Next, these things are to try to encourage the retaining of the college mindset. Aside form the "play hard" there's the "work hard" - the all night cramming that you had with college gets translated to working all night to meet some project target date.
Additionally, by establishing these pseudo-third places, it encourages the people who use them to be part of the work "community" rather than the civic community (where the hacker space or coffee shop is). This in turn makes the people who work there more isolated from the people in the community and has an impact on the third places there as there are fewer people in the civic community who use them (when they are provided free at work). Yes, you would rather use the local hacker space than the one that FB has for a woodshop - but that isn't true of a fair number of people.
Lastly, these perks aren't things that the company values too highly and thus is apt to remove them when times get tighter. Establishing those perks as the norm (see Basecamp with its combination of company forum pseudo-third places and perks) and then changing how they're done or making them location specific (FB employee in SV gets a woodshop, while the remote worker doesn't) will create discontent later down the road.
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I believe that companies that are offering these perks and pseudo-third places (as perks) are finding that the trouble that they cause is more than the value they provide to their employees from the employer perspective but are having trouble withdrawing.
The SV style perk - I believe - is a liability to a company. While it may improve employe retention a bit while it is active (and I really question that in as junior dev tenure has been dropping combined with an increase in remote work), removing it can result in singicant discontent and hosting it increases the issues that HR has with maintaining it.
{soapbox}
I believe a lot of companies are trying to establish a third place ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place and https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/02/28/20030228/ ) to help transition new grads and young adults from a college atmosphere to a professional atmosphere... but putting a lot of emphasis on having that third place. Having it _also_ means that employees tend to stay later at work.
Things like https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/custom-woodworking/cabine...
These are ways to use excess money in a way that rewards employees and makes some of the aspects hard to leave ("I could switch companies but then I'd lose the woodshop!") but it also sets up another set of problems in the nature of the third place - that its not work. The coffee shop that you show up to outside of work shouldn't have a manager / employee relationship between the patrons, but the coffee shop on the campus of a big company - that's harder.
It is those third space encroachments where the company is sponsoring it and yet the company wanting to not be political / social / getting into those HR issues, but yet the invariably show up there that lead to articles about how the company is going to be not political, or that half the staff is leaving because the company took a certain stance in a not-3rd space.
These third space encroachments where company life is used as a substitute for one's own hobbies and stepping beyond the college life atmosphere is where companies have social problems.
{/soapbox}