility to decide what’s best for them and that its policy hasn’t changed.
“Not so long ago, these perks were given a lot of emphasis,” said David Lewin, a managing director of the consulting firm BRG.
This fall, Meta fired dozens of employees for using meal-delivery vouchers to buy household goods, The Financial Times reported, signaling a curb to any sense of entitlement.
Google pioneered the modern tech perks culture during the dot-com boom, when, in 1999, it hired a massage therapist for its 40-person start-up. Other tech upstarts also tried to break from the stodgy environments of industry stalwarts. Yahoo’s break rooms were outfitted with foosball tables in the ’90s. Its competitor, Excite.com, tried giving its employee softball team (and corporate image) an advantage by paying Barry Bonds to play with them. Yahoo still won a matchup.
Google declined to comment, and Salesforce and Meta did not respond to requests for comment.
For Google employees, cuts have taken many forms. Off-site meetings in exotic locations are rarer, in favor of gatherings on campus, said a current and a former employee, who both spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of violating employer agreements. It has shuttered some microkitchens, and begun offering fewer — and cheaper — snacks. Artisanal chocolate was swapped out for Twix, two current employees said.
“They seem small, but they’re representative of a larger cultural shift,” said Suzie Reider, who joined Google in 2006 as YouTube’s chief marketing officer and left in April.
Daniel Keum, a professor at Columbia Business School, said companies now have more leeway to cut jobs and other costs without repercussions. A hybrid-work arrangement, he argues, had been one of the top tech perks.
In September, Amazon declared that its corporate employees must return to the office five days a week starting in 2025. Amazon said that it made the change to strengthen its culture and that it offered elder care options and pet sitters to employees.
The tech industry laid off more than 264,000 employees last year, 100,000 more than the year before, according to Layoffs.fyi, which serves as a reminder that tech workers may have lost their greatest perk of all: job security.
