&gt; You don&#x27;t appreciate office cultures involving alcohol or dog-friendliness, and you roll your eyes and put up with them.<p>I think the OP is complaining about this &quot;culture&quot; being used as a weapon to trick, mislead, and bully people.<p>&gt; So when you flat-out lie to your coworkers about your feelings, you&#x27;re undermining the social fabric, for your pecuniary gain<p>Any company that forces you to lie about your personal non-work related opinions in order to keep your job is incredibly toxic.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s also disrespectful to assume that your coworkers don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s actually valuable to them.<p>The problem is non-monetary benefits are misleadingly marketed to prospective employees and are thus very hard to evaluate.<p>For example I&#x27;ve worked at companies that provide free dinner to employees. In reality if you took advantage of these &quot;free&quot; dinners you were expected to work late.<p>Likewise I&#x27;ve worked at a couple of places that advertise unlimited vacation days. At all of my previous jobs in tech I have had 4-5 weeks vacation per year. So naturally I&#x27;m assuming that unlimited is at least as good. In other words taking 5 weeks off over the year shouldn&#x27;t be a problem at all. Bzzzzt! Wrong.<p>Likewise many companies say they offer great career progression and training and very few deliver.<p>It is false advertising. Plain and simple.<p>Actual free dinner is easily worth $5k&#x2F;year to me. The ability to take extra vacation days here and there when I feel I need a break is easily worth $10k&#x2F;year to me. A serious focus on career progression and a focus on training is worth another $10k&#x2F;year to me.<p>Naive sheepmullet used to get tricked into giving up $15k in salary thinking he was going to get $25k in benefits (that only cost the company $5k) and everybody would win.<p>Jaded sheepmullet realises there is a huge asterisk next to most of these benefits and refuses to compromise on salary unless the benefits are written into his contract.<p>For example I&#x27;d love to take a lower salary for a job that offered serious training and skills development. Lets write into my contract that you will provide me 20 days off work for self-study + 100 hours of 1 on 1 mentoring by my manager + a conference budget + a 10% pay increase at the end of each year.