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Comment by brohee | Hacker News Reader

"Every morning, I'd get up, hop in the shuttle, and that's when my day began. Getting breakfast, seeing all my friends"

Confusing friends and colleagues, possibly having no life outside of work.

"She's never at her desk, and she routinely cancelled our regular 1:1 meetings because she has no other choice"

Stockholm syndrome

"My boss's voice was devoid of emotion, even though we had gone through a lot together (at least from my point of view)."

The first step is seeing you are delusional...

Am I alone thinking that for this person getting fired is extremely positive and the opportunity to start anew with a healthier work/life balance?

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Nah, this post made working at facebook sound super weird, even without the disciplinary aspect.

The "omnipresent alcohol" bit is really odd too. Now weed is legal in california, are you also allowed to roll a spliff at your desk and go and smoke it on your lunchbreak? 420 deploy code every day?

I mean, we have beer o clock on friday afternoon, but generally programming is pretty hard, and while it may be fun to do all-night coding sessions while intoxicated at the weekend, getting smashed at work is surely not conducive to actually getting stuff done, especially in a team? All the espresso is bad enough...

Yes, one thing I believe is bad is to mix professional and private life, but he seems fine with it. Well I'm probably not a good fit for Facebook, which is fine.

I started a new job a few months ago after floating around startups for a few years. One thing I'm surprisingly happiest about is that the company doesn't stock alcohol in the kitchens.

We have beer o'clock sometimes, and occasionally the team gets drinks together, but alcohol is not an omnipresent part of everyday office life. The constant drinking (a lot of which was high-stress-commiseration drinking) I saw at startups was so normalized that this was honestly a cultural shock to me.

Indeed.

Another thing I see a lot (and you can see it in another answer to this question, further down) is people (mostly SV) referring to jobs as adventures. And more generally putting work on a pedestal and conflating work with life.

I mean I suppose in theory whatever floats your boats, call it an adventure, but to me an adventure would be going canoeing in Belize with (outside-of-work) friends. Show me a job that encourages and enables employees to do that and I will show you a job actually worth putting on a pedestal. 97 additional facebook notifications per day is not a selling point.

Definite elements of cultishness. In my experience it's best to remember that employers need people like you more than you need any one of them.

Yeah, the whole part about missing all the notificaions once they were no longer an employee, and about spending all day on facebook, had my skin crawling.

Why is it easier to make assumptions about the person than it is to think that Facebook's culture has a problem?

Do we generally blame the individuals who get pulled into a cult, or do we criticize the cult?

All cultures have deep problems.

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