ha-ha-guy: The free dry cleaning and BBQ is pretty awesome. The only question is if they're offering those services because the idea is you never leave their little venue to do anything else. My brother was at Google (and is now with Apple) and they offered free dinner to the entire family. The deal was though your family comes, has dinner with you, and leaves. You stay at work. By stocking the campus with benefits they're just trying you into working there more.

I don't see why people say this like it's a bad thing. My company has a cafe in my building a minute from my office. I can go there, get food, go back to my office and resume work or reading Fark or whatever.

The alternative is walking 10 minutes to my car, driving to some food place that's probably not any better, and spending twice as much money. Offering the onsite food is good for both me and the company.

ha-ha-guy: By stocking the campus with benefits they're just trying you into working there more.

People say this as if it's some revelation you're getting screwed. I WISH more companies would do this. America's infrastructure is built around the material costs of doing business, which results in a lot of off-the-book inefficiency. Japanese companies will work you a lot of hours, but they will do everything from provide on-site meals to subsidizing transportation. In one case a bunch of companies leveraged their influence to get a traffic bottleneck cleared up. Commute time for a 7-mile route dropped from 2 hours to 30 minutes. They didn't do it to be charitable; it didn't make sense for engineering firms to stand by as their workers showed up exhausted.

What do big companies in America do? Use their political weight to get. . . tax breaks. Some of the biggest tech names in the world in the Seattle area and I-405 is still a hellhole. I get the rationale that they can always relocate, but they invariable locate to the place with the lowest property costs and biggest tax breaks -- commute time isn't even on the list. I understand that companies don't care, but do these companies think they're not losing productivity when they don't do shiat about their workers spending 1/4 of their waking hours in traffic jams?

NotARocketScientist: No-one knows what to do with a physicist.

"If I can pass quantum mechanics, I can probably figure out how to do the job," gets me about a 50% rate of turning interviews into offers, even for jobs I'm not qualified for.

If you have a 4 year degree, you're asking yourself "What problem finding a job"

lol, wut?
Depends on what your degree is in. If it is in software design, you are golden. My (advanced) degree is in physics. No-one knows what to do with a physicist.

Most of us are idiots who would rather strip the colleges of all the useless crap so that more people would learn these kinds of skills.that makes people well rounded and capable of thinking about problems from a number of points of view.

FTFY

Yeah, just look at the Labor Departments numbers.

If you have a 4 year degree, you're asking yourself "What problem finding a job"

Link