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Facebook stopped burning VC money a long time ago. They've been wildly profitable for years. Their success is largely because of paying high salaries to attract

Facebook stopped burning VC money a long time ago. They've been wildly profitable for years. Their success is largely because of paying high salaries to attract some of the best people, not in spite of doing that. The real issue seems to be that they're losing $3bn a quarter building the Metaverse (eg Reality Labs) at the same time as losing ad revenue because of things like Apple's antitracking changes and failing to innovate Instagram allowing competitors like TikTok to eat a big chunk of their market.

gregjor 4y ago
"Best people" according to what metric, other than salary? Facebook got fat from advertising and monetizing the worst aspects of social media. Does that require the "best people?" What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10?
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  I agree. Maybe best at grinding LeetCode, best at playing office politics, best at tolerating toxic work environments... But likely not best in actually building good software. No doubt quite good at that, but probably not meaningfully different than any other tech company in the area hiring from a similar talent pool. And because the candidates also need to be optimized for the qualities mentioned in the first paragraph, likely there’s a trade off where average software development skill ends up being lower due to needing to maximize other personality factors first.
  - jstx1 4y ago
    I get the desire to look down on leetcode or on Facebook generally but do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers? They have billions of customers using their products all the time. This isn't done by useless people who know only LC and office politics. They have to solve technical problems that most other software engineers don't even know exist. Having incredibly influential open source projects (React, PyTorch) is just a cherry on top of everything else they're doing from a software engineering point of view.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      > do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers? They clearly have engineers that are good, but he questions if the engineers are better than the good engineers found at any other run-of-the-mill company. They aren't exactly performing sorcery over there, just solving problems like every other software business.
      - johnbellone 4y ago
        That’s beyond question and if you are asking it you’re fooling yourself. You can take a look at the output of their engineers as an example (React, Native, Cassandra). We are talking billions. Your run of the mill software company isn’t building this kind of tech. You can hate on Meta all you want. But let’s not deny the facts.
        didibus 4y ago
        I think it's a decent question, assessing tech talent is hard, oftentimes, building great things like React or Cassandra is also a matter of opportunity, working at big companies means you have hard problems that require you to spend time designing such systems. It's hard to say that others couldn't have similarly solved it, or even done it better. That doesn't mean it's any less impressive of the people who did build all this, but I just don't think we need to compare, we can recognize the accomplishment on its own.
        seer-zig 4y ago
        Could the fact that they have higher salaries have anything to do with it? Offer higher salaries and you'll attract stronger talent, regardless of the leetcode hoops they have to jump through.
        epicureanideal 4y ago
        Yes, of course higher salaries incentivize people to grind leetcode and tolerate office politics who otherwise might not.
  - lurker619 4y ago
    So there are no office politics or bad work environments outside FAANG? I've worked in both FAANG and run of the mill tech shops, and I vastly prefer the professionalism and less politics in FAANG environments. YMMV.
- abdabab 4y ago
  > "Best people" according to what metric, other than salary? Facebook scales. It’s not easy to scale computing infrastructure to support billions of daily active users. Only a handful of companies can do that right now. On top of that they scaled an ad business that can target billions of people. There is only one other company in the world who can do that. > What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10? See it’s less about “quality”, it’s more about “quantity”. Scaling is a different problem on its own. I adore Unix but I admire what Facebook did as well. Scaling any project over 10 exceptional people is one thing and scaling a project with 10,000 engineers is a completely different thing and Facebook succeeded at that. Whether that’s a good thing or not that they have succeeded is a separate discussion.
  - gregjor 4y ago
    Granted, just keeping FB running requires a lot of work from smart and dedicated people. But we can’t really tell how well they do it. If my bank or cell provider or AWS fail to scale I notice right away, but I won’t even know if FB fails to deliver ads to me, or fails to show me something in my feed (assuming I used FB, which I don’t). FB could actually get away with scaling poorly as long as they keep the lights on because few of their users would notice. I don’t doubt that delivering an online service, even a crappy service, at FB scale presents some unique and difficult challenges, and I’m sure FB employs lots of smart and talented people. But given the number of supposedly “best” engineers they do employ the results seem underwhelming. I find it more impressive that Amazon manages to keep AWS up and reliable while constantly introducing new services, and that Apple manages to support a billion iPhone users without spewing ads in their face.
- silisili 4y ago
  Not that it matters, but I interviewed at FB nearly a decade ago. While the process was a trainwreck that I'd never entertain again, I will admit that while on campus, I met and talked to some really, really smart people. I just remember being kinda sad that all this talent was being wasted on ads and holding attention. Back to the point, I think anyone who has been there could attest it's not all just leetcode studiers...well, maybe some amount, but they employ a lot of really smart people.
- onion2k 4y ago
  "Best people" according to what metric.. Any metric you like. Facebook is massive and has a huge range of people. There'll be people who sit in the top 0.1% for literally every method of ranking them you can dream up.
- noahtallen 4y ago
  I mean, despite my huge ethical disagreements with FB, they have successfully built one of the largest platforms (the largest by active users??) in the world. Scaling at this side is very, very difficult. Not to mention creating some of the widest-used OSS libraries on the web. Plus, it’s one of the few platforms our grandparents can use, and we all know how hard it can be to make software that older folks like to use. So they are clearly not hiring terrible devs. (Well, sure some of them are, but that’s the case everywhere)
  - gregjor 4y ago
    I can agree with all of that but still question how it requires so many supposedly “best” engineers. Facebook won the network effect lottery years ago, creating (or falling backwards into) an addictive platform that people join because everyone they know joined, not because their platform has obvious technical advantages over competitors. They scaled the platform organically over time because they had to, not because of some genius master plan. My parents successfully use iPhones and iPads and GMail, along with Facebook. I can’t say they “like to use” Facebook, but if they want to see photos of their kids and grandkids they have to use it. I don’t know anyone who enjoys using FB, including my own kids. It seems users see it as a necessary evil — where else can they go?

