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Facebook Employees Living in a Garage Hope Zuckerberg Will Learn What's Happening in His Own City (cnbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the reality-check dept.

At the beginning of the year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg set a goal to visit every state in the U.S. so he could learn more about the millions of people who use the social network every day. But two of his employees tell The Guardian that they wonder when the billionaire is going to get to know his own community. From a report: The employees, a married couple named Nicole and Victor, are both contract workers in the cafeteria at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. And they wish they, and the problems closer to home, could also get a share of Zuckerberg's attention. "He should learn what's happening in this city," Nicole tells The Guardian. The couple says they can barely make ends meet. Together with their three children, Nicole and Victor share a two-car garage adjacent to Victor's parents' home. They borrow money from friends and family to stay afloat and occasionally resort to payday loans. Although they earn too much to qualify for state benefits, they don't earn enough to afford Facebook's health care plan.

16 of 520 comments (clear)

  1. Three kids? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well there is your first problem....

    1. Re:Three kids? by Camembert · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We have become a sad population if we reproach people having 3 kids.

    2. Re:Three kids? by Train0987 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Having three kids isn't bad. Having three kids without the ability to support them is. I'm no fan of Zuckerburg but this couple is where they are in life because of their own choices. That's not Zuck's fault.

    3. Re: Three kids? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Seriously? My wife and I make half that, live in the most expensive county in the country, and are sending the oldest of our two children to college in a few weeks. You have wildly skewed priorities if you don't think you can support one child on a $300K income

    4. Re:Three kids? by Baron_Yam · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the problem is we're greedy at every level of society.

      Individually, we want 'stuff', so we put off kids (sometimes forever) because they crimp our lifestyles. This causes the birthrate to drop below replacement rate. Societally, we want an ever-expanding economy as we've structured pretty much everything to depend on there being more people in the future, and things start to fall apart if that doesn't happen.

      So... immigration from places with high birth rates when we really should be content to let our populations shrink so we don't consume as many resources.

      Really... why is a stagnant (or even shrinking!) population such a bad thing? No additional housing or extension of infrastructure is required. No ever-increasing issues with pollution, food production, or whatever. No ever-denser urban centers.

      In a world with 700 million people instead of 7 billion, our available resources would stretch 10x further and we'd still be far from any threat of depopulating ourselves to extinction.

    5. Re: Three kids? by ZipK · · Score: 5, Informative

      They probably have $100,000 student loans each. They do work at Facebook.

      The headline is misleading. They work for a company that provides contract employees to Facebook for the cafeteria, as per the first sentence of the report:

      The employees, a married couple named Nicole and Victor, are both contract workers in the cafeteria at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters.

    6. Re: Three kids? by Nidi62 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Kids are expensive. Ultra expensive if you give them a chance to go to college. They are a major drain on finances. Like it or. Ot their own decisions have put them in the situation.

      My wife and I make 300k combined in Atlanta. We are talking about 1 kid. Figuring out how we will budget for daycare, college, food, clothes, etc. plus any life emergencies and our retirement. Three kids would not only break us but be unfair to them.

      Me and my wife live in Atlanta (well, Woodstock) and are talking about our first kid as well. We make less than 1/3 of what you do. Of course, we live in a suburb, own a house that is priced and sized correctly for our income and expected family size (2k sq ft) located in a very desirable neighborhood(10 minute walk, 1 minute drive to physically be in downtown Woodstock), own 2 cars outright, and paying off about 30k in student loans (one of the loans we just paid off in cash a few months ago). We contribute to my 401k monthly from my salary, my wife contributes to savings monthly from her salary, we do not live paycheck to paycheck, and have plenty in bank accounts to account for medical/home repair/car repair emergencies. If we have a kid, we could easily get by on my salary alone while my wife stays home to take care of the kid/does some light work from home or side jobs. You are doing it completely wrong. Move out of your Buckhead condo or John's Creek McMansion, stop leasing brand new Mercedes or BMWs every 2 years, and on 300k a year you could easily have enough for retirement and to put your kid through college debt free.

