oddness... I would have thought the best thing a startup or small company (or any company) could do is treat it's employees like real actual individual people rather than them being a warm body filling that job title.

I've had experiences with a number of employers and also tried managing both groups of kids and devs so I'll share my thoughts (kids are easier).

Everyone has to eat. The easier you make this for people the better; apart from anything else hungry brains don't work properly so it's the company that looses out. A small kitchen including a microwave, toaster and fridge should be bare essentials. Make sure you have knives, cutlery and bowls/plates; potentially more if you have people working silly hours (eg enough facilities to knock up a plate of food). Don't baulk at supplying a minimum of tea/coffee/sugar/milk, nice water and potentially snacks too. If people are using the milk too quickly for whatever reason, it's really simple; buy more.
Previous places have done Pizza Friday (weekly, monthly or quarterly) which is always nice. It brings the entire office together which is great for getting to know colleagues and amazing things can happen when distant arms of the business sit down together over food.

Be easy with timekeeping and have some sympathy for the length of people's commute. This isn't possible with all roles, but my current contract doesn't have start/finish times or even an amount of hours in it -and it's amazingly liberating. Lots of our people have silly commutes (I'm driving for about an hour and a quarter) but I don't think anyone has a stressful one. Everyone (who's in) tries to get in before 10am (we never schedule meetings earlier) so people arrive between 7-10 and tend to leave some time around 4-8. If you get stuck in traffic and end up running late then it's annoying but it's not _stressful_.

With the right team, this seems to work extraordinarily well. People are happy and healthy and personally invested in doing a good job and take pride in it. When a deadline looms, something serious breaks or even if you've just got happily engrossed in something interesting then no one bats at eyelid at being in the office at >10pm. We have an on-call rota, but most people have set up personal alert systems so we get notified when we're not holding the phone -it's a matter of pride and respect both to our customers but also to each other. -tldr: bosses often expect people to work late but all is doom if you're not at your desk ten minutes before your official start time.

It's very distancing and disjointing to know you can't put anything down (from thoughts in a notebook, spare laptop charger, _my_ selection of random cds and usb sticks), basically make provision for future and be able to find it in weeks to come. I think physical carries across to the mental too; my brain finds it easier to resume from where it left jobs at home time when my general workspace is in the same state in the morning. At the very least people should be given a locker or a set of draws they control, especially if they're out of the office for periods of time. In technical roles I find hotdesking and hot-computering sucks more balls than imaginable; it's awful to the point where I actually used "sucks more balls" on HN. Oh, and if you have to refuse me local admin rights (and even if you don't), give people a couple of VPSs in a safe DMZ that they have root (and snapshot/rollback ability) on.

Open office culture can be fantastic (your mileage (or relevancy) may vary), but please don't think I mean stick everyone together in a big echoy room where you can't hear yourself think. If you're working on a laptop then really it shouldn't matter where you're doing it so make sure people get just as good wireless at their desk as in the office next door, the quiet room or outside next to the pond. Open culture should mean that no one is afraid to ask questions and that no one takes questioning personally and is willing to explain anything. If you're having a meeting or discussion (that isn't specifically private/privileged) then anyone is welcome to sit or wander in, listen and ask questions or offer explanations. Everyone gets to put forward their best ideas and then you pick them all apart with everyone else and hopefully all come to a consensus. Personally I love it when people see flaw in my 'obvious' ideas well before I've tried implementing them and then explain exactly why it sounds great but here's the key you missed -or simply, it's nice to know we've got each others backs. All this relies on good people and good leadership, but when dev, ops, networking and even sales and management are all on the same page then great things will happen.

Night/Shift workers: If you're a 24/7 operation then you've got people that work even odder times than the rest. Night and shift workers (I've seen 7-7 is relatively common and people end up out of sync with the rest of the business. Make sure they don't miss out when people get fed or when the office comes together -these are the people keeping stuff going when everyone else is asleep or enjoying weekends; imho it deserves more respect than is usually awarded to it.