Employees reveal the worst things about working for Facebook on Quora

Facebook has often been seen as a great place to work at. We mean, how awesome would it be to work for the world’s biggest social networking site, especially with a cool boss like Mark Zuckerberg, right? To top it all, the company has even been voted the world’s best employer only earlier this year. But is the Facebook office as rosy as it seems?

Business Insider has dug up responses from an open Quora thread to show some of the reasons why working for Facebook isn’t quite the best thing in the world. Some of the most complaints on the Quora thread included issues like lack of professionalism within the company. Right from being on call all the time to complaints about bosses having a “holier than thou” attitude, Facebook paints a picture of a college project gone wrong on the thread.

You can’t beat sitting in a hammock and working

The top voted comment on Quora happened to be of an on-call duty engineer named Keith Adams who said that they’re supposed to be on call 24/7 for seven days a week, six weeks a year. The rotation policy ensures these engineers are on call two weeks at a stretch. “For those two weeks I don’t leave town on the weekend; make especially sure not to have “one too many” at any social gatherings I attend; and most importantly, carry and immediately respond to a charged phone where I can be reached 24/7, including leaving the ringer on on the nightstand as I sleep. And yes, once or twice a year that phone does go off at some bizarre hour to rouse you from your slumber and go fight a fire in production.”

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Another complainant – an anonymous one, understandably – claimed professionalism suffered in a workplace since Facebook encourages employees to “be themselves”. One more employee claimed that the picnic-bench setting was not exactly the complete picture of the office. Employees have a flat table system, ensuring they’re huddled together only inches from each other, minus any privacy.

One common complaint included the lack of communication between and within teams, ensuring that either their projects were getting scrapped midway, there were no clear instructions and decisions being made on whims, lone engineers or interns. The weirdest – possibly most appalling complaint of them all – spoke of how merely making employees bringing coffee didn’t cut it at Facebook. “The team treated me like garbage and I was asked to [do] really inappropriate tasks (i.e. separating the director’s laundry complete with his wife’s dirty undies still attached),” an anonymous post read.

And free food!

There were a handful of employees who didn’t like the attitude of the bosses. The employee trained his guns at Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, who he said spent way too much time on “extra curricular activities.” He even claimed that they wasted time copying off competition. For example, Poke, a self-destructing messaging application that is a clear rip-off of Snapchat.

With all these negative aspects surrounding employees of the “best place to work in”, maybe all that free food and drinks and a laid back atmosphere to work in doesn’t really make the best workplace.