[using a throwaway here to avoid offending anyone]
I actually think there's a LOT of fat that could be cut at Google without affecting innovation. One person I know - I've literally never seen him wearing a shirt that he didn't get for free at Google. I've seen people get new Mac power adapters because the tech stop was closer than their desk.
These things are pretty small compared to salaries - and they do serve a purpose - having to buy your own t-shirts and pay for your own gym membership is a pretty good reason never to quit, but I wonder how much they foster a culture of just throwing money at problems instead of innovating? I wonder how much they make Googlers soft and entitled.
My point is less about the t-shirts specifically (as I said, it's a minimal cost) and more about the company culture as a whole. If you can make a silly request for an office fire pole and the company will give you a fire pole, does that foster an attitude where you'll just throw more servers at a problem instead of thinking hard about your systems, or an attitude where a cool project will stay in development for a long time, even when the business case for it stops making sense.
Sometimes throwing money at a problem is the right solution. I've been at companies where we've spent 16 man hours trying to figure out how to clear up space on a server(about 40 GB). Have there been a more open purchasing system we just would have gone out and bought a hard drive and saved the company $8500.
I remember working at a place that made employees buy their own pens, maybe as symbol of frugality. Nobody really got it - we just thought it was eccentric.
Some workspace amenities are basically just props - they don't cost anything once installed. People try it out a few times and go back to work. Day to day, it's about as significant as the junk on the walls at a theme restaurant, but it makes the space look "creative", and apparently that's more important than looking "frugal". Arcade games get used that way too - sure, you can play it, but who has time?
Meanwhile, important, recurring costs like improving data center efficiency do get a lot more attention.
That fire pole costs a lot less than the salary increase you'd need in order to achieve the same level of employee retention. Google has quite a bit of engineering talent; you don't want that talent to evaporate for the sake of some short-term cost savings. Your scheme will absolutely affect innovation: it will cause innovators to leave.
If you want to cut datacenter costs, reward engineers for impact, and include cost savings under your definition of impact. Engineers are pretty rational people and will respond to incentives.
as a thought experiment, Amazon is basically the opposite of the google culture in this perspective (door desks, soda/food is not subsidized, equipment is just barely enough, etc). now, this leads to lots of complaints from a subset of engineers who do then go to google (or like) pretty quickly. but Amazon does seem to be able to innovate (aws, kindle/fire, alexa) and survive in very low margin businesses. google seems to have struggled to move beyond search in any meaningful way.
I understand the point you're trying to make about the stress on frugality at Amazon and I agree with you, but your specific points are more accurate for past Amazon. These days Amazon has become significantly more accommodating.
The door desks are more of a tradition. You can request more expensive automatic standing desks easily. The soda/food is not subsidized day-to-day, but we do get coffee and tea (and if you stay late due to work you can get reimbursed for dinner depending on your team). The hardware is perfectly fine as well. I have 2x 1440p monitors and an i7 13" Retina MacBook Pro as well as a cloud desktop (courtesy of AWS) with scaling hardware as I need it for development.
I am also at Amazon currently. You are right, its not as frugal as in the past but it is still significantly more frugal than an environment like Google or similar startups/unicorns that go for that. I have interviewed people who are horrified to see soda machines with prices. Requesting a nicer desk (which requires some ergo hoops), no daily soda/food, and decent but not fully maxed out hardware is still pretty frugal comparatively for engineers, even if they have loosened things up in the last 3-4 years from before. While Amazon now provides you hardware that is actual functional for the job, places like Google are giving you free yoga and dry cleaning.
Googler here. The free shirts are usually not for employees. They're usually old promotional stuff that are left overs from events held for businesses.
Also, some Googlers are insanely good at finding out when they're about to get rid old swag.. I'm not one of them, unfortunately.
I do admit, the quantity of Mac power adapters laying around the office is a bit silly.
I actually think there's a LOT of fat that could be cut at Google without affecting innovation. One person I know - I've literally never seen him wearing a shirt that he didn't get for free at Google. I've seen people get new Mac power adapters because the tech stop was closer than their desk.
These things are pretty small compared to salaries - and they do serve a purpose - having to buy your own t-shirts and pay for your own gym membership is a pretty good reason never to quit, but I wonder how much they foster a culture of just throwing money at problems instead of innovating? I wonder how much they make Googlers soft and entitled.