If you've never been treated as an adult before, "We will treat you like an adult. You'll even be able to spend money without asking for permission." sounds like an outrageous perk. Many, many decisions about compensation and working style at startups are optimized for an audience which has never been treated as an adult before.
This is similar to how Google recruiters deploy their free food perk, incidentally. Google has over-the-top food benefits and has since forever. This is so widely publicized that people who are not in the tech industry know about it. Everybody who would take a job at Google is aware of it. Nonetheless, if you were to today ask a Google recruiter for a salary bump, they would as a matter of policy ask for a little time to think it over, then come back with "Well, we give you all the free food you can eat. A meal in Mountain View runs about $15 to $20 or so, and you could easily get 10 of them a week from us, so that's worth something like $10k a year right there, right? Boom, I just got you the extra $10k."
And this is standard policy because it routinely works on people who are smart enough to work at Google.
The food is a bit of a actual perk. That's why it's common to be taxed (benefit-in-kind). The tax man knows that employees/employers would be able to pay money to employees without paying tax by giving many non-money benefits.
That's why it's common to be taxed (benefit-in-kind)
It is not the practice of the United States to tax certain types of food benefits, including (almost certainly) the way in which tech companies customarily deliver food to their workers. You can read the test here:
If you've never been treated as an adult before, "We will treat you like an adult. You'll even be able to spend money without asking for permission." sounds like an outrageous perk. Many, many decisions about compensation and working style at startups are optimized for an audience which has never been treated as an adult before.
This is similar to how Google recruiters deploy their free food perk, incidentally. Google has over-the-top food benefits and has since forever. This is so widely publicized that people who are not in the tech industry know about it. Everybody who would take a job at Google is aware of it. Nonetheless, if you were to today ask a Google recruiter for a salary bump, they would as a matter of policy ask for a little time to think it over, then come back with "Well, we give you all the free food you can eat. A meal in Mountain View runs about $15 to $20 or so, and you could easily get 10 of them a week from us, so that's worth something like $10k a year right there, right? Boom, I just got you the extra $10k."
And this is standard policy because it routinely works on people who are smart enough to work at Google.