

Now hiring in tech? Pony up the perks - tomh-
http://gigaom.com/2011/07/29/hiring-engineers-silicon-valley-perks/

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bugsy
What a weird article. He says companies are desperate to hire talent (not
true) and then gives three examples of perks, the first two of which are
prostitution and gambling, both of which are done as one-off events, and
neither of which are perks in any reasonable interpretation of the concept.

The third example, of entrepreneurship classes, is not unreasonable, but even
better than that would be dropping the clauses on contracts that seize
ownership of everything employees do on side projects in their own time using
their own equipment, as well as the insane and common contract clauses
claiming ownership of work done for so many months after ones leaves. I doubt
that is going to happen any time soon, that seems to be a sacred clause to
many companies. So instead they offer entrepreneurship classes, with the
obvious understanding that should you actually act on them and start a side
project you will be sued into oblivion.

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frossie
Yeah. I mean, pay people well, give them something fun to work on, treat them
like people, and let them go home on time - it should be enough.

There are definitely other industries (eg. big firm law, finance) where the
bigger the hiring perks, the shittier the job - is this really where we want
tech to go?

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georgieporgie
That salary graph isn't very useful. Who cares what the top superstar earns?
Tell me what the average senior developer earns.

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bugsy
I like the graph myself (it was snagged from someone's flickr account
according to the credits). The second section does show the average salaries
for various positions in and out of the Valley, and the third position shows
that those Valley salaries don't even remotely start to compensate for the
higher cost of living there, which means that Valley salaries are not only not
really competitive at all, but are underpaid by a considerable margin. Cool
graph for showing that.

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hallmark
The image grabbed from Flickr was of the gorilla costume. The salary graphs
were from <http://www.focus.com/fyi/silicon-valley-salaries/>

