Silicon Valley Burnout

A tale of two cities

Two weeks ago I was eating lunch at Google, and overheard two people next to me having a conversation.

“I heard you’ve been talking to [medium sized startup]. Think you’ll go?”

“I liked them — but they don’t even have free food.”

When I was back in Michigan visiting family, my friend’s mom was celebrating her 30th anniversary at the insurance company she worked for. She was absolutely giddy — the company was going to pay for a small dinner for her and a few coworkers! Thirty years at the same company, and she got one free meal. And it meant the world to her.

Whereas back in Silicon Valley, the just-out-of-college engineer sitting next to me was scoffing over his lobster pizza (yes, that’s a thing at Google) that someone would dare offer him a six-figure job without paying for all his meals.

I absolutely love the lunches, massages, nice offices with exposed brick, ping pong tables, laundry, gym memberships, alcohol, and high salaries. I just hate that it’s become a cliché.

We’ve gotten to the point where these perks are no longer seen as rewards or motivation for doing a good job. Rather, they’re the baseline. We’ve come to expect them. We laugh when they aren’t there.

According to Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, there’s three things that motivate us: autonomy, mastery and purpose. No industry checks things off that list quicker than the tech world. We’re past that. So, companies have started adding more and more superficial benefits to compete and differentiate themselves . But these don’t necessarily motivate people or make them do better work — they’re just there for the sake of keeping up with the Joneses.

I wonder what else we can do to get away from this culture of insane superficial perks, without actually being a detriment to the morale we’ve created here in the Bay Area? And we need to do it in a way that avoids just piling more new things onto the “required” list.

Thoughts? Here’s the Hacker News thread.