Meta is bolstering perks like happy hours and company swag as it pushes staff to return to office, despite its 'year of efficiency'

And the happy hours are unpaid time.

Zuck on a mic: "Please increase your happiness by 14%."

Everybody dance.

Now.

Love unions, but hate the idea of distilling all our problems down to "capitalism". Give it a rest.

They have increased the pay, that's how they attract talent. I know some people from school who went on to work FAANG jobs and they make 3x the median for our industry where we're all from. Sure we all deserve more money, but it's not like it isn't a desirable place to work for most people in the industry.

They can’t. Workers at Meta were paid well and then they got to work from home. There isn’t any amount of money that will make those workers want to give up their new work life balance. Perks is the only option.

Google had it right back in the day. Free shuttle rides to work. Onsite massages, dry cleaning, free cafeterias, etc. if you make it so people don’t have to do those things when they get home, they will work longer. It still doesn’t compare to wfh but it was close.

Then Meta won't be a billion $ company. There's a reason workers are paid less, let's say a janitor gets paid $8/hour and the CEO gets paid $10000/hour.

If you start paying a janitor $10000/hour , tomorrow the janitor may ask the CEO to clean toilets as they both are getting paid equally or won't show up to work as the janitor has too much money to keep cleaning toilets. That's why we have hierarchy and front line workers needs to be at the bottom of this. Welcome to Capitalism !

I wonder if it's also that now their investors are going to expect growth on top of whatever accelerated growth they have experienced in this WFH era. meta wants a nice, predictable cruise uphill, not a sprint that they'll now need to continue, progress be damned.

Side note: that's a theory I've had regarding technological advancements in devices like phones. Apple, Samsung etc. want small incremental advancements they can drip-feed to consumers for stable growth, so they probably try to keep the big leaps infrequent. Yeah I know Moore's Law can't go on forever, and it might be getting to that point soon... alright I'll take off the tinfoil hat.

Every time redditors defend work from home: "we'd be sooo productive"

Every time redditors talk about work from home in the context of job search: "it's soo relaxed, no ones constantly looking over your shoulder to check whether you are working. You can easily take gaming breaks"

Y'all are a walking meme

One thing about tech workers is historically they will crunch themselves hard to minimize downtime and meet deadlines because they care about their code and infrastructure. That totally breaks down when they see a bunch of their friends get shitcanned or sees their company making greedy decisions at the expense of their employees.

Got laid off a while back for about 3 months, along with a handful of others (some of which were there 5-7 years!). When I talked to an old friend that still works there, he said the morale is basically non-existent. The company is also ranked in the bottom 5% now on Comparably 😬

100% agreed. I left the States in 2017. Job searching is tricky now but it's an absolute deal breaker.. Remote or goodbye. I will accept nothing else.

Maybe I'm the odd one out, but I've never felt like moving to a different country to work. I can barely imagine moving from the east coast to the west coast. Perhaps I'm missing something, but never once have I visited a place and said, "I would love to spend 8 hours of my life every day in an office here."

But I am at the ripe old age of 30, so maybe I'm past that demographic

MAAANG

Benefits matter, too.

I'm in the AAA gaming industry. EA laid me off earlier this year, and so I wound up looking for work elsewhere.

I've learned that really - the pay doesn't matter if you hate your life every day. If I wanted good pay, I would learn COBOL and write software at a bank. What matters the most is the quality of the team you're working with (primary), and what benefits your employer has (secondary).

If Meta were to call me up and say "Hey, we want you to be on a team with the greatest coworkers you've ever had," then I'd at least hear them out. What is their culture? Do they believe in crunch? How do they handle sick days? Vacations?

And yes, WFH is part of that, too. But if they were willing to pay to relocate me, buy me a house near a metro station... yeah, I'd take it.

But if they were to offer me that exact same deal - except there's no guarantees about production schedules/timelines, there's the "bus problem" (where the project couldn't survive someone important being hit by a bus), there's a lot of crunch (or just bad experiences from friends who've worked there... Blizzard offered me a sweetheart deal and I said no because of that history)... I'm less likely to want to bite.

And everyone has different preferences. I've known some people who love the office. I don't mind it myself, with the right group. But everyone has to make their own call.

I've built my life around working from home now, if that's not a part of the offer then it's a non-starter

Nope. Professionals have standards 😂

Seriously, Meta is for me in a very short list of companies where I would not work under any circustances, so the pay could be as good as you want but is a no.

No. Remote is better for the company and for me. There's tons of better opportunities.

Maybe but they'd probably just sunset the project anyway and in ten years it will look more like a stain on my resume than a badge. Plus traffic on Willow Road is a no for me dawg.

I did and still am.

Happy hours never went away. Swag also never went away. I don't know if the writer here actually knows anyone or just overheard someone talking about that stuff and assumed it was new.

