We are trying something new. Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the industry.

Farhad: Howdy, Mike. Your GIFs were all over the web this week. How does it feel to be a meme?

Mike: It was like being in a soundless, animated version of hell. Though it helped me hit my quota of talking about myself on Twitter much earlier in the week than usual, which was nice.

Farhad: So it was like a regular weekday for you?

O.K., other than your GIFs, it was kind of a slow week in tech news. Apple told USA Today that 11 million people have signed up for its streaming music service just one month after it was released. That’s impressive — Spotify, which has been around much longer, has around 20 million paying subscribers. But it’s worth remembering that Apple’s service is free for three months, so we’ll have to wait to see if the numbers decline once users have to pay up.

Also, Business Insider had a critical article about Hampton Creek, a start-up that has been praised (including by yours truly) for its efforts to find a plant-based replacement for the chicken egg. According to former employees, “the company used shoddy science, or ignored science completely, stretched the truth when labeling samples, and created an uncomfortable and unsafe work environment,” the site reported.

The founder and chief executive of Hampton Creek responded on Medium, saying the article was “based on false, misguided reporting” that he said some people had discredited. He went into some detail responding to some of the criticism in the article.

Perhaps the biggest news came from Netflix. On Tuesday, the streaming video company announced that it would offer “unlimited” maternity and paternity leave to its employees. While it was obviously good news for Netflix workers, the announcement generated more controversy than I would have guessed. This was partly because of the gimmicky way Netflix announced the move — it’s not “unlimited” leave, it’s unlimited during your first year after having a kid. And later on in the week, we learned that workers in Netflix’s DVD warehouse won’t be covered by the new policy.

Subscribe to the Bits Newsletter

But people in Silicon Valley were also suggesting that there was something sneaky and self-serving, for Netflix, in offering these benefits. Why was that?

Mike: I spoke to a number of folks who worked at Google, which has a reputation for being open with policies on maternity leave and vacation. What was interesting to me was this feeling of insecurity when taking time away from work — be it for vacation or for having a child.

Which, I think, is not specific to any one company. It’s this latent feeling of workaholism that exists in a number of companies, especially in high-growth start-ups. I remember a few years ago, in the early days of Square, when employees took to the web to complain how they felt like they could never take time off because of the pressure inside.

Anyway, that’s all to say that the move may suggest a progression of parental leave policies in the United States — which I believe lag significantly behind most of the rest of the world — a lot of people do not take as much leave as they could, or perhaps should, because they fear how it will appear to their colleagues or they worry they may miss out on opportunities for advancement.

This is a very real thing. And I’m wondering how these companies will combat that sort of feeling so that parents can take the time they are allowed.

Also, let me be a cynic for a moment — or rather, let me continue being the cynic that I definitely am: This seems to be another notch in the recruiting war of perks that companies offer. If Google, Apple and Facebook all offer superb parental leave policies, you can be sure that other tech companies need to hop on that train to stay competitive. You’ll note that Microsoft expanded its own policies just a day or so after Netflix’s announcement.

O.K., back to altruism or whatever.

Farhad: It’s good you bring up Google, which in many ways started Silicon Valley down the path of these lavish benefits, from free lunch to expanded maternity leave to even benefits for surviving family members of employees who die. Like you, I’ve been a bit skeptical about these perks. Once I asked Laszlo Bock, Google’s director for people operations (Google’s name for human resources), about them: Do you calculate the return-on-investment of all this stuff, and are you only offering perks when they help you keep employees working longer, or improve recruitment, or reduce attrition?

His answer: Not directly. Mr. Bock argues that what Google cares about is not the number of hours people work, but rather their happiness while they’re there. He says happiness is one of the key ingredients for creativity, and at tech companies, whose overriding mission is often to create stuff that doesn’t exist, employee creativity is all that matters. Through scientifically rigorous research techniques, Google does attempt to measure happiness. Insofar as things like expanded maternity and paternity leave improve happiness, they improve Google’s overall fortunes, he says.

Does this sound like dreamy, Bay Area progressive pap? Probably! But according to Google, the policies that improve people’s happiness also often make economic sense for the company. Maternity and paternity leave is a good example. In 2007, after noticing that women were leaving the company at a higher rate than men, Google expanded paid maternity leave to 18 weeks from 12 weeks, and later the rate at which new mothers left fell by 50 percent. The policy change paid for itself in reduced turnover alone, Google said. But it could benefit the company even more if one of those people who decided not to leave invents the next big thing.

In other words, altruism pays.

Oh, and Mike, this whole discussion got me thinking: I wish you’d take unlimited leave.

Mike: Funny you say that! I’m going to Hawaii next week for the first time ever. Maybe I’ll binge on poi and never come back.