As far as I can remember, Amazon never had perks for employees. Except for free coffee and tea in the kitchens. That's it.

I remember back in 2002 (?) when the 2-pizza team idea was introduced. My manager said he would find out how we could expense the pizza. It turns out that the pizza was merely theoretical: the team should be sized so that, if there were pizza, then 2 pizzas would be enough for the team. But that doesn't mean that pizza would ever be ordered or expensed.

Twitch did the free food and snacks thing. When acquired by Amazon, Twitch opened a Seattle office, on a floor of an existing Amazon building. We got to keep getting free food!

Every day around lunchtime, hungry Amazon workers from adjacent floors would quietly try to slip in to get a sandwich or a kebab or whatever, or would surreptitiously attempt to get a bag of chips.

Eventually the Twitch side started to complain: there was never enough food to go around at lunch time. If you were more than ten minutes late, all the food would be gone.

The Amazon management’s response? Lock off the Twitch floor so it required special badges for access. Let the Amazonians starve!

That is exactly what I expected to happen.

TBH I expected that everyone would lose the free food

That will happen a bit later

True. The badness is almost always incremental.

The last thing most tech workers need is more chips.

Yeah, free food looks like a negative to me.

I remember the same thing with the door desks. I was impressed at the time (I was young): "Wow, this company not only uses Pine for email but they're smart enough to know that fancy desks aren't necessary." That was obviously a long time ago, but that attitude didn't last long, especially when I saw how absolutely venal the company was becoming.

Amazon gives out free bananas.

Office amenities were the carrot, attendance policies are the stick. Both are aimed at increasing the share of time employees spend at the office/thinking about work/immersed physically and socially in work-based networks. Employees who interpreted these amenities as a spirit of generosity that would just change with the times into a full remote culture were badly mistaken. If anything, it's the companies that never put any thought or care into their office environments, teambuilding, etc. who would be most amenable to going remote.

I couldn't care less about those ridiculous perks; I can do all that on my own time. All I want is good work, good pay, good colleagues, and good management.

Well in big tech I have good news for you, you get both!

More like, "Congratulations, pick two!"

I have all of those and most people I know do also. Big tech is awesome. There are some bad apples but it’s very easy to move around.

Are you talking about Meta, by any chance?

The managerial way to say it...The company is frugal