I would love to work in an area where I could play a quick game at lunch or thrash out an idea while playing Tabletop Football. You may not like that, and that's fine.

I understand it and my view on it can be considered cynical. I love coding and love what I do, but I also know that I want my employees to have diverse interests that are not governed by what happens in the office. You chill and play video games or some other activity at work and now your day is longer. I am getting more of you, the creative you, the productive you, the "fun" you, and when you walk out of the office at 9 at night, you are spent, but feel somewhat fulfilled.

As an employer, I get some extra hours out of you and all it took was a few beers, or an Xbox, or a table game. That is a good investment for me, but not so good for you. It's the casino approach to maximizing profits. I'll give you free drinks and smokes, so stay a while.

My company's approach: We encourage people to wrap up their day at a healthy time, preferring to work smarter during our shorter days. We ask people in different time zones not to respond when getting chat/IM messages if it is outside of their work hours. They were doing this and it wasn't fair to them.

Despite this, our team puts in longer hours than we want because they are given challenging work and rise to the challenge. If we have to ask people to work extra time, as we did this week, we do it with the acknowledgement that we have had a lapse in planning on our part and we thank them for their commitment. Later, we go through and understand why we were unable to deliver and work on doing better with our planning.

Seems like you are overthinking it a little. My company has a foosball and ping-pong table and we play it occasionally. It isn't there to trick us into stay longer and we don't work longer hours because we played a game for 10 minutes. We sometimes have a company get-together in the lunch room if we sign a big customer or have a successful deliverable, nothing wrong with a beer and some snacks. Certainly not a reason to run. I would argue that these things have brought my team closer together.

I recently saw all three at an open house for a company that will remain nameless. It doesn't change that my friend working there finds it a fabulous work environment.

Just curious, how would you describe your friend?

Middle-aged female with a husband and children. Practical, but laid-back. Admittedly, she's coming from a job with an overload of work, iterating on a kind of boring, mature product. At the new employer, she's involved with some cool, new stuff, big enough that I saw it on a tech news site online before she told me about the release. She's been there about a year so far.

Companies in the Netherlands often have bars, just FYI.

We have all three at Google, but we don't show the alcohol to the interviewees.

Run towards it or away from it?