BigDave - 8:14 pm on Mar 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

It looks like every successful engineering department that I have ever worked at. In other words, the ones run by engineers instead of business people.

Perks absolutely make a difference to retention and productivity, I've seen it over and over. Having good free food or drinks on site keeps the employees on site. The same goes for gyms, dry cleaners, hair salon, etc. On-site massage is even making it into public sector jobs.

At one company I worked at, they were going through some cost cutting, and they were going to get rid of the free soda, juice and coffee. I went to the president of the company and suggested that he take a ride with me the 2 miles to the 7-Eleven to see how long it took and to calcualte how much it would cost the company if each employee took a break twice a day to go buy drinks. They kept the free soda.

I honestly did not see anything in those pictures that was all that extravagant when you consider the payroll, net worth, and the earnings/employee.

You also have to remember that Google is not a "public company" in the normal sense. Those people in the photographs are the ones that own the real stock. All that those of us in the "public" can own is basically non-voting tracking stocks. Only insiders can own voting stock.