Tech Companies Show Feet as They Try to Appeal to Gen Z

Over the last year or so, Silicon Valley made an all-out push for employees to return to the office. Now that the industry has people back at their desks, it’s trying to figure out how to make them happy. The influx of office dwellers, including a growing number of Gen Z representatives, has the Valley trying new things, like shoeless offices.

According to the New York Times, the “no shoes” movement has picked up steam at startups, with businesses encouraging employees to leave their kicks at the door. Ben Lang, an employee at the shoeless AI coding company Cursor, launched a website called Noshoes.fun that tracks the options for prospective employees who like to let their toes get some fresh air. The list includes digital workspace maker Notion, payroll company Gusto, mobile games developer Supercell, and a number of AI-centric startups like Replicate and Rime Labs.

Now, whether going shoeless around others really adds much comfort to your work day is probably a matter of personal preference. But the idea behind it, per the Times, is to allow employees who are being made to go back to commuting to work some of the same comfort they once had while working from home. It is also apparently, in part, because the workforce at these offices skews young, and these companies are trying to figure out what exactly it is that Gen Z wants.

Elsewhere, they’re going less for regenerative and more degenerate. According to the Wall Street Journal, some startups have started filling the snack bar with Zyn and other nicotine pouches. Palantir—the surveillance tech company run by Trump-aligned, pro-war crime CEO Alex Karp—has apparently been on the front lines of this push, presumably because the hit from the pouches is the only thing that allows its employees to calm down after pushing out a new update to improve the efficacy of murder drones.

At this point, corporate America’s general confusion as to how to accommodate a younger cohort that generally seems to expect more of its employer than generations before it. Executives have labeled Gen Z as things like “undisciplined,” “entitled,” and “lazy”—though frankly, every generation seems to go through this slander as they enter the workforce.

But the cultural divide seems to be about as big as it’s ever been. According to a report from CBS News, some companies are even going so far as to send their Gen Z employees to etiquette classes so they can learn how to behave in mixed company settings like an office.

Interpreted as friendly as possible, the trend is an attempt to help Gen Z get up to speed on some of the lessons it may have missed by having a chunk of its socialization period stolen by a global pandemic. Taken a little less generously, it’s corporate entities trying to push a generation of people who have more expectations of work-life balance, better boundaries around their time and effort, and demand more respect from their bosses to fall in line with an industry that pushes work over everything. Given that, it’s hard to imagine that letting people stand at the water cooler in socks and slippers is going to win them over.