Covid did reduce the amount of stuff being bought. Freezer went away so ice cream went away. Less alcohol in the game rooms (though no shortage during happy hours), custodial stopped working on weekends (not too many people here anyway, just don't leave food in your trash bin anymore). They cut a "health" allowance from 3k to 2k =(

Anyway, it's easily the best decision I've ever made. I make twice my city's median household income. The push for RTO blows (I'm convinced Lori/HR need to justify their existence). At first it was 3 days, now we just got told two specific days (happy hour days are going to rotate, RIP). There's even a whole HRIS system in place for compliance tracking and all kinds of other wasted money/man hours that went into this. Makes no sense. They keep reference "the data" and "studies" but aren't showing us what they're saying. Nevermind that the C suite all got Exceeds Expectations after having to fire dozens of thousands of people (we still believe executive performance = company performance).

Things are coming back since our stock is back to starting with a 3. The only thing that pissed me off was how many laid off people's positions were re-filled like 6 months later. It's like the layoffs were just to get dilute the blood in the water that investors were looking for and hearing about a bunch of layoffs make rich people happy. Other than that, my team is amazing, my manager is awesome, work schedule is extremely flexible (single with 2 kids, I don't know how I'd manage at any of my previous places I've worked). There's the usual "cost saving" bullshit (although, there are honestly a LOT of areas that have been streamlined without any real detrimental effect, so kudos to that) but honestly that's not Meta-specific. Meta just makes the news because it serves 1/3 of the planet.

Also, we make fun of Reality Labs for not being profitable and we don't give a shit about Threads because it was made in a few months by a few people. Twitter isn't really that hard to emulate.

If it's fully remote, yes.

Recruiters keep asking me to apply and I must've told them to pound sand about 3 times in the past 2 years.

Define "the pay was good".

For what they're known payscales say they'd pay a dev with my experience? No way in hell. It's only slightly more than I make now, and I'd have to go back to the office and work for an evil company (though I'm in Insuretech today, so that bit might just be a lateral move..). Plus I live in a low CoL area today, so a bit more money would actually mean a substantial QoL drop.

Now if we're talking stupid money, like $600k/year, then yeah I'd suck up going to the office and abandon my morals. Frankly anyone here who says they wouldn't do it for any salary is kidding themselves

In my country... yes. If I get over the 3month (max allowed) testing period, then they almost cant fire me, so i'll happy take those monies just for showing up. Of course, they dont have offices here :)

It's just a job, of course I would. I feel like I dislike most companies anyways, including the one I work for so it wouldn't change much.

Negatory. There's more to life than money and I have too many ethical conflicts with how they've operated. They do have some fun tech though.

I'd apply the same standards as any other offer

As an Aussie, I know a lot of people that would do something for a carton of beer.

I mean usually its a favour and not "return to the office and I give you beer" but still

Verily, one must maintain the utmost reverence when discussing our illustrious Emperor. Criticizing his haircut would be an affront to the grandeur and authority of our magnificent Meta Empire. Let us, instead, extol the virtues of Meta and the remarkable achievements of our Emperor.

Imagine how good it would look if he cut it at the office!

That's not hair... that's skin for his disguise.

Allegedly, he purposely cuts his hair like that because he thinks of himself as a modern Augustus (Octavian).

He looks like he cuts it himself with nail trimmers.

Say what you want, but its also an iconic look. You recognize his face the moment you see it, with that sorta disinct (but still kinda shit looking) haircut.

But also I dunno, I can understand the vibe of wanting super short hair to keep it up and out of the way, some people just prefer their hair cut to stay the hell out of the way, without committing to being full shaved down.

I try not to judge on such a thing. If he likes that haircut, fuck it, the dude makes more money while sitting down for his haircut then 100 haircuts would cost him to pay for.

He can do whatever the fuck he wants with his hair.

I would rather judge him by his actions, like that shit he pulled with buying "private" beaches and whatnot.

Edit: Actually out of curiosity I looked this up for some updates, and it sounds like he and his wife have been putting in efforts to actually do right by the locals, and that a lot of the bad press was just trying to dunk on him and was largely just stuff going over poorly with locals, so he retracted offers and went back at it again but with the help of local professors to ensure he did it right and in a better way.

It sounds like over the past few years he and his wife have been pouring money, like a LOT of money, into preserving tonnes of wildlife and donating a bunch of money to save large areas that were going to be privately developed, and instead now have enough money to pretty much stay preserved and managed by the locals forever.

https://www.kauaitravelblog.com/mark-zuckerberg-kauai-property/

Not gonna lie, it actually sounds like the dude is trying to put in some real work to do good here, I have to say.

Of course. Do you think that they'd risk missing out on a free branded t-shirt?