This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Staff are given daily allowances of $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch, and $25 for dinner, with meal credits issued in $25 increments.
Hot damn this is absolutely wild. Even if you only look at lunch, that’s ~$6k/person. If you add in breakfast and dinner that’s ~$17k/person.
As someone who works at Meta:
Ya the benefits are nice.
Sounds like that one evil corp homer worked for.
My first thought is that this entire article reads like a camouflaged press release from Meta.
The source for the article seems to be an anonymous, internal leak, but those “leaks” are often from the company itself as a way to send a message while maintaining plausible deniability.
My second thought is that they are grouping together wildly different types of infractions without saying how many people were guilty of each one. It’s possible that one person was committing outright fraud while everyone else was just accused of a minor technicality.
Finally, the accusation of “pooling” funds seems like a big tell. That’s what you should want the employees to do to save the company money. Without specific details about why that was wrong this sounds more like a gotcha than a legitimate reason to fire someone.
All of these together make this article seem like a way of scaring employees into resigning so they can cut the workforce without being subject to WARN act requirements.
I work in a Meta office nearby, it's the talk of the town, many people think it's true.
The only thing that I could imagine would make the pooling look really bad is if one or more people are not going to use their credit and so they “pool” it in with someone else who does want to use it, and the latter employee now has a $50/$75/etc. credit.
I don't think Meta thought this through, unless the staff already know you can be fired for small things like this. Sure, they stretched what you are supposed to spend money on, broke the rules, fine. Fuck around, find out, not something i do professionally. But it's $25. You're a 1.5$ trillion company. It comes off as petty.
If I was still working at Meta, I'd be job hunting. And maybe that's what they want. Maybe they need to downsize some more.
But eventually Meta will have the minimum amount of staff and need to grow again or necessary people will leave, and when they try to hire people they may find this article and demand more money to make up for the pettiness or they won't apply, because no one likes to be under a microscope.
And maybe that’s what they want
It's absolutely what they want. I think they're trying to cull their workforce, and cracking down on random policies in this way is intended to get people to leave w/o having to pay out severance packages.
they may find this article and demand more money
I highly doubt that. People will continue to apply to Meta because it's a prestigious job and pays remarkably well. Unfortunately, Meta will get away with this, and it's honestly disgusting to me.
100% agree on your first point.
I would caution your second point. A few years ago, news articles pointed out Meta had to pay people more compared to other similar companies due to people not wanting to work there. Sadly Google search isn't showing me those older articles.
A few websites are saying Meta's average pay is 379k (Zuckerberg takes a $1 so he isn't driving that number) vs Google at $315k vs Microsoft $193k vs Nvidia 267k. That's a lot of difference. So running a company like a pedant has a real dollar difference, especially for workers who can demand it. Meta lost a lot of money on the Metaverse and they are spending to catch up AI, meaning they already have to be competitive for employees compared to other companies. Add in the perks are a trap to get fired, and your costs just keep going up. Perks are typically offered in lieu of higher costs and in this case incentive people to work longer in an office. Now they leave for food or go home and you have lost those benefits.
Meta had to pay people more compared to other similar companies due to people not wanting to work there
It's probably more because they were offered a position at some other prestigious firm, like Google or Netflix. Meta doesn't need to compete with you local mom-and-pop software company, they're competing with other large tech firms, so if they want "the best," they need to pay up for it.
Microsoft $193k
I think there's a lot more variety of roles in some of those companies though. Microsoft has a big hardware division (XBox, Surface, mouse/keyboard, etc), which means a lot of lower-paid support staff, logistics, etc. Meta is relatively new to that (mostly just their VR), so they probably have a lot fewer lower-paid roles. Microsoft also has a lot of campuses in lower COL areas, whereas my understanding is that Meta is almost entirely in the SF Bay area, with relatively few satellites (i.e. much higher average COL).
So just looking at average salaries doesn't tell the whole story, we'd need to look at equivalent roles. You could absolutely be right here, I'm just pointing out the metrics don't necessarily support the conclusions.
Totally fair points. Probably next to impossible. Wish I could find those articles, but oh well. I just don't see this being good for future hiring at Meta at the end of the day.
I hope you're right, because I detest Meta and refuse to use anything they touch.
I’m just trying to understand how UberEats is a good way to feed an office. Are we talking about 3 people in a WeWork space somewhere? I can’t imagine 250 UberEats orders all arriving somewhere at once and getting to the right people. Or even 25.
