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Comment by _qulr | Hacker News Reader

Politics aside, many Facebook employees come across as rather childish, incapable of taking care of themselves. The big complaint is about lack of snacks! Zuck has to scold them by asking rhetorically whether they joined the company for the free food. And one employee asks if they can go live on an island by themselves, apparently like Lord of the Flies.

Of course one may fairly ask whether Facebook's hiring process produced this result. The staff skews... young. As an outsider, I get the sense that Facebook is more like a college dorm than a workplace. No coincidence I guess that Facebook started in a college dorm.

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> The big complaint is about lack of snacks!

Free food, including meals. If Facebook is anything like Google, some single people were literally using that for every meal and snack 5/7 days per week. It's tasty, nutritious food, and you don't have to prepare it or do dishes. Sure, an adult should be able to take care of this on their own, but this is a major perk, not just a box of granola bars on a shelf. It might cost them $100 per week (~$5,000 per year) to match their food intake via cooking at home. Much more if they start ordering a lot of take-out. That's a fair chunk of compensation they're not getting anymore. This absence is not at the top of my list of pandemic or employer complaints but I can see how it might be near the top of someone else's.

From what I've seen, I don't think $5K per year is a big chunk of a Facebook engineer's compensation. In any case, the bigger issue is that this situation exposes how utterly dependent these engineers are on their employer, not just for money but for basic life functionality. Only a tiny number of companies in the world offer this level of "service" to employees. What happens if and when they no longer work at Facebook? The company has seemingly turned its employees into helpless children, or at least never forced them to grow up after leaving college. If "continue to live like you're in the dorm" is a "perk", maybe it shouldn't be.

I think thats an unfair, and frankly agist extrapolation. I can cook for myself every day and there is plenty of inefficiency in that action. Its wasteful, the food isnt as good as a professional, I have to shop and waste gas, I have to pay retail pricing. Or I could use the shared resource thats done professionally and efficiently. We are engineers, are we not programmed to reduce complexity and waste. I dont think its fair yo assume they couldnt cook for themselves if they thought it was needed.

> I think thats an unfair, and frankly agist extrapolation.

Is it ageist to point out that Facebook is ageist in its hiring and operations? Or that Facebook encourages its employees to be overly dependent on Facebook?

What some would view as a "perk" — the company providing every meal — others would view as a downside. What if you prefer to be home and have meals with your family?

"A major sell to candidates is our office perks include free food"

"with work from home, we’ve lost a huge financial part of our package"

For those who prefer not eating meals at the office, how fair is it that this is considered a significant perk of Facebook employment? I'd say that whole thing could be considered kind of ageist. It's certainly highly unusual, compared to most other workplaces in the world.

You mentioned "inefficiency", but it seems that efficiency is ruling out relationships with people outside of work. ;-)

I wasn't worried about facebook, mostly just commenting that its unfair to assume these individuals who creat 400k+ in value to their companies a year aren't able to cook for themselves if they have to because they are young. I think its more likely that they are taking advantage of economic incentives.

I dont really have an opinion about facebooks agism in their hiring.

I just think you are making an unfounded assumption.

> I think its more likely that they are taking advantage of economic incentives.

My question is, who is taking advantage of whom? As I said originally, "one may fairly ask whether Facebook's hiring process produced this result."

It seems like Facebook specifically targets people who are amenable to Facebook's "caretaker" benefits, and then encourages those people to become dependent on those benefits. If you work for Facebook, you may have the choice of "taking advantage" of those incentives, but most people outside of Facebook don't have the choice: they're forced to take care of themselves. This is not necessarily a bad thing though, because self-reliance is an important life skill. If short-term economic incentives prevent you from learning important life skills, this may actually be to your long-term disadvantage. I'm not sure Facebook is doing anyone any favors in this respect.

If you think about it, why would Facebook approach hiring and employment any different from how Facebook approaches everything else? The goal is ultimately to increase "engagement" with Facebook.

I dont know why you dragging me into a different conversation, I have not comment about who facebook hires, I don't really care.

They haven't been in the office since March iirc. If they were utterly dependent on this perk, they would literally be dead by now.

