Food is an important part of every culture, including the culture inside of our company. Since our early days, we've offered free meals for the people that work at Facebook because it creates camaraderie among the diverse group of people working here and it lets us focus more of our time on building a better service.
As part of our food traditions, we observe cultural and religious holidays from around the world at CafeX, the name of our main cafeteria and kitchen in our headquarters office. As a global company with employees hailing from around... the world, we try to acknowledge and take part in as many of their diverse cultural celebrations as we can.
A few weeks ago, one of our engineers, Ali Heydari, approached me with the idea to host a Nowruz feast at Facebook. Nowruz, literally meaning "New Day," is an ancient Iranian festival observed by more than 300 million people and as a national holiday in 11 nations. It celebrates the start of the Iranian New Year, which was on March 20 this year.
The culinary team and I agreed to create a special menu for this holiday, but we first needed to research the food we would be preparing. When cooking traditional food, we like to be as authentic as possible. We asked a few of our employees of Iranian descent for their help with the feast and the table decorations.
Navid Mansourian from IT and Niloofar Nafici from our security team took members of our culinary team to a local Iranian restaurant Rose International Market, in Mountain View, Calif., so we could sample many of the dishes that would be on the menu.
Niloofar volunteered to set up the traditional Nowruz table, and Navid helped to create the menu and to work in the kitchen to ensure the food tasted authentic. Our menu included: lavash bread, mahi sefeed (white fish), kabab chenjeh (lamb kebab), jooje kabab (chicken kebab), borani esfenaaj (spinach and yogurt) and salad-e shirazi (tomato-cucumber salad).
Pedram Keyani from our site integrity team documented the preparations in this video:
This was the first time that we celebrated Nowruz at Facebook, but we have celebrated several other holidays and festivals. These include Thanksgiving, Christmas and Passover, as well as Holi, Durga Puja, Chinese New Year's and most recently, St. Patrick's Day.
Do you have a favorite holiday or festival meal from your culture that we haven't yet celebrated? Let us know by sharing it in comments. We'll choose our favorite and then prepare a special menu to honor it. We'll share the meal with you in future posts on the Facebook Page, so become a fan to get future updates.
Josef, Facebook's culinary overlord, is looking forward to cooking for your favorite holiday.
- by Josef L. Desimone on Monday, March 29, 2010 at 12:37pmSee More
- Topics: Working at Facebook
- by Charlotte Carnevale Willner on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 12:15pmWe're introducing a new series today called "Faces of Facebook," which features excerpts from interviews with our employees that originally appeared on our internal blog. Their words offer a glimpse of life inside of Facebook and the work they do around the world.See More
Adam Conner was the first member of our Washington, D.C., office when he joined Facebook in November 2007. He works on the public policy team as one of Facebook's official D.C. lobbyists. He is originally from Los Alamos, N.M., and is a little broken up over Conan O'Brien right now.
...You send a lot of social emails and show up at all our company parties. (Social is an internal email list where employees discuss social topics such as finding concert tickets, a new apartment or teammates for a pickup game of basketball). What do you do in your spare time?
Conner with U.S. President Barack Obama.Sigh, the party thing used to be the case but not any longer, I've missed the last two holiday parties. But I did manage to be around for Game Day last year, which was awesome (Game Day is an annual Facebook tradition where employees spend a day competing in teams in a series of outdoor games).
I'm a pretty social person and have always worked around a lot of people; but when I first started working for Facebook I worked by myself from my apartment. If I had worked for any other company I think I probably would've gone insane. But being constantly on Facebook (the product) with all of Facebook (the company) let me feel like a part of the company in a real way. Social (email) was kind of the same way and I've never seen anything like social anywhere else I've worked.Describe a moment where you felt that your work was making a difference in the world.
The week of January 11-17 was pretty cool, helping to pull together the Global Disaster Relief Page in just few hours. I went on vacation that weekend and was on the phone in Mexico convincing President Clinton to plug our Facebook page as part of the relief efforts.
Election Day in 2008 was pretty cool, too. We'd registered 60,000 voters in just 10 days with ads on the site, got 5.5 million U.S. users to click the "I Voted" button on Election Day, and had something like a million users look up their polling location on the Google Map. That was when I realized the high point of my professional career in politics was going to be getting 5.5 million people to click a button.When you applied to work here, what crazy rumor about Facebook culture did you initially dismiss, only to discover that it's completely true?
I knew almost nothing about Facebook when I joined. I was like a lot of people who don't seem to conceive of the idea that people work at Facebook and not magical computer fairies.Why do you work for Facebook, over any other options open to you right now?
I really love my job. I get to sit in meetings with vaguely important and occasionally actually important people and explain why Facebook is like the wheel or fire and how not using it really isn't an option anymore. Government and politics both operate with pretty limited resources, but technologies like Facebook really are an answer for helping them overcome those constraints.
I came to DC to be a character in the (American TV show) West Wing (like Sam or Josh) and there are times when it was hard to look at all my friends working on the Obama campaign or in the White House and not feel like I'm missing out. But Congress, the White House, the government—those have all been around for a while and will be around for a while longer.
Facebook is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It's like my favorite Facebook philosopher, (engineer) Soleio, once said (in this video): "This is Everest. Like there's nothing else, you get this thing done, you do this thing well, and then you can go home. You can say 'Hey I changed the world.' "
Charlotte works on Facebook's international user operations team. - Topics: Working at Facebook, Faces of Facebook
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