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Comment by maybeiambatman | Hacker News Reader

Damn, say what you will about FB, that's a gesture and a half.

Why? It's a fraction of a percent of most employees' annual pay, which presumably they are still receiving. If anything, it's like giving everyone a tiny bonus for some PR. At least that's how I read it.

If they gave that money to contractors, that would actually be a gesture of good will. Honestly I feel like they'd be better off only giving it to contractors and ignoring their employees, who are already extremely well-paid.

If you read the article you will see they are also giving every essentially a full bonus irrespective of performance. Depending on individual agreements that could be a significant sum so it's definitely not a fraction of a percent of anybody's annual pay.

Facebook has always given out bonuses, that's not news. The news is giving every employee $1000, and I'm saying that's a horrible decision on Facebook's part and they should be shamed for it. They should use that money to help those in need, or just not do anything at all.

Facebook has always been known for its unethical decisions, but this is just dumb - unless their goal is to get some incredibly superficial PR for what is a very small amount of money to them (tens of millions is a rounding error compared to their quarterly revenue).

You've failed to comprehend the article and now you've failed to comprehend my comment. Facebook isn't simply 'giving bonuses'. Bonuses are based on performance. It's rare at a company that you will get 100% of your performance bonus. In this case Facebook is giving everyone a high performance score (and therefore a high % of their bonus) regardless of how well they performed.

For perspective: someone on a $100k salary with a 10% bonus might normally expect $4-8k bonus. Not it'll be $9-10k. Depending on how high the salaries are and how large the bonus %'s are the difference could be quite a lot.

pleasing cynics is like pissing outside on a windy day when you have to go - damned if you do and damned if you don't.

read the article - they're giving out 1k to each of the 45k employees. i'm sorry for the contractors (i don't know if it includes them) but that's still a small city's worth of people. they're also guaranteeing bonuses for the next two quarters for all of those people. i don't care about fb but the move definitely clears the bar for nice gesture even if it's not nobel peace prize worthy.

like how about we just rejoice in one small nice thing instead of taking meaningless cynical potshots?

I'm cynical because I still don't see how this is helpful. It's giving more money to people that already have money, instead of spreading it around to people that don't have money. Facebook employees are about the least economically vulnerable population you can find, apart from people who inherited their wealth.

Why not actually do something useful with the money, like donate it to a charity in need that's trying to help those suffering from the epidemic?

Yes - I genuinely think this is a bad move, as in they should have not done it at all. As someone who does make a stupid amount of money, I wouldn't care about an extra $1k, but I know people that would. This is just trickle down economics.

Not everybody at the company is a six figure software engineer.

Sure, but the vast majority are. This is basically targeting the group that includes mostly engineers to give them more money, instead of giving the money to content moderators or other lowly paid employees.

Again, this is basically the worst use of the money Facebook could have considered for anything with a remotely philanthropic angle. It reeks of a PR grab to me, and even if not it's just a horrible decision if their goal is to help those in need.

> this is basically the worst use of the money Facebook could have considered for anything with a remotely philanthropic angle

Huh, this isn't philanthropic. The $100 million they are giving to small businesses is philanthropic.

This is simply a benefit that they are providing to their employees.

Your comment is purely nonsensical. You're acting like FB sent out a press release that talked about this as how they are helping the world fight coronavirus.

It's helpful because it dramatically reduces stress on employees (due to guaranteed bonus without performance review) during a turbulent time.

I can't see why this is so hard to understand.

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