If you think they're spoiled for ever having this perk, using it, missing it, and/or complaining about its absence, I won't try to convince you otherwise. I agree it's something the vast majority of people never had, much less get to enjoy during the pandemic. I'm just adding some context which I thought you might be missing when describing it as "snacks".

Anyway, I'm going to shut up on the topic now, as it's not as important to me as content moderation. I don't work for Facebook and don't plan to (sorry, recruiter who emailed me yesterday), so their employee perks affect me only very loosely as they shape industry trends. In contrast, I think the content moderation has a surprisingly huge effect on everyone. Facebook is where a lot of people find the content that shapes their opinions. It may sway the US presidential election.

> I don't think $5K per year is a big chunk of a Facebook engineer's compensation

Whether it's <1% or >10% of their compensation, any cut should be acknowledged.

You could feed yourself well, delicious and healthy food, 2000 wholesome calories a day, for 5 days a week. 20 days a month where you effectively don't have to buy groceries or eat out.

Food is a part of the compensation package at FB and other companies where money sloshes around in giant buckets.

> What happens if and when they no longer work at Facebook?

They get paid less. Plenty of people have left companies like FB et al for smaller companies where you have to buy your own lunch and they're fine. Not sure why you're so excited to pull a "kids these days" here.

> Not sure why you're so excited to pull a "kids these days" here.

I wouldn't say it's kids these days. Facebook employees are not representative of the wider public.

The question that really made me shake my head wasn't the one about food but rather "Can we build a quarantined Facebook city? Like, buying an island and all of us working there?"

Never mind the fact that Facebook probably pays better than 80% of tech companies

Never mind the fact that tech salaries are already insane

Never mind the fact that there is a global pandemic and corresponding economic uncertainty

Never mind the fact that millions of people are out of work, can't afford to feed their families, and facing one of the biggest eviction crises of all time while being completely abandoned by the government

Never mind all that - where is my free food?

What are you saying, exactly? People can't complain if others have it worse? It's hard for me to think of a more charitable interpretation of your comment, which seems to plainly chastise Facebook employees for voicing complaints during the existence of other big problems in the world.

People who can’t have a sense of perspective about temporarily not getting a free lunch shouldn’t be making decisions about what content is censored on Facebook.

They can complain about anything, it's just their complaints, in context, sound so trivial and entitled than it's hard to take them seriously. Oh the hardships! Oh the terrors! Now they only have a secure job in their own home while earning mid-six-figures! And also getting $1000 bonus! How can a human being be expected to survive on that?! Buying their own La Croix, like some kind of peasants!

The Towel Debacle for Microsoft wasn't about towels. I doubt this is about food.

We fight proxy wars all the time because we can't seem to bring ourselves to say what's really bothering us. All these other minor problems accumulate to make the unspeakable thing intolerable.

> The big complaint is about lack of snacks!

I don't think there's anything unusual about talking about that in a company-wide Q&A. It's minor, but people will want to know how they should adjust their budgets and how long. This is a good platform for such a question since it's something that affects everyone in the office.

> It's minor, but

"A major sell to candidates is our office perks include free food"

"with work from home, we’ve lost a huge financial part of our package"

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...

Perhaps they don't know how much food costs, having never gone to the grocery store. ("How much does a gallon of milk cost" is the classic political gotcha question.) Or they don't know how to cook. Those are possibilities.

Young urbanites don't cook. They don't drive, how do they get groceries. They probably have a single frying pan. For these people, free food at work might be a large portion of their daily caloric intake, outside of the beer/booze.

I don't know why this is downvoted.

Honestly, I bet a lot of employees were fine with living in apartments with minimal kitchens (most studios have the kitchen be a single long counter in a corridor of the apartment) since they would be getting their meals at the office anyways.

Yep - When I started cooking more meals and larger portions because I'm home most of the time and wanted to gain weight, I noticed that my kitchen is really suboptimal for this. Prepping breakfast and or a quick supper does the job, anything a bit more elaborate becomes a hot mess due to space and appliances.

It was an oddly contemptuous take IMO. Like what's the beef with having a single frying pan? If you really don't cook anything at all, why do you have even one? Or there's no reason you couldn't cook 3 meals a day in a single frying pan if you wanted to, just a little more cleaning.

As a small-kitchen-haver, cooking is perfectly doable. What's tougher is making enough food for 6 people or a 4-dish meal.

