I’d be inclined to dismiss this as “3 data points make a trend” NYT article, except it isn’t. This is unfortunately definitely a trend that’s been building for years. Huge appetite for this kind of meaning-pampering in entitled-techie land.
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Hehe some people are offended that this desecrates religion and tradition, I’m offended it desecrates the bleak, stark, soullessness of business
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Registering a bet with Toby for future reference
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Replying to @tobyshorin and @djbaskin
It’s a bet. We’ll revisit in 10 years. I’d say a tiny minority of the workforce will be in environments like this, and majority will have highly functional relationships to work with few such superfluities. WFH, free agency, and API jobs will turn work into bare metal behaviors.
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Distinction between active vs passive environmental design
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Replying to @mikewawszczak and @MikeWawz
That comparison is off. Evironmental aesthetics don’t actively try to make you do things. A better comparison is to workplace wellness programs that give you health insurance premium breaks for wearing pedometers and walking 10,000 steps. Or cultish sales events.
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In general, business trends strike me as faddish when they have specious or non-existent relationships to the basic existential function of businesses: to make and sell goods and services at a profit, creating wealth for owners and time-for-money trades for workers.
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If you can’t trace a robust connection to the balance sheet, it’s either a perk/in-kind comp (like buffet lunches and on-site laundry), some sort of distraction theater, or a manifestation of fundamental causal confusion about what drives what. There’s a lot in that last category
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Perks and theaters are often misread as causes of success. Eg: buffets
A: Perk hypothesis: Just a convenience for high-value employees
B: Theater hypothesis: Sucker them into working longer hours cheaply
C: Causal hypothesis: improves morale/culture, boosting productivity
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Replying to
It’s like how SUV designers found that adding more cup holders made customers rate them as “safer”. Trappings of domestic cozy produce feeling of safety through direct appeal to intuitive aesthetics rather than abstract statistical reality of truly effective measures.
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Also, D: Continuity of Infantilization for upper middle class college grads who’ve never had to do their own domestic maintenance is an important recruiting promise. Particularly as things like equity upside, stimulating technical problems, and meaningful social impact recede.
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More speculative: maybe some “Ritualist” consulting is Continuity of Infantilization extended for older workers. It’s a substitute for the sense of meaning non-workaholic adults pursue outside the workplace after basics are nailed down (family, community, religion, charity, art).
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I think it’s mostly for the young per your first hypothesis. The old already have support systems for that elsewhere and also much more cynical about the motives of an employer providing it. The only old people I’ve seen fall for this are rah-rah sales orgs doing their big events
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Could be. I haven’t seen it in practice. Just matches the cultish obsession with “culture” and “mission” I tend to see in older (post-family) CEOs, particularly founders who’ve stayed past their peak of proficiency and who see the company as their great contribution to the world.

