Lots of people dream about working for Facebook, and why wouldn't they? It has, after all, produced its fair share of millionaires and billionaires. Facebook employees voted the company the best place to work in 2013 in Glassdoor's annual survey.
So when Facebook's workers blow off steam about their employer, their complaints end up sounding more like humblebrags than anything else. Former and current Facebook employees sounded off on a thread on Quora, a question-and-answer site popular in Silicon Valley that was created by an ex-Facebook executive. There's too much free food, employees are too friendly, there isn't enough bureaucracy, the company they work for is too famous.
The question was: "What's the worst thing about working at Facebook?"
- There's too much freedom in the office. "FB employees are (implicitly) encouraged to be themselves at work," wrote an anonymous Facebook engineer who says he has been with the company for two years. "At most companies, you put up a wall between a work personality and a personal one... This wall does not exist at FB." The company's unofficial sport is beer pong, which is played at most company events, he writes.
Overall, Facebook employees are really satisfied, but the complaints seen here are common ones for Facebook employees.
"At Facebook as of late, we see employees speaking favorably about a thriving hacker culture, Zuckerberg’s long-term vision for the company and the ability to work on exciting technology touching the lives of a billion people," Scott Dobroski of Glassdoor, an online jobs community, told The Huffington Post by email. "Conversely, some of the downsides Facebook employees speak about lately include working long hours, a company culture that feels a bit more corporate post-IPO, along with too much free food."
We have reached out to Facebook for comment and will update with any response.
Still, with millions of Americans struggling to get or hold a job, most people would take these "complaints" over streaming bosses or low wages (or unemployment) any day of the week.