Well, hypothetical speaking, if there were two completely absolutely identical jobs, but the one had a ping pong table. I might choose the one without and ask them to get a Foosball table, since I'm no good at ping pong.

Most places that have HR like this work their employees too hard for them to have time to use a ping pong table anyway, so it's really just a hollow gesture.

Indeed.

It's telling that "basic dignity" or "managers who aren't dicks" didn't make the list.

Ping pong tables are loud as fuck and disrupt the whole office. If they invest in a soundproof room to put it in, sure. Otherwise it just makes you feel like a massive douche.

I wanted a foosball table dammit!

My last job had a pingpong table. We'd even use it occasionally. That is, until people started getting pissy when they'd see us playing pingpong. Then management started bitching that we were playing pingpong instead of working. Eventually, nobody was allowed to use the pingpong table - it just sat there, in the middle of the room, with brand new paddles and packs of balls that we weren't allowed to use.

The money was okay - not great, but not terrible. After some management fuckery, I left for a $10000/yr raise and 100% work from home. I've gone up $20K since then, been promoted to senior, still have upward trajectory, and still work 100% from home. I have a desk in Memphis somewhere, but I've never actually seen it.

It is if you're managing an Olympic ping pong team

My employer really covered their bases. We have ping-pong, pool, and foosball. That guarantees that everyone has something that will keep them from quitting.

It’s always about autonomy, one way or another. People want to be able to control how they work and what they can get out of it. For some that does mean more money, for some it would mean less stress, for others it could means less meetings.

It’s pretty easy for management to address all of it by just giving people more power over what their work lives are like, but that could mean less control over their workforce. No “owner” wants that, to them, they own their employees’ time/work life.

I was at my last job for 10 years.

If I had been well paid and treated well I would not have ever started that job search. Further even just having one of those two thing might have kept me from looking.

At that job I hit the tipping point of both. It’s was getting shittier everyday and the pay wasn’t budging year after year. Finally mid-Covid the power flipped to the employee and jobs were much easier to get. I started looking and jumped shipped.

It’s not ever not about the money around 0% of the times.

This