Josef Desimone, Facebook's executive chef, has died

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10100895107738711

by paradiseall • 13 years ago

58 28 13 years ago

freehunter2• 13 years ago

I just think about projects I benefit from and team members I've worked with and how this can happen at any moment. How differently the world seems when you take just one person out of it. Suddenly, everyone around you becomes the most important person to ever exist.

My deepest condolences to the Desimone family and to everyone at Facebook.

sdfjkl• 13 years ago

Mark's grinning face right above this announcement bothers me for some reason: http://cl.ly/image/2k0p2v2A1U3t

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

it might be a decent (though seldom used) feature for these communication mediums to have (FB, G+, etc) to be able to hotswap your icon for just one message when the message is grave.

many gmail users now have icons (gee thanks, G+), and I can imagine that this awkwardness happens frequently in death notice emails sent to family and friends. Swapping it with even a generic frown face icon might do.

samstave2• 13 years ago

The ability to have a "tone profile picture" -- where you can have several pics and then pick the tone of a post....

samstave2• 13 years ago

I recall when a colleague I had worked with passed away suddenly and we were not yet connected on linkedin, and linkedin was sending me reminders to connect with her for months after she passed.

I emailed support at linkedin and told them of the passing - never got a response - but the alerts eventually stopped... though I do not attribute their stopping to my email to them.

chronomex• 13 years ago

LiveJournal has that ... you can have several avatars and choose for every post and comment.

Andys• 13 years ago

Or how about the fact that thousands of people are "liking" the sad news.

Flowsion• 13 years ago

They are not liking the sad news, they're liking Mark's words said about the sad news.

BHSPitMonkey• 13 years ago

Just an unfortunate effect of Facebook's terminology (compared to, say, a Google +1, or an upvote). The intent is to promote and share the message, regardless of how it actually makes you feel.

soupboy• 13 years ago

According to http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/04/business/fi-chef4, Desimone worked for Google before Facebook. "As Google's first executive chef, Ayers hired Desimone in 2003 when Google was growing so fast that they cooked in the back of an 18-wheeler and served meals under tents."

Quite an amazing journey. RIP.

67726e2• 13 years ago

Perhaps I am just lacking some perspective here and someone could better inform me, and I don't mean to be "that guy" right now, but how does this really relate to the guideline of:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I can understand when someone like Douglas Engelbart dies and HN is filled with stories about him, but what exactly has this chef done that makes him noteworthy on HN?

CoachRufus872• 13 years ago

Perhaps he's fed (or knew), at one point, many of the folks here on HN.

untog• 13 years ago

He worked at both Facebook and Google, so aside from anything else I have to assume that a good number of HN readers have benefitted from his cooking.

Are developers now the only employees worth celebrating at tech companies?

67726e2• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm just coming from a different perspective having only ever worked for a small company, but I don't exactly find a chef to be noteworthy, at least not in any technical sense.

Let me put it another way, aside from the employees of Google or Facebook, what has this man done that would make him interesting to the rest of the people on this site? What did he do that makes him noteworthy? I'm sure he was a good man and all, but what does he matter to me? By all means, if there is something noteworthy, please let me know, otherwise why was this posted?

methehack• 13 years ago

Sorry, dude, you're "that guy".

Someone who a bunched of people loved has tragically and suddenly passed away. A bunch of folks who knew him probably read this and up voted the story. I think you could have picked a better post -- finding one could not possibly be difficult -- to grind this particular axe.

koenigdavidmj• 13 years ago

You, sir, have a very poor sense of timing.

And the position of this on the home page tells me that a large collection of good hackers find it interesting. If you disagree, flag it and move on.

cpncrunch• 13 years ago

I agree with you. While it's sad that this person has died, it doesn't really seem newsworthy.

nostromo• 13 years ago

I've always admired Google for elevating the role of chef to such unprecedented heights.

But it also makes me wonder what other roles in these big companies could be elevated. (Random example, perhaps the cleaning staff.)

When I was at Amazon circa 1999 rumor had it that the van driver we saw once a day (he delivered intra-office mail -- is that still a thing?) had at minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock options and maybe much more. Beyond being a tad jealous, it also made me happy that the company would think enough of the "support" staff to make sure they were given the same perks as everyone else, even if they were of a different magnitude.

tlrobinson• 13 years ago

Compare to good old Zynga: "One Journal source said that Zynga executives were especially concerned with not creating a "Google chef" scenario."

http://m.cnet.com/news/zynga-to-employees-give-back-our-stoc...

Josef Desimone, Facebook's executive chef, has died

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