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How I Fell Through the Cracks at Facebook

A chronic illness forced me out of my software engineering job. What would have helped me most was a workplace union.

A view of Meta (Facebook) headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on May 15, 2026.

You could consider me one of the lucky ones. Meta, a company at the time called Facebook, offered me a software engineering job before I finished college, and before the advent of AI massively changed the landscape for entry-level roles. The job meant many things to me, but one of its most crucial upsides was the perks, the safety net it gave me as a new college grad. On my first day, in 2013, HR presented me with page after page of options for customizing Facebook’s many employee benefits on their onboarding portal. I had to choose between Kaiser and Aetna, for example, and whether I wanted a Roth or a traditional 401(k). I had to decide if I wanted insurance for my dog.

One of the choices presented in the portal was whether or not to pay into a corporate disability insurance policy. I don’t remember opting in, but apparently I did. More likely than not, that was the default, and I clicked to the next question without a second thought.

One choice that I didn’t need to make was whether or not to join a union. Facebook didn’t have one, consistent with the software engineering industry at large at the time. Engineers weren’t really agitating for them yet, either. In 2013, Americans were, according to one poll, more opposed to unions than they’d been for most of the past 100 years. This was also the height of the Big Tech industry, the era of ping-pong tables and Kombucha on tap, and tech companies like Facebook were known for doing everything possible to keep their engineers happy. My entry-level role came with an obscene number of stock options, a signing bonus equal to a full year’s pay, unlimited sick days, fresh-cooked meals, transportation to and from work, and access to countless on-site services.

Six years later, I left all this behind. When I was 27, I suddenly developed a serious chronic pain condition, chronic migraine disorder, which is characterized by frequent migraine attacks. I stopped working, and the specifics of Facebook’s corporate disability benefits, which I’d long since forgotten mindlessly checking a box for, suddenly mattered a whole lot.

Migraine symptoms run the gamut from severe head pain to vomiting to vertigo to paralysis. Some migraines mimic strokes, while others alter your vision or strike you temporarily blind. There are even reports of migraines causing people to forget how to speak for the duration of an attack. Attacks, or “episodes,” can last anywhere from a few hours to multiple years.

My migraines involved severe headaches, bouts of nausea, burning sensations, and pains that ripped through my body like seizures. They lasted for days, weeks, even months at a time. My light sensitivity was so severe, I wore baseball caps inside to block out ceiling lights. My migraines also sent me to the hospital multiple times. I quickly resigned myself to a regimen of drugs with side effects like severe fatigue, short-term memory loss, and—ironically—“medication overuse” headaches. But nothing helped all that much, or for very long. I was in severe pain 28 days out of the month on average, and frequently unable to look at screens, read, speak, or think about anything other than survival.

For the first few weeks of my condition, I dipped into my unlimited stash of Facebook-employee sick days. But as the weeks turned into months and my health didn’t show any signs of improvement, my manager connected me with an HR representative, who connected me to a case manager with Facebook’s disability insurance company—a separate company from my health insurance provider. The disability insurance company, apparently, would cover my salary for as long as I was disabled from work.

The disability insurance company’s involvement seemed unimportant to me at the time, because the end result was the same: Money got deposited into my bank account while I went about my days trying to feel better. Between the hospital visits, alternative treatments, and migraine episodes that limited my executive functioning, being chronically ill was the most stressful “job” I’d ever had. I knew that it was the insurance company furnishing my........

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