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Matt J
Matt J

The type of people you'd like to hire tends to be a first-order concern when deciding what sort of perks to offer. For the programmer who's thinking about or in the process of raising a family, paternity leave, company matching of adoption funds up to $X/year, flexible vacation and working hours, and a sense of job security may be much more attractive than a soda machine and free Segways for all. You mention that you're looking for "junior" or "young" programmers, but many young folks do still fall into this category.

I sense, however, that by "young", you might mean "too young to be into that whole 'work-life balance' thing". Let's call this 'The Google Strategy'. The idea here is to make it so it just doesn't make sense to their analytical minds to ever leave work. Have on-site services like free food, drink, and laundry, provide gathering places for informal conversations. Make them feel like they're the rock stars of the company, and they'll repay you with long hours and hard work. The good news for you is that these types of perks don't cost you much at all relative to the increased hours they'll be willing to put in. The bad news is that this model tends not to be sustainable, and this dot-com era "irrational exuberance" no longer satisfies your programmers when they start to want to take vacations, get married and go on a long honeymoon, have kids, and so forth. At that point, they want flexibility, more vacation time, a 401k, etc. Besides the first one, these all cost significant coin.

Here's the most important point though: if you'd like to hire the absolute brightest people you can find, don't try to outsmart them. Odds are, the really sharp ones will be a little less interested in the size of the Free Red Bull Fridge and the number of air hockey tables at their disposal, than whether you'll value them as an asset to the company and as an individual (both in terms of compensation and employer/employee relations in general), whether you have a sustainable business model/plan, whether your work really excites them, and whether your work really excites you. I'd suggest reading a couple essays on Joel On Software, he treats the subject of hiring good programmers in a fair amount of detail ("Smart, and Gets Things Done", I think, is the name of one of the essays).

While your question certainly isn't without merit, and providing a work environment with some of the same perks as your competitors will make your sales pitch somewhat easier, the only people that will be truly swayed by these kinds of things are not the people you want the success of your small company to depend on. Good developers want to feel like they're making a contribution to something that matters, like their skills are valued and put to good use, like they are responsible to their peers and to themselves. Focus on having a truly great, dynamic company that does great work, and that treats its technical people with respect (things like private offices help here, too), and you'll really attract the type of people you're looking for.

(Thanks to Thomas Kammeyer for a tip on the last paragraph!)