Facebook fires engineer who gave tours to Chinese visitors
Staff Reporter 2015-09-09 09:02
A snapshot from Chummy, an online platform connecting Chinese travelers with expats living in the places they wish to visit. (Internet photo)
Facebook recently fired one of its Chinese engineers for abusing the benefits the company gives its employees, such as free meals for their family members and guests. The engineer was found to be charging Chinese visitors for tours of Facebook's offices in California, Chinese state broadcaster China National Radio reports.
The engineer was found to have brought a group of ten Chinese tourists with him to visit the company's premises. He charged them each US$20 in return for a tour of the facilities and a meal in the staff cafeteria. The visitors were users of Chummy, a shared-economy platform that links Chinese travelers with local expats.
Chummy is an internet startup based in San Francisco. Chummy's Linkedin page claims the company to be "like Uber or Airbnb, but instead of rides or rooms, we help travelers (which we call youmi), and hire interesting locals (which we call banmi), to show them around their favorite places in their city." A tour of a tech company is one of the packages offered by the group. Chinese travelers to the San Francisco Bay area who wish to visit the offices of a big name company such as Google, Apple, Yahoo or Twitter can reserve a tour through Chummy and get in touch with Chinese expats who work for the company concerned.
Facebook has contacted an attorney about the incident as the founder of Chummy formerly worked for its Chinese competitor Tencent, according to China Daily, an English-language newspaper based in Beijing. Since Facebook made that filing, other Silicon Valley tech companies such as Google and Apple have also launched internal investigations to see if users from Chummy have illegally visited their companies and campuses, China Daily said.
Liu Chang, the founder of Chummy and former vice president of Tencent, said she felt sorry for the man who got fired from Facebook and will help him to find a new job so he can remain in the US. She also said she sees Facebook as a bastion of innovation and thinks the company should give its employee an opportunity to explain himself. "We just want to change the world and this service has nothing to do with breaching safety or economic competition," Liu wrote in an open letter to Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
