It started as Testing on the Toilet, which was an effort to get people to actually care about unit-testing their code and software quality and writing maintainable code that doesn't break in 6 months. Later was expanded to Learning on the Loo, general tips and tricks, and then Testing on the Toilet became Tech on the Toilet. It's been going on for a good 20 years now, so that's about 1000 articles (they change them out weekly) and there aren't really 1000 articles you can write about unit testing.

The insight is actually pretty similar to Google's core business model: when you're going to the bathroom, there isn't a whole lot else you're doing, so it's the perfect time to put up a 2-3 minute read to reinforce a message that you want people to hear but might not get attention for otherwise.

I play chess on the toilet at work.

Actually, that is also a way to surrepticiously abuse you: not even your toilet time should be "yours".

I was in a fraternity in college, 20 years ago. We put weekly bathroom notes on the inside of the stall doors. Something interesting, something funny, upcoming news. The elected fraternity secretary was responsible for making those weekly, among many other things.

If they were a day late the amount of pestering they would get until the did that weekly job was hilarious. We all got a kick out of them.

Your toilet time can be yours, just don’t fucking read them lol. Back then razr phones were the hotness, nobody sat on a smartphone and had ads blasted at them while they took a shit.

I guess, if you equate "influence" with "abuse". An awful lot pillars of our society would become abuse then. Ask any parent of a toddler whether their toilet time is actually "theirs".

Employers should not be treating employees like toddlers and try to brainwash them on the goddamn toilet

My point is the opposite actually: if you are the parent of a toddler, you'll know that your toilet time is not actually yours, because your toddler will try every effort to get your attention and influence you, up to and including crawling into your lap while you are doing your business; tantrumming on the bathroom floor; tantrumming outside the bathroom door; cutting up the mail you really need to file; spilling food all over the floor; unlatching childproofing; moving furniture; and enlisting their siblings.

It's not really a FAANG thing. I bet you've seen the memes about X days without a serious accident, or without stopping the production line. It's the equivalent in a restroom or a urinal: A place you can make sure people see key information. You can find this in many industrial sites. A call center might have reminders of core principles for how to close calls quickly, or when to escalate. A lab might have safety tips. A restaurant will remind you of hand washing. An industrial site of some important safety tip or two.

While I've not seen this in every single place I've worked, it's very common.

You're right that it was just other employees who decided what to print there. But I don't think that absolves the company (Facebook) really... Everything a company does is just things that its people do! Nothing about the flyer was outside the parameters of the job of its maker. Their job was to make the company money by helping advertisers maximize ad revenue, and that's exactly what they were doing.

Facebook had a serious internal propaganda arm when I was there. Couldn't manage to get floor length stall walls in most of the bathrooms, but every stall had a weekly newsletter about whatever product stuff.

Every high traffic flat space on the wall would be covered with a poster, most of them with designs lifted from US WWII propaganda, many hard to tell if satire or not. I was surprised there was never one about carpooling with der füher.

I can say at Google we usually just had engineering tip posters in the washrooms they were usually very insightful and just written by other engineers at the company.

Stuff like how to reduce nesting logic, how to restructure APIs for better testing, etc.

People usually like them. I can't say I've seen what the parent post described so I imagine it's "the other" FAANG mentioned here.

Yep, I frankly thought Testing On The Toilet was pretty great.

That and nice washing toilets.