this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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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.
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.
I didn’t see anything about meta collecting unspent vouchers. If they are, that’s a good reason, but there’s a not inconsiderable overhead involved in that collection and redistribution/refunding, so I’m not automatically assuming that they are.
Even at $19k/employee/year, this is small potatoes for meta and I would be astounded if they’re honestly doing this for something so petty. A goodwill gesture towards your employees is basically always a good investment.
But I guess they’ll get the best qualified quintile of employees to voluntarily quit, then be left with a bunch of wary, maliciously compliant employees who weren’t good enough to get jobs anywhere else. Not worth it, imo.
Are they vouchers? I don’t remember from the article, but I’d assume it’s just the employees give Facebook their Uber account info and whenever it goes down to $0, FB automatically reloads the account. I’d imagine it would be way too much effort to pass out physical cards to everyone.
Your point about only retaining the worst employees is valid though
I actually can’t tell, it says they’re credits awarded in $25 increments- I could see that being either vouchers or employer accounts. I still lean towards something like vouchers, given that the increments are roughly equivalent to one meal each and the employees were pooling them, but it would be much more reasonable to do it the way you interpreted it. If they did that, they’d probably even be able to lock delivery to the office address for the majority of employees (I’m sure some people have to travel, but probably a small minority who could be given a different type of account), which would probably naturally cut down on the likelihood that people would misuse it (people obviously still could, but it’s not a good look to leave the office with a bunch of shopping bags, which would likely have a chilling effect).
Great username, by the way.