When you have looked at new opportunities, or been lured away when happy, what are some of the most important perks that you look for?
This isn't the typical perks question. I'm looking for real world experience: what perk caused you to make a switch? Was is a major influence in your decision, and why?
As a single father of 2 kids, vacation is the best perk.
My current employer also offers 2 weeks of paid family sick leave to use when the kids are sick (or I am).
Aside from that, flexibility to work from home when I need to - and a pure performance based review process is great.
These perks drew me away from a very steady job to one of higher risk. I started at my new job with 4 weeks vacation plus 2 weeks family sick leave, plus the flexibility I needed to work from home/weekends/etc.
I got pulled away from a 5 year relationship because of project management.
A good team does it for me.. Tell me what I'm working on, not how much you're going to pay me. After I make "rent" I could care less about the rest. AS long as it's clean code I'm happy.
I had tool a job for a major US airline. They usually have flight benefits: you can fly on any flight as long as there was space on the plane after all the paying passengers were on. Pretty sweet at the time (spent a few weekends in Europe). It was actually a pretty fun job too.
If the work is interesting and the colleagues are intelligent and get things done that is enough for me.
Flexibility is great, but at any company I would consider working for it's more of a standard that a perk
work from home with flex hours.
yeah there are gotcha's with working from home (the extra hours, the physical detachment from teammates, the primary mode of communication being text (chat,email) and audio (skype))
but not having to fight commuter traffic is near priceless.
Of course, this presumes other basics are already in place, such as reasonable pay and reasonable workload (ie: dont be pulling 80hr weeks).
Make me matter or make me better -- I happen (as do most people) to think that I am important an so I would like my work to reflect this and to know that the people I work for value what I do, or help me become better (either will do, but both are of course better).
I know that most companies will fire me the moment they can save a penny doing so, so don't expect me to stick around if I can make a penny more elsewhere.