>If you value these employees so much that you pay them $400k/yr
A company isn't paying you X amount of money because it "values you", they pay you that because of the market forces that force them to pay you that amount of money. They'd gladly pay you nothing and crack a whip on your back if they could get away with it.
"Valuing you" is something your family will do, but rarely a company, especially a publicly traded one.
>be careful what message you want to send.
The message was exactly the one they wanted to send: "Everyone is expendable".
Because training employees is expensive & may not be obvious how the $ could be used. In the employee side it is a small % of total comp so it doesn’t make sense for them either.
It isn’t clear that they fired the employees to send a message. From the article, it doesn’t look like Meta told other employees, “we fired people who abused the free meal service,” so I don’t know how others would get the message. Instead it was posted on Blind and picked up by news which seems like a poor way to send a message from a PR perspective.
Whether or not they intended to send a message, if I work at the facebook the blaring loud message I just received is "do not under any circumstances try to expense anything, ever."
> the blaring loud message I just received is "do not under any circumstances try to expense anything, ever."
did you not read the article?
the message was, quite reasonably, "don't take the fucking piss, if we give you food vouchers to buy your dinner, then use it for buying yourself dinner".
That's obviously not a serious question, so it doesn't deserve a response.
> if we give you food vouchers to buy your dinner, then use it for buying yourself dinner
I don't know whether there even is a "message", but if I worked for a company that just fired a bunch of people for discrepancies in really minor expense reports I would simply avoid submitting an expense report for something like a meal ever again. They're clearly looking for an excuse to fire people, and it's better to not make oneself a target.
These aren't expense reports. They are digital vouchers.
Imagine if your boss has a stack of gift cards on their desk in case people need a taxi home, and some employees start using it as their personal expense fund.
If I was looking to fire someone, the thieves would be at the top of the list.
Huh, I've never seen a digital voucher before. How do they work? And how can the employer detect what the employee uses it for?
I guess the net result is the same? It seems accepting the digital voucher comes with a huge risk--what if they decide to object to the establishment or your food choice? So just.. bring a sandwich for lunch instead or pay with your own money...
EDIT: the important thing to remember as a U.S. employee is that--just like every interaction with the police is grounds for arrest--every interaction with your employer is grounds for dismissal. So minimize those interactions.
ANOTHER EDIT: which restaurants or food trucks accept these "digital vouchers"? Are these some kind of apple wallet type thing on your phone? So it only works at places with certain payment equipment? Many places I like to eat only take cash..
It's an assumption, but groceries are food and I'm assuming the person just threw in toothpaste as well. And, apparently, that one dollar worth of toothpaste was too far.
Well it was a credit replacing the food that’s normally available. If the stated purpose is credit to get a meal while working there, it’s fraud to buy other stuff with the credit. I can see why an employer would want to terminate you, they have to trust you and your work.
Right, if you're looking at from a surface-level view. Using such a surface-level view means I could, instead, buy a meal and choose not to eat it. Because the credit is only for food.
But that's worse, right? Okay, then the conclusion is that this basis doesn't work, and you need some leniency. Simply sticking to rules, especially if they're stupid, almost always backfires.
We have to do cost analysis. Is it really worth it spending 100,000+ dollars to rehire and knowledge transfer over a few bucks? Do we really want to set the precedent that we are anal dictators? What affects does that have on other employees in our company?
It's very tempting to be technically right, and then believe that means you can do whatever you want. I mean, you can, but as a company that can bite you. Being correct is not a hall pass from human perception. If you're an asshole, you will still be treated as such, regardless of how correct you may be. Naturally, I'm sure this move eroded much employer trust at Meta - almost all of it being in innocent employees. Collateral damage, but somehow, I doubt anybody sat down and did the cost analysis on if it's worth it.
> But that's worse, right? Okay, then the conclusion is that this basis doesn't work, and you need some leniency
Not really, having a hole in the rules doesn’t mean the rules should be loosened. I don’t even understand how you came to that conclusion.
The rule is „this credit is for you to buy food as a meal“. That means you shouldn’t order stuff to only take home and eat later, and it also means that you shouldn’t order stuff that’s not a meal. I don’t see why this is so hard to understand from the perspective of the employer. If the employer hands out fuel credits for the drive to work, would you say it’s fine to use that to drive to your holiday because hey, I could have used it to needlessly drive circles before coming to work, too, and that would have been even worse?
I think the meal credit thing is a simple concept and if you can’t follow the simple rules and have to order other stuff, you deserve to be fired. It’s not hard to understand.
Million or two spend on retraining specially when it comes out of budget of teams might not be so bad compared to more oversight from say IRS. I am not sure how meals are handled, but very likely differently from other goods.
Tax and legal implications can be worse than having to fire some people and formal warning showing you did something for others.
That was to illustrate the principle. If you agree, we can look at something with the same magnitude.
Imagine if your boss has a stack of gift cards on their desk in case people need a taxi home, and some employees start using it as their personal Amazon shopping.
The vouchers had a specific purpose.
If I was looking to fire someone, the thieves would be at the top of the list.
My assumption is that this is an excuse to get rid of some employees they didn't want anyway.