I interviewed once for a part-time job at a potential startup, and the two people running it spent 75% of the time talking about how they had a pingpong table and how that meant it was a fun company…
The job wouldn’t be in the office tho, so for my position (and pretty much every employee) would only be able to use it off the clock.
They were very excited about the ping pong table tho, because their job was in office and they played a lot.
I’ve worked in at a smaller startup with a ping pong table and my anecdote is we were all obsessed with ping pong. So their excitement could really be genuine. It’s not always a ruse.
You may be fine with $1000 a month. You have everything you need: food, bed, apartment, electricity, etc.
Now you get a new job and have $2000. You try out more expensive food options and realize you like them better. You move into a bigger apartment and start enjoying the freedom.
You may never wanted this if you didn’t try it, but now that you have, you don’t want to go back. You may not have noticed that your mental and physical health was degraded due to your previous living conditions until you get better after raising your standards.
I’m like mid-career and I can’t afford vacations. There’s always some other priority for the money and I would feel guilty for spending it on something that is by nature temporary and ephemeral.
That question isn’t the best way to frame it, because yeah… 2x “enough” is pretty reasonable. That’s still well within the high returns of happiness phase.
Do you need 1000x enough, though? Or 1000x that? I’d love a high end espresso maker, or a nicer car, or to be able to afford to take more time off, but there comes a point where more is just pointless.
Ah but what is enough money for you or I is not enough money for the bigwigs. And since they’re obviously more important, as they’re at the top, we have to have sure they get enough money even if that means you don’t.
But they’ll get you a ping pong table so you can stop thinking about how you don’t know what you’re going to feed your family tonight
Eh. Toxic work culture can drive people away regardless of the pay. Obviously some people suck it up but not everyone. Ultimately the goal is to treat employees well all around. Good pay, benefits, and work culture will keep people happy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wtf are you talking about? Employees work office jobs 9 to 5 because they love to work. Like all good employee’s. Heck, if they weren’t getting paid they’d still the work for free because they love it so much. It’s only out of the pure goodness of my heart that I decide to pay them minimum wage/s
And when you edit within a minute of a reply that was made within a minute of your comment nothing changes. Just suck it up and admit you missed it, dude.
If needing to pay for basic necessities weren’t a factor in people getting jobs, I highly doubt the majority of people would work the kinds of jobs of today. I don’t know a single person who is excited to go into their retail job and deal with shitty customers all day or sit in a bland cubicle all day making spreadsheets that nobody really cares about.
I know more people who would much rather devote their time to learning and playing instruments, or making something with their own hands, or writing stories, or spending time raising their families.
Hey if that’s your jam go for it, personally I’d like to live in a world where someone can elect to do that sort of work and not have to worry and stress about housing, food, bills etc or take on that kind of work despite hating it in order to put food on the table.
In fact all three are valid answers. Cruel manipulation as it is, additional even uncompesated responsibilities often do drive retention as people are invested too deep and too stressed out to consider switching or find time for the process.
I thought this was chatgpt for a second because I didn’t want to believe anyone but ai could be this tone deaf. then I remembered humans and got depressed
Of course, nobody with two brain cells to rub together who reads that answer is sitting there thinking to themselves, “Huh… I guess I’ve had it wrong all this time, focusing so much on money.” Rather, they’re instinctively blurting out, “Yeah right – I call bull!”
But I’ll give them partial credit; frequently it’s about money. Sometimes, it’s just about a work environment that used to be great going to crap. And sometimes, it’s about the employee coming to an epiphany, and realizing that their work environment was actually crap all along.
That said, it may be true that not every job that I’ve ditched was entirely because of money… but it should go without saying that it’s always a factor in where I went for the next job. Also, it’s never the only factor – but it’s certainly one of the more significant ones.
Oh yeah, fun fact, in my former and current job every year we get invited to a town halls with some executive and every year we hear the complaints that we can’t keep employees.
Every year I ask the same question, “We keep hearing that we have a attrition problem so why do we keep chasing the industry standard for pay and benefits, why can’t we adjust our pay scale and promotion process to actual reward performance to actually keep our high performers?”
Every year, is a non-answer, nothing changes, we lose good people and only keep our industry standard people.
Though it was funny that since I’m on multiple projects/teams I did get the same speil multiple times from the same person and the third time in two years I got called I didn’t even have to ask before I got the boiler plate.
I actually convinced my boss to get us a ping pong table, all I had to do was forego my pay for a year!
Totally worth, since I’m not working for the money, I’m working for the culture (our culture is now a ping pong table). It’s so awesome that I can use it during my state-mandated breaks 🙂
A company offered me a million dollars to work for them, but then I remembered the ping pong table at my current employer and said no way. Totally worth it.
How many of these companies think employees are going to say it’s about the money during an exit interview? Usually if you agree to an exit interview it’s to be diplomatic and not burn your bridges. You’re not going to tell the truth, you’re going to say what they want to hear.
I always have. If that’s the reason, why wouldn’t you? It’s just business. Once, they’ve offered me a potentential promotion or salary increase to try to retain me (but not nearly as much as I got from the new job). I doubled my salary and got my title promoted twice in 2 years by switching employers twice. If I keep it up I’ll be a CEO in no-time, lol.
I was abundantly clear that I was leaving for the money. They countered with a salary that was pretty much identical, but I wasn’t shy about telling hr that it shouldn’t take me getting another offer to convince them that I was worth paying market rates for.
No bridges burned, they’ve reached out twice now to see if I’d come back and the salary is now pretty competitive but I’m in a good spot and not interested in leaving.
It was specifically about the money. Please don’t be one of those people so ignorant as to believe that a firm who doesn’t value their employees until they’re one foot out the door is somewhere that will pay you what you’re worth in the long run. Being competitive now doesn’t mean I’d be making more money, it just means they’re now in the range for my position.
Money isn’t only valuable in this instant, the availability of money in the future is also an important factor.
Hey, wanted to level-set with you real quick. Some people in the office have commented that they see you playing ping pong quite a bit. I know you’re just playing on your breaks but It’s really not a good look.
“Yes, boss, I’m leaving because I’m tired of playing ping-pong on unoccupied morgue tables, you really should’ve bought a proper ping pong table instead”
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