Facebook worker dies at company headquarters in an apparent suicide | Hacker News Reader

Facebook worker dies at company headquarters in an apparent suicide

cnet.com

60 pointsmlcrypto21 comments

Can we stop the blaming here? Every suicide is one suicide too much. I know what this does to relatives and friends; my father committed suicide when I was 12. I'm 33 now and it still affects my life.

If you know someone who appears to be depressive or even suicidal, try to be kind and supportive. It helps a lot.

This sad news is buried here on HN but surfaced on my Twitter timeline. Surprised there isn’t more empathy or anecdotes going around to bring light to issues surrounding this situation. There is a real need to humanize work in our industry and heed mental health. Work is hard, and this lost life speaks to how terrible reality becomes when work and identity has is unbalanced, too tightly coupled.

Why flagged?

Why all the downvotes?

> At least this person didn't hurt anyone else

Except

- the ones passing by while or shortly after it happened

- the people looking out of the window and seeing them fall

- paramedics and other rescue staff having to look at them from close up

- the people who have to clean up afterwards

- the ones who have to pass by that spot in future

- ....

And then: Not to forget colleagues, friends and family who lost somebody. Probably now with a feeling of "why didn't I help?"

Sad when people see no other way out than suicide.

That's not what I meant. I meant in the USA there is a culture of shooting a place up when you're depressed. Fortunately that did not happen, that's all I meant. I've had friends kill themselves. I've battled with depression and I've seen someone die in a horrific car accident right in front of me.

School shooters don't fit a single profile. Some of them are well liked and popular like Jaylen Fryberg and the perpetrators of Columbine were bullies themselves rather than being victims of school bullying.

The people doing jobs more distant from “tech” don't technically work for Facebook or in their offices. At least moderators don't.

I hate this word and I avoid using it whenever possible, but there's work happening on "postvention" - an intervention after a death by suicide to reduce the risk of death and harm in survivors.

Having a loved one who dies by suicide will increase your own risk of death by suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postvention

Flagged, because I think it's irresponsible to include the method in the headline.

Still below the national / global average. I see nothing newsworthy here, just a very sad story.

Maybe some lessons can be learned before whatever average makes it newsworthy to you...

Your point is not valid because the headline is not "someone committed suicide", the headline names Facebook. The connotation is not that there are general mental health lessons, but rather implies there is something facebook specific. GP is pointing out that is likely false based on the stats quoted. This is not a treatise about depression, its clickbait against a popular-to-hate corporation.

Fair enough!

Average of what?

Average suicides per thousand workers of a company, maybe.

The US has an average suicide rate of 13 per 100,000 per year, Facebook has 40,000 employees and right now a single suicide. They'd need at least 4 more to meet the average this year.

Single public suicide.

This is significant because it is a company that pays very well. Not because of where it stands relative to the US average.

I'd like to know what this person actually did for work. The media tends to ambiguously use terms like "tech worker" without specifying whether they are technical or non-tech employees at tech companies.

Setting aside the fact that counting tragedies is kinda in bad taste, I think it's relevant to point at a past exemple:

"French" company Orange, who has around 100K employees, got into national trouble for a "wave" of suicide that counted in the thenths. [1]

The company's french boss got terrible press by calling the series of event a "mode des suicide" (roughly translatable as "suicide fad" or "suicide fashion").

The events highlighted "structural" managerial problems at the company.

FB has around ~20k employees, so that might affect the "newsworthyness ratio".

It is obviously too early to know if the situation at Facebook is comparable to Orange.

I would not be surprised at all, if the narative of "Facebook badly treats is employed" gets popular. FB already has a rather bad rep.

Facebook top management had better handle this thoughfully - if only, by pure human decency.

[1]: https://theguardian.com/business/2014/mar/19/orange-france-i...

France has an average suicide rate of 12 over 100,000 per year.

A company with 100K employees and over 20 suicides per year, is concerning.

You can not compare the global average because different countries have very different methods to define and count death by suicide.

For example, we're all calling this particular death a suicide but there's a chance that the San Mateo coroner / medical examiner rules this as something else.

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