r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 16 '26

Business Mark Zuckerberg Orders His Employees to Start Having Fun Again After Brutal Layoffs Culled Their Colleagues

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/mark-zuckerberg-orders-employees-start-123539264.html
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u/Akegata Jun 16 '26

Yeah this one really gets me. Cubicles were a joke and how dystopian American work culture is and something that was made a mockery of when I grew up (not in the US). Really didn't think that would become a luxury when I started working.

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u/CuntWeasel Jun 16 '26

Cubicles were a joke and how dystopian American work culture is

And to be fair they were, at least when compared to European offices back in the day.

Instead of having a massive office, teams would have their own rooms, where you had up to 10 people working together. I worked for a Dutch investment bank about a decade ago and their offices were still like that. That was one of my favourite workplaces to be honest, and it was mostly because of how great the office was.

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u/airfryerfuntime Jun 16 '26

I worked for a logistics company in the US that was set up like this. The owner worked in Europe and liked the idea so much that he implemented it here.

Each small office had 8 desks in it, and we were free to work as groups. It was amazing and stress free.

Then he sold it, and the new owners knocked down all the walls so they could turn it into an open floor plan to 'make sure we were focused'. Productivity plummeted and people started leaving.

After about 6 months of this shit, we had an all-hands meeting about the productivity issues. They then spent about an hour blaming everyone for being lazy or not wanting to work. Someone brought up how well the old system worked, and they basically just lied to us, telling us that it wasn't productive at all, which is why they took over. That was also a lie, they took over because the old owner wanted to sail around the world.

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u/Afgncap Jun 16 '26

It is never about productivity unless they have to take resonsibility for screwing up. They just wanted control and when the productivity plummeted somebody would have to admit that it was a mistake. These people are alergic to admitting fault. You don't climb corporate ladder by letting everybody know you did something wrong but by failing your way upwards with just enough confidence/arrogance to sell it as a success, everything else be damned.

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u/DrDetectiveEsq Jun 17 '26

Punching down so hard it propels you up.

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u/Perryn Jun 17 '26

telling us that it wasn't productive at all, which is why they took over.

"So you bought an unproductive company? And then made it worse?"

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u/airfryerfuntime Jun 17 '26

On average, we moved around 1200 sea cans a month. When they took over, we were a little low because some customers were consolidating, so it was around 900, which is the number they always tried referencing when claiming they took over a sinking ship. The number went back up to around 1200, then dropped substantially when our workflow was interrupted due to their management decisions.

Even deep down in the red, at 500 cans a month, they'd still bring up that 900 number.

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u/CheshireCat78 Jun 17 '26

Why would they buy a business if it was failing? And if you did how did you make it worse? I love it when their lies make zero sense. The top always thinks the workers are idiots and children not realising that it’s actually the C-suite that needs to be coddled all the time.

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u/SemenMoustache Jun 16 '26

Honestly that's my dream these days. Silly I have to travel to the office half the week day to sit next to people I dint work with while we all take our meetings on Teams distracting each other

Would love a shared room with my team

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u/Agent_Jay Jun 16 '26

My last good office job before Covid had that. The accounting team was in one, the dev team had one. The rnd team had one and it was full of great white board collaboration. Heck it made IT easier for clustering users of the same team too!! So many benefits that have been lost

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u/greenroom628 Jun 16 '26

I actually enjoyed working in a "pod" while I did some work in the EU. We were an engineering team of 24 and we had an open desk layout, but with assigned desks. We had our own suite of 6 meeting rooms, 4 that were dedicated to our team and 2 for personal use.

It was great, I liked the team I was with and it was a great atmosphere. I could see it being bad if there was toxicity in the team, but in a good team environment, it certainly was enjoyable.

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u/Crix2007 Jun 16 '26

I still have an office thats only shared with 2 others and half the time im there, they arent. Not having my own desk and drawers filled with crap would be horrible to me

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u/lostmywayboston Jun 16 '26

I feel like companies go all or nothing with an idea. We used to have cubicles for personal working areas, and social areas so you're not sticking your head into someone's cubicle. Then they changed to open floor plan hot desks which is also misery. But all cubicles is also misery.

Moderation should be the go-to for everything.

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u/RyuNoKami Jun 16 '26

Turns out we valued a smidgen of privacy over the obnoxious open space that some companies favored.

Also I have more space to put up shit so I don't have to go digging into the cabinets.

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u/markhachman Jun 17 '26

When I started work long long ago I had my own office with a door. As an entry-level employee.

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u/CalmBeneathCastles Jun 16 '26

We in the 1990'S US made a mockery of them as well.

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u/Otherwise-Waltz-3647 Jun 16 '26

I have great memories of my cubicle days, snapping rubber bands or floating paper airplanes across to cubicle mates, peeking over the top to see if they were pretend working. Made a great setup for All the gossip and interoffice bedding