Oh, it's terrible. The entire policy is Bananas. And you can't pool funds? So if it is 3 people, $75 worth of pizza will feed them for a long time. But they got fired for pooling them.
How much time were the Accountants spending verifying this? Or did workers just receive vouchers? If a handful of people were abusing it, how did they notice? No refunds on vouchers, so you'd assume an amount of late nights and then refill as needed. It was already budgeted, so it's a sunk cost.
Also in some places I've worked, $25 after the delivery costs isn't that much food either. I'd be ignoring that perk forever if I still worked there, too much red tape.
Yeah the pooling funds part confuses me. What is the damn issue?
Well, they also just straight up laid off 9,000 people this week so they are clearly in a mood to get rid of people. And I suppose they don’t mind firing people for small infractions because it accomplishes two things for them:
Free food is after all a perk that most people don’t get at work. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg of perks that Meta employees get. I know for a fact that executives get sick and tired of employees being spoiled by all this and they probably took personal enjoyment in these terminations.
I agree, this stinks of petty gotcha, which is why i dont think its a good idea, as remaining employees with devalue those perks and stop working for Meta as a result.
And yes, these are perks above all else, but remember Meta created these incentives to keep people in the office longer without having to pay them (a lot) more. A few people abusing it in order to ensure the majority of workers stay nights and weekends (at small satellite offices) is a small price. Now? "Hey, worker X, staying late tonight?" "No, going home to eat, don't want to make a mistake on ordering Uber Eats and get fired" means you don't get 5-40 hours per week extra time from that worker X. And you already paid for the vouchers, so you don't save money. Also other workers won't stay because more people leave.
Granted we are talking Mark Z here, so eating food is probably too alien for him to understand.
If it was made clear that it was only to be used for food and to only use while you were at the office, then fine. Harsh, but whatever.
Stupid policy is stupid.
Are they requiring receipts from those that follow the directions to make sure they spend all $25 on lunch?
Lick lick lick slurp is all I see with this comment.
The severity of punishment does not match the severity of violating the policy. We've already figured this idea out in real life and across numerous genres of fiction that at this point is a common trope. It's literally a sci-fi trope at this point of the paradise planet that everyone loves but the biggest flaw is that any infraction against the law however minor is tje death penalty. The concept of fair punishments is literally baked into the constitution through the bill of rights with the 8th amendment, no cruel and unusual punishments, no excessive bail or excessive fines.
Yeah, that's how that works: when you abuse a perk for meals in the office by using it for other stuff, you're rolling the dice, aren't you?
Can i have that $400k job?
Right? I promise not to scheme on $10 worth of toothpaste.
Sorry, trying to scam your employer isn't smart. Food vouchers, not couch vouchers.
Exactly. Force them to do layoffs, don't give them an easy out to fire you for misconduct.
That said, Meta could absolutely have just ended the program for people who abused the policy. But it seems their intent is to reduce headcount as cheaply as possible, so that's why they went this direction.
Being fired means 6 months of unemployment. Fuck meta. Time for a vacation.
I'm getting unemployment right now. It's 1/6th of my former pay, zero benefits. Oh, and the max benefit is a total of 2 weeks of former pay.
I got 1100/week, for up to 6 months 🤷
It’s hardly like getting fired is a ticket to a 6 month vacation. Misuse of funds like this is tantamount to theft and probably grounds to disqualify you from unemployment benefits. And anyway for these highly paid workers, unemployment is a tiny fraction of what they are accustomed to making. It’s a tough job market out there and Meta laid off another 9,000 this week so it’s a smart move to start job hunting the second you’re unemployed. I know people who have not found work after 1 year. A vacation? Shyeah no.
Exactly. I lost my job during COVID and fortunately the unemployment office found that my "contract position" was actually an illegal "full-time position" and I qualified for benefits. But the benefits were a fraction of my regular salary, even with the increased COVID-era unemployment benefits. It was enough to live on (I was already frugal), but I was certainly motivated to find new work.
I was "fired" because "my job had been eliminated." Had I been fired for misconduct, I wouldn't have gotten any unemployment benefits.
Meta is doing it this way to cut workforce without having to pay severance or unemployment, not because they really care about that $25.
My state would pay them $4400/m for 6 months, assuming they meet the minimum requirements of applying to jobs. And, since it’s a rough market out there, 6 months isn’t really unreasonable.
