Thanks! I found out a little bit about the founder(I think)--forget his name, but he seems legit. He's a founder of vagabond.something, and was a player in Skype. I listened to his podcast, and he was pretty grounded in reality. I heard he was given 5 million a few years ago to get this thing started; which doesn't seems like enough to manufacture your own chip? After every job posting, the company is offering a Mac book pro retina as an incentive to join the company. For some reason I started to laugh, but you need a laptop to work, and why not a Mac book pro retina? What I got out of the podcast is the TV show Silicon Valley just might be a documentary. I guess I didn't realize just how important Silicon Valley has become, and seems akin to an amusement park in some ways. No wonder rents in the Bay Area are beyond staggering. The podcast I watched was about vagabond.someting--not this company.
As for Skype... the company is backed by VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel who all invested in Skype. Don't know any other connection to this company.
As for your comments about Silicon Valley, yeah it's pretty crazy. The basic idea is that companies like Google, Apple or Facebook have millions or even billions of customers/users and are some of the biggest companies in the world. Meanwhile they have very few employees because their product is mostly software, and 1 guy can code a program that a billion people use, unlike say a barbershop where 1 person can only cut a few thousand people's hair. Which means that the potential reward for the very best programmers (a small team of whom can build products used by millions) can go through the roof in a free market.
Which is why you get wages of $100-200k for solid programmers. And something like a free Macbook Pro then is not a big deal. It costs $1500, it's used for 3 years, so the cost is $40 a month, peanuts for someone whose wage is already $10k a month. It makes sense to spend an extra 0.4% for one of the best laptops available allowing your employees to be productive anywhere anytime they want.
And if a $50 gym membership & free lunch makes people happier, more productive and absent due to illness, to the extent they're only 5% more productive, you get an additional 5% of $10k of 'work', or $500, so it makes sense to give employees free gym memberships that cost you $50.
If you run a private bus service with wifi for employees and pay $500 for a private bus driver for a day moving around 100 employees who don't have to take a crappy bus, and those 100 employees are 5% more productive because they can get to work sooner (or leave home later and more rested), and work on the bus because it has wifi and is spacious etc, or because they can have breakfast on the bus, that 5% productivity gain nets $50k in total for the 100 employees, and costs a fraction of that.
etc etc. That's the kind of reasoning going into making it an amusement park. It makes a lot of economic sense to spend a lot of money to make employees a bit happier, more productive, less absent and reduce employee turnover, when these employees already cost $200k and in small teams build large software products. It also makes sure talent is attracted to work at your company specifically, and is less inclined to leave once they get there.
All of which can make for some amazing working environments, and also very silly outcomes (as well as friction in communities where people live that don't have any of those benefits but work just as hard, and have to see things like awesome private buses for some citizens, while they have to take shittier public transport, for example. There's been quite a bit of controversy in Silicon Valley about stuff like this the past few years)
