One time I took a road trip and stopped in SF for a few days. I linked up with this chick who let me stay at her place for a few days because we had good chemistry and we were originally from the same area.

She worked at Facebook in Menlo Park and on the day I was leaving she invited me to stop by the Facebook campus on my way South to hang with her one last time and see the FB campus.

It was exactly like the video I linked, even more decadent. I saw the “work” she was doing and bro I thought it was such a joke. She was choosing colors and placement of buttons on potential new UX layouts and doing all this retarded fake work around this completely irrelevant task anyone could have done. Meetings and diagrams and blah blah blah. The devs just rolling their eyes.

I really couldn’t believe that was a job and there was this huge palace with a full blown rooftop forest, 20 perma-free restaurants and a bunch of vending machines full of free shit to house thousands of people pretending to do work there.

Nothing feels more frothy and fiat than big tech from that experience. Truly an insane situation.

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So I’ve never worked at a big tech company with all of the insane amenities, but I did work at a very large insurance company that had recently built a new corporate headquarters. The area had a bunch of trendy restaurants, fancy looking office spaces, apartments and what not. We just didn’t have all the free stuff.

But even still, the amount of actual work that happens in those environments is shockingly low. I noticed pretty quickly the Pareto distribution in who did the majority of the work. The rest of the cogs held pointless meetings all day, every day.

It nearly drove me to a mental breakdown because I genuinely want to be productive.

So I guess my point is, the problem is way worse and way more widespread 😅

All the stuff you mentioned is also completely bonkers though.