7 Workplaces That Give Unreal Job Perks
As millennials steadily take over the workplace, they bring with them new demands for job perks. It’s not enough for a company to solely provide healthcare and matching 401(k)s. Today’s workforce wants, nay, demands water fountains that spray free-trade iced coffee and endless stand-up deskside guacamole. Those perks may sound ridiculous, but honestly, they’re mild compared to some workplaces.
Numerai Will Help You Freeze Your Dead Body
If you’re anything like us, you constantly worry about dying before Halo XI: Master Chief, Actually releases directly into the virtual reality chips we’ll all have implanted in our brains. Well, if you manage to snag a full-stack engineering job with the AI-run hedge fund, Numerai, you won’t have to worry about missing out on any sweet future tech/progeny. That’s because Numerai offers their employees whole-body cryonic preservation. Like what Walt Disney did(n’t actually do) for his head, but for your entire, lumpy body.
This isn’t some half-baked promise to chuck your lifeless corpse in the break room freezer after collapsing at your desk; this is the real deal. Numerai’s cryonic preservation comes courtesy of a company called Alcor who just so happens to be the world's leading cryonics organization since 1972 according to ... Alcor, obviously. That quality doesn’t come cheap, though, and freezing your inanimate husk starts off at a minimum freaking $200,000! After that it’s a much more manageable $180 a year -- unless you happen to die in Maricopa County, Arizona. Then they’ll give you $60 off annually!
Of course, all of this apparently assumes that you work for the totally-not-Skynet company until you literally die. But yeah, if you can stick it out, you just might be able to live forever once technology catches up and they can thaw you back out. So that’s certainly a plus.
Pixabay
“Here's your new office. If you die, we'll just leave you in there.”
Members Of Congress All Get Hustler Magazines
Not all sweet employee perks are built into the contract. Occasionally, workers score unexpected benefits like military veterans gorging themselves on free Denny’s pancakes or anybody who writes for The Modern Rogue having access to that intangible feeling of being just a little bit better than their friends (a feeling you can totally get, too). Or, if you worked as an American Congressperson any time after 1983, you got a free subscription to the pornographic magazine, Hustler. No, seriously.
On September 4, 1983, Hustler magazine owner, Larry Flynt, decided that the American government needed to be in tune with culture. And according to Flynt, that apparently means unfettered access to pictures of near-hardcore pornography. So he stuffed some 535 manila envelopes with the latest issue of Hustler and shipped them to the mail rooms of every single member of Congress.
As one might imagine, this upset ... well, only about half the members of Congress, actually. Regardless, in a rare moment of action, they united to complain to the United States Postal Service. They begged their mailmen to stop with the unsolicited pornography already, which was at this point coming on a monthly basis. But before the Postal Service hired somebody for the sole purpose of throwing away 534 magazines every month, a U.S. District Court judge got involved.
Pixabay
“And this is the Flynt Library, if you'd like to ... bone up on your reading.”
The resulting court case sounded like a terrible porn movie from the ’70s, and just like we’d imagine the plot of United States Postal Service v. Hustler Magazine, Inc. to go, the case concluded with the judge ruling in favor of Hustler. We don’t even want to imagine the heroic end-scene freeze frame.
The judge believed it well within the First Amendment rights of the magazine to send free copies to the country’s representatives, saying, “Receiving Hustler once each month would not unduly burden a Member of Congress. We cannot imagine that Congressional offices all lack wastebaskets.” Or private bathrooms, probably.
This practice continues to this very day, with each Congressperson utilizing a different technique to dispose of their unwanted skin mags. Some claim they’re sent to needy troops overseas, while others say they just magically disappear every time they get new interns. So by proxy, Hustler is also a perk of going to war or having a low-level position in Congress, which is almost as heroic.
Asana Gives You $10,000 To Pimp Your Workspace
What’s the most you’ve ever spent to “update” your personal workspace? This assumes, of course, that you have such a space and aren’t crammed into a warehouse with thousands of other people or a cubicle the size of a litter box. Perhaps you’d spend a couple bucks to buy a Fight Club poster to keep your boss honest, or if you were feeling really crazy, maybe you’d buy a more comfortable chair or even an exercise ball so everybody knows you’re better than them.
Well, if you’re employed by the work-management app, Asana, you can do all that and more. Asana provides new hires with a whopping $10,000 that can only be put toward drowning your workspace floor to ceiling in Brad Pitt’s photographed abs.
Pixabay
Or just throw it all on the floor and roll around in it, naked and giggling.
Asana wants its employees to really take ownership of their workspace and build a better “work culture.” Apparently, many of their employees spend that money on really hardcore stand-up desks which honestly sounds miserable. Of course, they’re probably aware that all of us sitting down to write are probably going to be dead soon. So we guess strong-calfed Asana employees will actually have the last laugh from their motorized standing desk thrones.
