Gotta get creative with your layoffs when you already did massive layoffs but still need to please wall street.
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.
Definitely seems like they want the layoff from my position in the industry.
The tech megagiants are massively reallocating their budgets from “paying people for new product development” to datacenter build-outs, under the belief that AI will fundamentally restructure all knowledge work into property you can own and extract rent from.
Unfortunately the industry is completely non union and a good chunk of employees are on H1B or TN visas where they will get deported if they get fired. That really puts a damper on wanting to rock the boat.
Expect things to get less stable and shittier over time as this trend continues.
Yup, and when I worked w/ a team @ Facebook on a project, there were a lot of immigrants there. That really sucks, but the solution here should be to improve our immigration system so workers can more easily switch companies instead of getting deported and having to reapply.
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:
- no severance required
- sets an example and scares people into obedience
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.
Your fine with people violating your trust? Because that’s what you’re advocating.
If people are going to show they’re willing to scam the company and steal from it, why would you keep them around.
Sorry, I would have a zero tolerance policy on theft. I’ve seen it first hand in a small business and in a massive retailer, not cool.
Really depends on how valuable all of the staff are. I too have seen theft of small and large offices I’ve worked in. Personally didn’t buy pens until I started working from home. I also did the accounting and budgeting for office supplies and products from the product line (beer), which sometimes had free samples taken from it. Executives loved to grab samples daily. We ensured this was added to employees paychecks as a perk for tax purposes, but not down to the individual beer. We also had talks with anyone who took over their fair share.
The cost always came down to pennies per person. Their value as a worker was typically more valuable then micromanaging them and creating an environment where they were punished. Average employee made more for the company daily then what they took home. If they knew it was fine within some limits (which most did and I would argue these Meta workers were within given their pay/value of the company), it’s actually better to just ignore it.
Now the remaining employees and future employees know any mistake could cost them their job, with no major warning, just 2 strikes and your out.
When you take this personally (“violating your trust”), you end up creating a shitty place to work to soothe your ego.
Where’s the scam? If the company is providing a $25 credit as a benefit, then they should just give the employees $25. Why should Meta get a say in how it’s spent?
Because that’s part of the deal. They get free credits for 3 meals a day as an added bonus but they broke the very simple terms that came with those. That makes the employees untrustworthy since they can’t keep a very simple promise.
Also they probably have to spend them that way because it becomes plain income otherwise, which means it will be taxed accordingly. And that will ruin this benefit for anyone.
Fuck meta and stuff, but this is a pretty great deal for employees.
Some decent bootlicking in here…
“Leadership” gets strippers and nobody cares lol
I’m reminded of a video from Gary Vee where he had a small moment of reality: Some guy was complaining his employee quit 3 weeks after starting because they were all lazy. Also note it was always his only employee.
Gary asks him how much they paid the employee (min wage) and if he demanded they work over 40 hours (yes and no ot), then pointed out the guy was walking home with all the money and expecting someone to work hard with no return.
The entire audience was confused. Now they are in these comments.
It’s crazy to see people justify this. I wonder how they’d feel getting microscoped at work until fired. There’s always a cause if your scummy enough.
Don’t get me wrong purely from “regulatory” perspetive this wagie done fucked up…
But sufficient slaving experience, I can tell you that this reason is a pretext lol
It seems bootlickers can’t tell the difference and appreciate the nuance of what happened here. No wonder we got this shiti “employment experience” peasants are their own worst enemies.
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.
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.
But honestly why is that bad? I’m vegan and I work at a bakery. When we get to eat products that I don’t eat, I pass my portion to my coworkers, because obviously. When we made alcohol out of our leftover bread, my observant Muslim coworkers gave us their bottles.
The employees are happier and we actually talk about and get to know the products more (which is the whole point)
Well in this case, it’s $25 that wasn’t going to be spent that now does get spent. If you do that for a year it’s $7k additional. I don’t think it’s fireable, but I can at least understand from a bean counter perspective how that’s enough.
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.
I would just convince everyone at the company to use their full credit every single day from now on. Give the food to a homeless person or something.
