I remember a chat I had with a colleague about 6 years ago. He posited that I would be really excited to work at FB since it was such a fast growing company wit

I remember a chat I had with a colleague about 6 years ago. He posited that I would be really excited to work at FB since it was such a fast growing company with all these interesting problems. I responded that I couldn't understand what he was talking about, there really wasn't much interesting going on outside of some graph analytics at the time and that problem had a pretty limited life-span given FB's particular use-cases. There's been very little really truly interesting blue-sky technical work at FB that's I'm aware of other than trying to figure out how to get around pretty prosaic issues through clever hackery rather than just doing it some other already established way and trying to figure out how to exploit their user-base for targeted ads (which by many accounts from folks I know aren't all that great w/r to ROI). The more interesting stuff seems to be happening in their acquisitions like WhatsApp and Oculus, but the "Facebook stink" feels like it's already starting to get to those teams as well. I honestly have almost no idea what their 13,000 employees must be doing outside of data center operations and various O&M projects at this point. Building quality mobile client software definitely doesn't seem to be it. What I find immensely interesting is how they're pulling in around $11/user/year (about $4 in pure profit)! Their economy of scale is pretty good considering it only costs them about $7/user/year to run the service. I'd easily pay $10/year for a service like FB that didn't entirely suck and had all my friends on it.