A quick story about "entitlement" at some of the most 'employee benefit focused' tech companies. I haven't worked at Google, but I've worked at two of the othe

A quick story about "entitlement" at some of the most 'employee benefit focused' tech companies. I haven't worked at Google, but I've worked at two of the other so-called FAANG companies. The soft benefits and perks were amazing, no doubt about it. For a time, a certain (popular) subset of the free snacks became unavailable. My immediate team and I made some jokes about it. A week or so later, word got around that somebody had opened a medium grade internal incident over the 'outage'. So we looked up and sure enough, there it was, an actual filed incident, status ongoing. Ok so that's fine; things were generally pretty 'loose' at the company, so maybe that was a joke. Nope; not only had many hundreds of people marked themselves as impacted, but the discussion was quite serious. Mixed in of course were many people making comments about how silly/absurd/outrageous it was that OTHER PEOPLE were taking this snack outage so seriously. The whole thing turned into quite a kerfuffle. There were now hundreds of comments under the incident, and the associated chat channel was getting pretty heated. Word came down from my area's management, unofficially, in a friendly way, suggesting that we just stay clear of the whole thing, which was sound advice in my opinion. To be clear: the vast majority of the heat was about whether this thing should be an incident at all, and the size of the 'sides' were to my eye roughly even. I'm not trying to make a statement here about entitlement one way or another, but simply recounting a story from a few years ago as I best recall it.