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.

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

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.

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.