While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. […] “Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Ms. Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”

Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post last year.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 days ago

    Even the “facilities” they offered before were meant for achieving one objective whilst claiming to have a different purpose, like Google’s “relax areas” which the techies never had time to use and whose purpose was actually to attract candidates by projecting the idea that Google was a relaxed work environment (rather than the neverending death march it has been for more than a decade) or their free shuttles to work so that people actually worked during their commute without that being counted as work time which were sold as being to help Google employees with their commute.

    I was in Tech back in the 90s bubble and already back then things like the Aeron chairs, office get togethers and pizza parties were just hypocrite ploys to get people to work long hours for free and to make their office the center of their social life so that they would be less likely to move jobs.

    Companies expecting you to put in 50, 60, 80+ hours a week, don’t actually care about you or your well being and all their non-monetary “benefits” should be examined with a skeptical eye and the assumption that they’ll gain from it in some way until proven otherwise: it’s not always selfish and sometimes one’s direct manager genuinelly wants people on the team to feel good: a good way to spot it is how reacted if you say “not interested, I’ll just take that as time off instead” - if they’re ok with it, then it’s genuine good will, if they try and pressure you or refuse the time off part the whole thing was meant to serve objectives other than what’s good for team members - but anything coming down from HR or upper management is certain to be some kind of ploy to directly or indirectly benefit the company.

    • quetzaldilla@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      This is the exact same way at the Big 4 accounting firms.

      Gym in the building. Daycare. Restaurants. Spa.

      Never exactly free, and there’s never any time or energy to make use of it.