Hacker News Reader

Comment by _2d30 | Hacker News Reader

Being the company everyone loves to hate is tough. They're paying the people their full wages still, many of whom won't be working anymore but they're evil because FB chose to give $1K to their FTEs. All they had to do was not be super extra nice to their FTEs and no one would give a shit. The full class of workers would be worse off but FB the company would be better off.

What a stupid thing to complain about.

View on HN

I think you've missed the broader point. The whole thing is a reminder that many 'progressive' companies like Facebook like to boast about how well they treat their employees - high wages etc - but in reality they outsource most/all of the lower-paid jobs. There's nothing wrong with this(!) but it does mean they lose some moral highground as a lot of people working physically in their offices probably don't have very good terms/job security after all. (Unless, of course, they also require good conditions for their outsourced workers too.)

I don't know much in the way of details but there's this quote from the article implying the get meals:

> “Would help ease the cost of not having hot food and snacks at work five days a week also.”

There's also this article (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-13/facebook-...) which implies the minimum wage for their contractors is $18/hr in low cost areas and $22/hr in high cost areas.

Thanks. One does wonder why they have tens of thousands of content moderators, none of whom are actual employees.

I would imagine Facebook hires contractors to moderate content because the job has high turnover and doesn't require any skills.

What do they mean by a contractor? Do they mean Software Engineering contractors or do they mean zero hour contractors which are typically not paid particularly well.

I am a .NET contractor/consultant at a similarly large corporation (just finishing a contract now). I wouldn't expect a penny from the corporation. It just how it goes.

> There's nothing wrong with this

Agree

It might seem stupid to you but inequity is a pretty normal thing to complain about.

Is there anything that prevents contractors from getting FT positions?

That would be inequity

FB pays its engineers more than other companies around the world. Is that inequity?

If an "inequity" is such that we are complaining about a step which makes some people better off but no one worse off, I will always claim it's stupid to complain about. Again, they are getting their full wages whether they are working or not. Their lives are no worse off as a consequence of Facebook's actions (many are better since they won't be working, WFH and/or avoiding COVID) but you're upset that Facebook did make some other people's lives better. I can't understand why I would get behind this. Seriously, if FB had just not given one set of workers a little bet extra, then no one would be whining at all and workers as a whole would be relatively worse off as compared to what did happen. It makes no sense to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com