I completely agree. Not everyone knows, or even wants to cook 3 meals a day (me included). For people who have gotten free food through their work, it is a big deal.

Now they either have to make stuff themselves (which costs time) or source it from outside (which costs money).

I understand that this can be a point of dissatisfaction, but I think most people are reacting to the presumption that it is somehow the employers responsibility to address it.

For most of society, the answer is obvious: Figure it out, Snacks aren't in your contract.

In the US, we don't typically have employment contracts. Facebook was serving up 2+ meals per day. At (a modest estimate) $20/day, that works out to be about $5k per year. That's not an insignificant amount of cash to some people.

I guarantee that facebook employees have an employment contract they signed. This would cover assignment of intellectual property, moonlighting, and other topics. In the US, an employer can absolutely cut your salary by 5k/yr if it isn't in your contract.

But this is all beside the point, I'm not saying that 5k isn't insignificant to people, even FANG employees. I totally understand that. Im saying that facebook can take this away at the drop of a hat with no notice. It is weird to outsiders that the employees don't seem to understand this.

There are often agreements made, but the employment is still at will. So there's no 'contract' for the employment itself, whereas other jurisdictions have actual contracts, and employer can't simply fire you or alter your pay outside the scope of the contract.

Everyone understands that the benefits are subject to change. If management changes them and you don't prefer the changes, you speak up.

Personally, I won't work somewhere that doesn't offer free coffee. If the coffee is canceled, I will start looking for another gig.

Would you leave a $600k job, like a E6 at FB, if it didn't offer free coffee

If I could find another job for the same money, yes.

But they no longer have to commute to work (which costs time, or which costs money). They could use that time or money to learn the joys of cooking tasty food, tasty food being one of the few things people of all walks and persuasions can agree is a joyful thing. But they perhaps instead choose to use their free time to play grindy addictive video games, or binge watch Netflix, or consume cannabis, or rage-read political newsfeeds, or get mired in political threads on HN. Why take up music or cooking or reading good books with good friends and why find joy and peace and purpose in life when you can instead wallow in a web-cesspool?

Yes, it does seem like a college dorm. Sometimes it's even intentional, as in the design of the MPK campus. A lot of the perks serve the same purpose as a college dorm: eliminate the need (or even desire) to go off campus, maximizing time-on-task for the organizational purpose. That's not entirely a bad thing, though it does grate a bit for older employees such as myself (for two more days) sometimes.

The "live on an island" thing is different. It sounds like a reference to the policies around WFH and changing locations, though I'd left the Q&A by that point so I can't be sure. That's actually a pretty complex topic, so I'd be a bit cautious about oversimplifying or taking out of context.

> It sounds like a reference to the policies around WFH and changing locations

Yes, but that was also behind the snack complaints.

According to the article, everyone got monetary bonuses, but it seems the problem wasn't the cost of the food, it was not having "hired help" to stock and cater the food for you.

I wonder if you'd feel differently about the "hired help" if companies like Facebook and Google stopped paying that "hired help" while they sit at home doing nothing during office closures.

Not quite sure what you're arguing here?

"Living on an island" is an allusion to Randism.

Or even a Randian illusion.

Trust me, the vocal minority there are extremely sheltered, self centered and live in a weird unreality. The majority of employees who come from the real world aren't that bad but also tend to keep quiet.

I often think that people who spend too long at the top of maslow's hierarchy of needs just end up losing touch with reality.

I went on site for an interview with FB a few years ago. College atmosphere is exactly as I'd describe it. Free cafe for the kids, they were brewing beer in one corner of the office, they were keen to point out all the stuff they had available for just hanging out with the bros. If you want to work at FB, show up on a skate board, with beat headphones and a zip down hoodie. Don't show up looking like someone that works in an office.

If you want to talk about childish, should we talk about the sort of answer Zuckerberg gave. Atleast the guy there for the snacks was getting snacks until recently, I'm worried about the guys who think they joined facebook because:

>you’re here for some combination of reasons around the mission of the company, the impact that we can have in the world, trying to make sure that that’s as positive as possible

> Atleast the guy there for the snacks was getting snacks until recently

IMO destroying civil society for snacks is a worse reason than destroying civil society intentionally. The pettiness of the tradeoff makes evil people look good by comparison.

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