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It turns out there is such thing as a free lunch — and that’s important to techies looking for the best place to work in Silicon Valley.
This year it’s Google offering the best pay, perks and benefits, according to a survey conducted by career site Glassdoor. That beats out Facebook, which was ranked third-best by pay and benefits this year.
It’s worth noting that this score doesn’t account for overall happiness at the company, which usually involves an estimation of the culture, the leadership and the ease of working with management — or lack thereof. On that list, which came out months ago, it was Bain and Company that led the pack, not a technology company.
But as far as perks of being an employee go, Googlers seem to be the happiest. According to the survey, which was composed of anonymized ratings from current and former Googlers, employees are happy with not only their salaries, but also their benefits packages and stuff like free food, onsite massages, in-house medical services and even company-wide outings to cool offsite spots. Hawaii retreat, anyone?
That said, all the in-house perks may look nice, but they’re meant to keep employees on campus for much longer than they would normally stay. That ostensibly means more time spent working, and that’s a good thing for Google, Facebook and others.
As for the bottom line: Google employees’ average base salary comes out to about $128,000 for software engineers, while that same group averages around $120,000 over at Facebook. (Apple, by the way, tops the tech company list at an average of $132,000.)
Considering how often people seem to have left Google for younger companies like Facebook, Twitter and others, it’s not surprising that Google has upped the number of niceties it’s willing to dole out to employees.
Free sushi included.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