42Floors Pays You To Go On Vacation Before You Start Working For Them
Since Americans work longer hours and take less vacation time than pretty much everybody else, some sexy, new startup companies have been offering their employees unlimited vacation time. As long as they make sure their work gets done, employees can spend every other waking moment scaling Mount Kilimanjaro in their underwear for all their companies care. Of course, it turns out that unlimited vacation time freaks employees out and often causes them to take less vacation time, because Americans don’t trust anything unlimited unless it comes in a metal trough at Golden Corral.
As one might imagine, no matter what the vacation policy is, many American employees tend to be exhausted and hate their job. That’s what the CEO of 42Floors, Jason Freedman, noticed about an employee he was trying to hire. When everybody else was asking the potential worker when he could start selling his soul again, Freedman said he would only give this guy a job if he took a two-week paid vacation before he started working.
Pixabay
They also gave him a small child to even it out.
This kicked off a trend in several companies whereby their new tech hires spend the first two weeks of their new job lying catatonic on a beach somewhere. By the time they actually get to the office, they're ready to work until they die and can be flash-frozen.
Japan Won’t Fire You, So You Can Get Paid To Do Nothing
Sometimes employees can earn an extra perk that’s actually supposed to be a punishment. No, not a sexy disciplinary thing like Jennifer Aniston’s character from Horrible Bosses, more like a literal time-out for useless employees. Unlike in America, it’s actually incredibly difficult -- both legally and culturally -- to fire Japanese employees. Historically, this has led to a phenomenon called “madogiwa zoku,” which translates to “window seat tribe.” Basically, there are thousands of Japanese workers no longer useful to their companies who haven’t been fired and literally won’t be. Employers hope they just eventually leave, because nobody likes to feel like they’re not contributing. Well, except for tons of people who would definitely sign up for that gig.
The problem is that, in recent years, struggling Japanese companies have really needed to cut more staff (presumably because they’re running out of windows for useless employees to sit at), but they still don’t feel like they can just fire anybody. So instead, they’ve started taking their unproductive members and shoving them in what are called “oidashibeya” rooms in the hopes that it’ll get people out the door faster.
The idea behind oidashibeya is that instead of giving a worthless employee a sweet window spot, they take them into a windowless room and hope that they lose their minds and quit out of some combination of boredom and shame. Which is actually the same tactic my football coach used on me in high school. Oidashibeya rooms are a terrible place to spend your career, and many placed there do eventually quit. And that’s great for the company, because it means they don’t get any severance packages like in a layoff.
Of course, some people have incredible stamina to do literally nothing all day, and a 51-year-old man named Shusaku Tani decided to push it to the extreme. As of 2013, the Sony employee had spent over two years doing nothing but sitting in a room, cruising the internet, and writing a brief report of what he’d done all day before heading home to his family. He told the New York Times that he refuses to leave, and in doing so, has set up a pretty cushy gig for himself.
New York Times
9:00 AM - 4:00 PM: Stared longingly.
Scopely Gives Employees The Most Absurd Briefcase Ever
One of the most awesome perks for pretty much any company worth working for is the sign-on bonus. You're not going to get those for low level jobs, but for anybody savvy enough to be hired by the gaming company Scopely, your sign-on bonus is thoroughly fantastic.
New hires receive a briefcase full of several things, some of which are, in fact, money. But this is no ordinary stack of cash. It's $11,000 wrapped in bacon. That’s right. You can always smell a Scopely employee even from outside a GameStop. Nestled up against those swine-fat encrusted riches are several other goodies like a spear gun, a box of cigars, Sex Panther cologne, beard-grooming oil, and a full year’s worth of Dos Equis beer.
The new hire also gets access to a custom-tailored tuxedo and a professional oil painting of themselves. It honestly appears as if Scopely is actively mocking their new employees. Like maybe if they shame them hard enough, they’ll work for them for eternity in their bacon-smelling, well-fitted tuxedos out of fear of ever showing their faces in public again.
CNET
Career goals. And also relationship goals. And really, just goals in general.
Google Will Do Your Chores
Few things are worse than coming home after a long day of programming or giving haircuts with a battle-ax only to realize you’ve still got a ton of chores to do. Even if it’s just as simple as throwing your filthy underwear in the washing machine or picking up your ungrateful child from wherever you last left them, chores after a work day are invariably a huge bummer. That’s why Google decided to do away with all the stuff in your life that doesn't involve tweaking SEO algorithms, and do the chores for you. More specifically, they hire “corporate concierge” workers to do basically whatever their employees want.
Pixabay
“I picked up your majestic snow-horse from the horse cleaners.”
In the official description for the job, the concierge will need to be able to do stuff like make restaurant reservations (and suggestions) and order flowers. They’ll pick up your dry cleaning, find tickets to concerts, or hell, probably even plan and book entire vacations to places like Belize for you. Of course, the employee still has to pay to fly to Belize, but at least they don’t have to stress out about making sure they can find a hotel where they won’t be murdered. Speaking of, the only thing the concierge doesn’t seem able to do is kill people for you. At least not until our feature film, Google Killcierge, comes out next summer in select theaters.
