I agree that working at a startup for equity is akin to the lottery, but the perks of startups are so much better than big companies. Catered lunch, free food in the kitchen, kegs onsite, etc. I could never go back to a cubicle with no windows in sight!
> Catered lunch, free food in the kitchen, kegs onsite, etc.
Without getting into the relative availability of these things (I think you are underestimating how available they are in big companies).
These are extremely cheap to provide. The perks that cost a lot for companies to provide, health insurance, better pay, better retirement options, education reimbursement, etc. Are where real comparisons between perks should be made. In my experience those are systematically more common in big companies than small ones (that is governmental policy makes it easier for big companies to provide these).
Don't forget work/life balance. As I've gotten more experienced under my belt, I increasingly value my free time. I no longer have any interest in burning the midnight oil because a company is constantly in crunch mode due to poor planning, understaffing, etc.
Larger companies often can provide a better work/life balance because they have more resources to do so. Now, that isn't always the case--many of them abuse the hell out of their employees because they can, but there often isn't the same "working 80hr weeks" you get at startups.
I've found that increasingly the dollar value of my free time is one of the most valuable "perks" a company can provide.
The best 'perk' is working for a company where it's expected that you will work normal hours most of the time instead of as the exception. As I get older and have a family and more interests outside of work, this becomes the most critical factor. A lot of the classic startup perks seem designed to keep you in the office.
I might be. I work at a well established and funded "startup" with the same benefits as the big company I came from, but with a bunch more perks.
I see a lot of replies insisting that big companies have the same perks as startups plus the standard benefits, and that's great. It makes happy for the legions of employees working there (and me if I end up back there someday). Our experiences are anecdotal, so I wonder if this is actually a widespread thing at large companies. I doubt it, but I hope I'm wrong.
Which of those have free breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Your just naming big tech companies in SV. Most of which have horrible perks and known to be cheap. I mean Cisco? HP? EA? Seriously? (the only one that has great perks on your list is netflix)
If you often find yourself eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at work, I'd say this no longer qualifies as a perk. At that point, it's the least you should be provided for working insane amount of overtime.
A lot of big cos offer office space with windows. In fact it's pretty standard. Even a few of them give you private offices by mostly default, like microsoft!
In my situation, I work from home a lot, but also go in the office 3 days a week or so for face time (per my role, and I work with great people) - we're a small bootstrapped company solving some boring problems in fun ways :-)
None of these perks are really all that interesting.
Free lunch/snacks/drinks might save you a couple hundred dollars a month, max, if you use them everyday. A little resourcefulness with leftovers, brewing some coffee at home, etc, and that perk is worth way less. It's worth little compared with your paycheck.
After doing different office layouts, I have come to enjoy cubicles or separate offices, more and more. Open concepts are not unique to startups, anyway.
Also, those are easy to downgrade or eliminate. People might gripe if the snacks are from Costco instead of Whole Foods, and they might gripe if they're done away with altogether, but ask someone to take a $200/month pay cut, and they'll be really pissed off.
Many big companies that are doing well financially give their employees many perks (apart from decent to good pay). And this is not even a new thing. Goes back to my dad's or grandfather's time or even earlier. Source: personal experience and heard from family and friends (including of previous generations, like older cousins, uncles, etc). And I'm talking about both Indian and American companies - had / have some family background in both (as employees).
I work at a mid-size (~500 employee) telecom. "The [company name] 15" is a meme here because there's always so much free food in the kitchen. Every time anyone meets with clients/partners/etc., they always have way too much food catered, and the leftovers get put out for the rest of us. New employee orientations are especially awesome because they always order like ten times as much food as the newbies can eat. And we get donuts and klobasneks in the break room every Friday morning... plus every day, the break room is stocked with cereal and milk.
I like to post about the stuff I find in the break room on Facebook, and I've had multiple people tell me they gained 15 pounds just reading my posts.
> I could never go back to a cubicle with no windows in sight!
That's a mixed blessing. I consider cubicles a perk, and while windows are nice, the lack of windows isn't a deal-breaker for me, and they have their downsides.
At my last employer -- a 12-person defense contractor that put the "small" in "small business" despite having been around for 20 years -- I sat facing the window. We had four people in the room, with an empty seat for a fifth, none of us with our backs to the walls: we all faced the edge of the room. Three of us faced plate glass windows. Yeah, sure, the view was pretty. We worked on the 12th floor. I faced a freeway and a light rail line, with a rail station visible as well. It wasn't uncommon for us to stop work so we can gawk at a nasty accident on the freeway, so we can speculate on why the police have the freeway closed off, or to marvel as a hawk flew in front of our windows. That's the good. The bad is that the glare could get blinding at times. And all of us were afraid of closing the blinds because we didn't want to interfere with somebody else's view, so we just sucked it up and worked in glare on various days.
And then there was the office layout itself. Nobody had any privacy, and we could all see each other's monitors from our desks. I never worked on the same project as two of the people in my room (and they usually were on separate projects themselves): it wasn't uncommon for other members of their teams to walk into our office and have an impromptu design meeting with them while the rest of us tried to tune them out. And, no, we had no meeting rooms readily available to us: we rented a handful of offices in an executive suite that we shared with other companies, so any meeting rooms had to be booked well in advance and cost us $$$.
Now, at my current employer, I work in a cube farm, and I love it. I have my own space, I can see when someone's coming up to me, my cube doesn't get used as an impromptu meeting room, etc. Sure, I don't have my awesome view anymore, but it's not terribly important, and I'm no longer dealing with glare. If I really need to look outside, there's a window not too far away from me anyway, and when the weather gets bad, a lot of us gather by that window so we can check out the storm.
Your comment just reads like you've had too much of the startup Kool Aid. I, for example, work in a not-google/fb/apple large company in a LEED certified building with lots of windows and sunlight and they have lots of perks like catering and beer.
My company provides such things as well, and I live nowhere near California. Just finished my daily free lunch and my desk actually looks out a window.
