Last week I was given a tour of the Meta offices. Were they "masculine"?

It could be one of the last times they are allowing guests in. I didn't make it into the men's bathroom.

This edition brought to you by employment law firm White, Hilferty & Rose.

Last week, I was invited in for a tour of the Meta offices. It was their final weekly happy hour, and my host told me that these once-a-week happy hours were now becoming once-a-month, presumably a cost-cutting measure in this new era of Meta.

After entering the lobby through a set of brass revolving doors, I approached a group of doormen who had nervous energy. Not nervous to see me or other guests, but nervous that if they have one minor fuck-up, they’re instantly ejected from the building. I passed them my driver’s license and signed a confidentially agreement, which was disguised as a friendly message about visitors being respectful of privacy!

I considered not signing it—but then assumed that these scrutinized security doormen would notice if I didn’t, and I don’t think I would have been let in. (If Meta sues me for this Substack, I suppose we will know what they really think about free speech.)

I received a lanyard and initially thought I could use it to walk through the turnstiles, but the security guards barked at me to sit on the couches and wait for my host. I backtracked in slow motion. My host arrived and hugged me, saving me—she was effervescent and artsy-looking, wearing cat-eye eyeliner and stacks of silver rings on her red-painted fingernails. She allowed me through the turnstiles, and then a security guard again put me on notice for holding my lanyard in my hand instead of wearing it around my neck.

With the lanyard now around my neck we ascended in the elevator to a different floor, in what looked like a giant and slightly upscale university cafeteria. Engineers, product managers, and designers who worked on artificial intelligence and hardware buzzed around in cliques of two to five. My host waved at one seated person as we made laps around the happy hour area, but when I asked about how many of these hundreds of people she worked with, she told me that she didn’t have any idea who any of the rest of them were.

I grabbed a white wine and she grabbed a beer, and we sat in the mix of everyone. The employees were enthralled in their own conversations, and I presumed that unlike a more sales- and marketing-focused environment, these technologists were not looking to socialize with others at this happy hour. I was definitely the minority (in both gender and skin color, not that I care one bit), which made me wonder how many of these engineering workers were on visas.

I have heard from other employees that Meta was their favorite workplace in tech, so I wasn’t surprised to hear that it was hers too. She said that she has not once worked with someone who has done anything unethical. When I asked her about Frances Haugen, the well-known Meta whistleblower, she claimed that a lot of the information shared by Frances was taken out of context, from teams she wasn’t a part of. Some of the reports of Meta acting a certain way she chalked up to incompetence or ignorance rather than some sort of evil.

She echoed what others have told me, that Mark Zuckerberg is known to be more open-minded and deferential than most tech CEOs, something I have heard from at least two other employees. Her theory was that he was just deferential in nature: deferential to Sheryl Sandberg, as we’re now learning given he attributed all the DEI programs to her command—and now deferential to Donald Trump.

At the same time, after a conversation with an acquaintance who used to work at Salesforce, I was reminded that the rank-and-file are for the most part very sequestered from top decision-makers. Maybe now that DeepSeek is threatening American artificial intelligence, beyond Trump’s influence, there is further impetus for a drastic culture change at Meta. My host didn’t have any illusions about that—she was prepared for Meta to become a prototypical cutthroat tech or consulting workplace.

At the end of our conversation, an unusually joyful cafeteria worker approached us with hot cider and whipped cream, which we both gladly accepted. I had to use the restroom, and she told me that she was supposed to follow me to the women’s bathroom, which did not have a men’s bathroom next to it. (Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to see what would happen if I walked by the men’s restroom, if I would get tased or whatnot.)

I sense that she invited me in, in a sense, to reveal that this wasn’t some sort of jiu-jitsu competition in a den of tigers narrated by Jake Paul. Which is both good for Meta’s image (they’re not as sinister as we imagine), and also bad (red-pilled Ken from Barbie has taken over in the White House and there are new masters and incentives). I didn’t find the workplace masculine in fact—more so neurodivergent, introverted, and focused.

Later that night, at a party for investigators and whistleblower lawyers, I mentioned the theory about Zuckerberg being deferential to someone like Sandberg as a personality trait, and the investigator I was talking to said that this sounded like “pop psychology” (while another lawyer defended Frances Haugen’s claims).

Naturally, I take what a happy tech employee says with a grain of salt. But who knows, maybe there is an intrinsic desire in these tech founders to defer to these mother or father figures (Travis Kalanick with Ariana Huffington, Elon Musk saying that Trump reminds him of his father).

From personal experience, I certainly know that many of them don’t have it all figured out. Even if they legally have the decision-making power, they have little boys inside of them. Little boys can be wonderful, or they can throw tantrums.