I recently had a programming session that provided a nice ad hoc benchmark because I was asking various LLMs to find and fix instances of a certain kind of suboptimal pattern. Codex (gpt-5.5 default) was about twice as fast as Claude (Opus 4.6) with indistinguishable quality.
I am probably the only person ever to ruin a copy of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by dropping it into a toilet adjacent to the poker room at Foxwoods. (I'd forgotten to zip up a backpack and it fell out.)
Here's an impolite theory of perks: they're a form of collusion between the employer and employee at the expense of spouses and dependents. (As a matter of household negotiation, a rarely-visible, rarely-legible decrease in salary is usually easier to justify than going out and buying nice lunches, office furniture, massages, or whatever else.) I don't think this is one of the five most important explanations of perks, but I'd guess it has nonzero explanatory value.