Josef Desimone, Facebook's executive chef, has died | Hacker News Reader

Josef Desimone, Facebook's executive chef, has died

facebook.com

58 pointsparadiseall28 comments

I've always admired Google for elevating the role of chef to such unprecedented heights.

But it also makes me wonder what other roles in these big companies could be elevated. (Random example, perhaps the cleaning staff.)

When I was at Amazon circa 1999 rumor had it that the van driver we saw once a day (he delivered intra-office mail -- is that still a thing?) had at minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock options and maybe much more. Beyond being a tad jealous, it also made me happy that the company would think enough of the "support" staff to make sure they were given the same perks as everyone else, even if they were of a different magnitude.

Compare to good old Zynga: "One Journal source said that Zynga executives were especially concerned with not creating a "Google chef" scenario."

http://m.cnet.com/news/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-stoc...

According to http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/04/business/fi-chef4, Desimone worked for Google before Facebook. "As Google's first executive chef, Ayers hired Desimone in 2003 when Google was growing so fast that they cooked in the back of an 18-wheeler and served meals under tents."

Quite an amazing journey. RIP.

I just think about projects I benefit from and team members I've worked with and how this can happen at any moment. How differently the world seems when you take just one person out of it. Suddenly, everyone around you becomes the most important person to ever exist.

My deepest condolences to the Desimone family and to everyone at Facebook.

Perhaps I am just lacking some perspective here and someone could better inform me, and I don't mean to be "that guy" right now, but how does this really relate to the guideline of:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I can understand when someone like Douglas Engelbart dies and HN is filled with stories about him, but what exactly has this chef done that makes him noteworthy on HN?

Perhaps he's fed (or knew), at one point, many of the folks here on HN.

He worked at both Facebook and Google, so aside from anything else I have to assume that a good number of HN readers have benefitted from his cooking.

Are developers now the only employees worth celebrating at tech companies?

Maybe I'm just coming from a different perspective having only ever worked for a small company, but I don't exactly find a chef to be noteworthy, at least not in any technical sense.

Let me put it another way, aside from the employees of Google or Facebook, what has this man done that would make him interesting to the rest of the people on this site? What did he do that makes him noteworthy? I'm sure he was a good man and all, but what does he matter to me? By all means, if there is something noteworthy, please let me know, otherwise why was this posted?

You really are being that guy. If it bothers you so much, why not just skip the thread?

The content on the front page is whatever members have decided merits the attention of the community. Clearly it affects a number of HN readers or else it would not have made it to the front page.

Please stop. What you're doing is not appropriate.

While his comments may come off as insensitive to some people, merely expressing an opinion, even one that may be unpopular or disagreed with, is not inappropriate in any way.

I encourage him to not stop expressing his true thoughts on this subject, as well as on any other subject that may come up. The uninhibited exchange of ideas is what makes for truly interesting and insightful discussion. Once political correctness or avoiding hurt feelings overtakes free expression, further discussion becomes pointless.

There is the right place and the right time for expressing dissenting opinion. An announcement about someone passing away is simply not it. I don't know how else I could explain this. This is just basic decency.

This is a perfectly acceptable time and place to discuss anything relating to this matter.

The decent thing for everyone here to do is to express their true opinions, regardless of how others may interpret them.

Holding back, or not expressing one's ideas at all, out of some fear of "offending" somebody is a truly indecent thing to do.

You are coming from a bit of an asshole perspective. While hacker news guidelines are certainly useful in the majority of links posted, I am sure they can be bent for a death notice that may personally move members of the community.

Additionally, as has already begun on this thread, there are certainly interesting thoughts that can sprout from the initial link given even a modicum of intellectual curiosity -- how social networks and online communities can deal with death, for example, or how support staff should be integrated into company culture.

At any rate, enough other people have found the post interesting or relevant enough to upvote it.

Guess what: not everything on HN is meant for you. Just move along.

Before this was "Hacker News" it was "Startup News". Due to historical / cultural reasons, a large base of the readership of HN are people from, or with connections to, Silicon Valley and the companies there. A lot of people on HN have probably been touched by Mr. Desimone in some way, and more than a few people here may have known him personally. IOW, he might not have been a "hacker" (or maybe he was, who knows?) but he's part of the "HN family" in a sense. That's why his passing gets a mention here, despite the fact that he may not have been notable to hackers in any other regard.

If my custodian passed away, I would be tremendously sad, although he never touched a computer in his life except to see pictures of his baby granddaughter. He is a wonderful person and a great friend to have around the office. Everyone loves him, and he is a much a member of the team as anyone else. We bounce ideas off him all the time, and although he sometimes has no idea what we're talking about he does his best to be an ear to whisper into. And in the the company I work for, I might be the only employee on HN.

Now multiply that by the thousands of employees from Facebook or Google who are here. Does this new affect them? Hell yes it does. You know what "doesn't matter to me"? The death of Douglas Engelbart. Sure he invented a lot of things that I use every day, but I never knew him and I never even paid him a thought until I heard he had died. But plenty of others had, and did, and mourned him. And I mourned alongside them, for we had collectively lost someone great that I never had the honor of knowing.

In short, try to be a decent human being and respect the mourning of others. This post is one our of thirty on the main page, and yet this is the one you choose to shit all over. Find something that interests you more.

Sorry, dude, you're "that guy".

Someone who a bunched of people loved has tragically and suddenly passed away. A bunch of folks who knew him probably read this and up voted the story. I think you could have picked a better post -- finding one could not possibly be difficult -- to grind this particular axe.

You, sir, have a very poor sense of timing.

And the position of this on the home page tells me that a large collection of good hackers find it interesting. If you disagree, flag it and move on.

I agree with you. While it's sad that this person has died, it doesn't really seem newsworthy.

Mark's grinning face right above this announcement bothers me for some reason: http://cl.ly/image/2k0p2v2A1U3t

it might be a decent (though seldom used) feature for these communication mediums to have (FB, G+, etc) to be able to hotswap your icon for just one message when the message is grave.

many gmail users now have icons (gee thanks, G+), and I can imagine that this awkwardness happens frequently in death notice emails sent to family and friends. Swapping it with even a generic frown face icon might do.

The ability to have a "tone profile picture" -- where you can have several pics and then pick the tone of a post....

I recall when a colleague I had worked with passed away suddenly and we were not yet connected on linkedin, and linkedin was sending me reminders to connect with her for months after she passed.

I emailed support at linkedin and told them of the passing - never got a response - but the alerts eventually stopped... though I do not attribute their stopping to my email to them.

LiveJournal has that ... you can have several avatars and choose for every post and comment.

Or how about the fact that thousands of people are "liking" the sad news.

They are not liking the sad news, they're liking Mark's words said about the sad news.

Just an unfortunate effect of Facebook's terminology (compared to, say, a Google +1, or an upvote). The intent is to promote and share the message, regardless of how it actually makes you feel.

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