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    7. Re: Three kids? by OneSmartFellow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You are majorly fucking up if you have to worry about your expenses on a $300K income.  I earn well under that and I honestly don't have anything sensible to spend my money on. 

    8. Re:Three kids? by Nidi62 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't understand why you would keep bringing them into this world if you can't afford them.

      Maybe if they actually had received effective sex education in school or have access to family planning and abortion services poorer people wouldn't keep having kids. But nope, sorry, abstinence-only sex ed for everyone! Defund Planned Parenthood! People who undertake a perfectly normal bodily function must be punished!

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    9. Re: Three kids? by Enigma2175 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Conservatives and religious people donate more money (a higher percentage of their income/assets, not just in terms of raw dollars) to charities and non-profits than liberals and atheists.

      I don't know whether or not they feel smug when doing so.

      A lot of religious donations aren't used for charity, but they are still tax deductible and are included as "charitable donations". Those donations build churches, pay pastors, gild statues, evangelize their church, and plenty of other things that have nothing to do with charity. Sure, there are many churches that do plenty of charitable work but there are also many that do none and those donations are just as tax deductible.

      That all may be beside the point, since this article cites an MIT study that found that political affiliation didn't have a relationship with willingness to give, although conservatives gave more dollars in total (because they are richer) both sides give at about the same rate. Interestingly the article also states that "only 10% to 25% of church donations end up being spent on social welfare purposes" which backs up my point above, with religious donations excluded conservatives might give at a lower rate than liberals.

      --

      Enigma

  2. It's Virtue Signaling; They Don't Care by Kunedog · · Score: 5, Insightful

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    Google spends millions to provide WiFi to "refugee" camps in the EU as if there aren't poor people in the US that could use help. It's virtue signalling with political overtones and nothing else.

  3. Ok. easy to fix but would you go along with it? by Glasswire · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is simple. FB needs to relocate the staff in their unit to some rural site in in North Dakota where those FB employees could no doubt afford palatial houses.
    What you don't want to live there, you want to live in a CA area with insanely high real estate prices? That's not Zukerberg's problem, it's yours.

    1. Re:Ok. easy to fix but would you go along with it? by Hentes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So do you propose all the other FB employees walk to North Dakota at lunchtime? You can't relocate a cafeteria.

  4. Re:Not even allowed to use the gym by trevize42 · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is the chronic issue. They work full time at Facebook, but Facebook outsourced this labor to a sub-contractor for cheap rates. They skirt employment laws by outsourcing labor. Then the employees are paid far below a living wage. It happens in all tiers of employment. The is very dominant in IT. Large companies outsource their IT labor to contractors and those contractors get a sub-standard wage and no health benefits. The company get's a good financial outlook on paper while large portions of their workforce are shafted. What needs to happen is a change in law, that which if you work full time for a company you must be paid by that company at least a living wage and health benefits. All this sub-contracting to skirt decent wages and benefits needs to end.

  5. Something wrong with our society by XXongo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Kids are expensive. Ultra expensive if you give them a chance to go to college. They are a major drain on finances. Like it or. Ot their own decisions have put them in the situation.

    Statements like this make me queasy. You're telling me that we now have a society where we have decided that it's ok that raising the next generation is too expensive for ordinary people to do. There has to be something wrong with a society that considers raising the next generation to be something ordinary people can't participate in.

    My wife and I make 300k combined in Atlanta. We are talking about 1 kid. Figuring out how we will budget for daycare, college, food, clothes, etc. plus any life emergencies and our retirement. Three kids would not only break us but be unfair to them.

    YOW! $300K and it's not enough to raise children?

    Really, you are telling me that there is something very, very wrong with our society.

    1. Re:Something wrong with our society by Dog-Cow · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No. It's just him.