gregjor 4y ago

"Best people" according to what metric, other than salary? Facebook got fat from advertising and monetizing the worst aspects of social media. Does that require the "best people?" What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10?

epicureanideal 4y ago
I agree. Maybe best at grinding LeetCode, best at playing office politics, best at tolerating toxic work environments... But likely not best in actually building good software. No doubt quite good at that, but probably not meaningfully different than any other tech company in the area hiring from a similar talent pool. And because the candidates also need to be optimized for the qualities mentioned in the first paragraph, likely there’s a trade off where average software development skill ends up being lower due to needing to maximize other personality factors first.
- jstx1 4y ago
  I get the desire to look down on leetcode or on Facebook generally but do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers? They have billions of customers using their products all the time. This isn't done by useless people who know only LC and office politics. They have to solve technical problems that most other software engineers don't even know exist. Having incredibly influential open source projects (React, PyTorch) is just a cherry on top of everything else they're doing from a software engineering point of view.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    > do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers? They clearly have engineers that are good, but he questions if the engineers are better than the good engineers found at any other run-of-the-mill company. They aren't exactly performing sorcery over there, just solving problems like every other software business.
    - johnbellone 4y ago
      That’s beyond question and if you are asking it you’re fooling yourself. You can take a look at the output of their engineers as an example (React, Native, Cassandra). We are talking billions. Your run of the mill software company isn’t building this kind of tech. You can hate on Meta all you want. But let’s not deny the facts.
      - didibus 4y ago
        I think it's a decent question, assessing tech talent is hard, oftentimes, building great things like React or Cassandra is also a matter of opportunity, working at big companies means you have hard problems that require you to spend time designing such systems. It's hard to say that others couldn't have similarly solved it, or even done it better. That doesn't mean it's any less impressive of the people who did build all this, but I just don't think we need to compare, we can recognize the accomplishment on its own.
      - seer-zig 4y ago
        Could the fact that they have higher salaries have anything to do with it? Offer higher salaries and you'll attract stronger talent, regardless of the leetcode hoops they have to jump through.
        epicureanideal 4y ago
        Yes, of course higher salaries incentivize people to grind leetcode and tolerate office politics who otherwise might not.
- lurker619 4y ago
  So there are no office politics or bad work environments outside FAANG? I've worked in both FAANG and run of the mill tech shops, and I vastly prefer the professionalism and less politics in FAANG environments. YMMV.
abdabab 4y ago
> "Best people" according to what metric, other than salary? Facebook scales. It’s not easy to scale computing infrastructure to support billions of daily active users. Only a handful of companies can do that right now. On top of that they scaled an ad business that can target billions of people. There is only one other company in the world who can do that. > What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10? See it’s less about “quality”, it’s more about “quantity”. Scaling is a different problem on its own. I adore Unix but I admire what Facebook did as well. Scaling any project over 10 exceptional people is one thing and scaling a project with 10,000 engineers is a completely different thing and Facebook succeeded at that. Whether that’s a good thing or not that they have succeeded is a separate discussion.
- gregjor 4y ago
  Granted, just keeping FB running requires a lot of work from smart and dedicated people. But we can’t really tell how well they do it. If my bank or cell provider or AWS fail to scale I notice right away, but I won’t even know if FB fails to deliver ads to me, or fails to show me something in my feed (assuming I used FB, which I don’t). FB could actually get away with scaling poorly as long as they keep the lights on because few of their users would notice. I don’t doubt that delivering an online service, even a crappy service, at FB scale presents some unique and difficult challenges, and I’m sure FB employs lots of smart and talented people. But given the number of supposedly “best” engineers they do employ the results seem underwhelming. I find it more impressive that Amazon manages to keep AWS up and reliable while constantly introducing new services, and that Apple manages to support a billion iPhone users without spewing ads in their face.
silisili 4y ago
Not that it matters, but I interviewed at FB nearly a decade ago. While the process was a trainwreck that I'd never entertain again, I will admit that while on campus, I met and talked to some really, really smart people. I just remember being kinda sad that all this talent was being wasted on ads and holding attention. Back to the point, I think anyone who has been there could attest it's not all just leetcode studiers...well, maybe some amount, but they employ a lot of really smart people.
onion2k 4y ago
"Best people" according to what metric.. Any metric you like. Facebook is massive and has a huge range of people. There'll be people who sit in the top 0.1% for literally every method of ranking them you can dream up.
noahtallen 4y ago
I mean, despite my huge ethical disagreements with FB, they have successfully built one of the largest platforms (the largest by active users??) in the world. Scaling at this side is very, very difficult. Not to mention creating some of the widest-used OSS libraries on the web. Plus, it’s one of the few platforms our grandparents can use, and we all know how hard it can be to make software that older folks like to use. So they are clearly not hiring terrible devs. (Well, sure some of them are, but that’s the case everywhere)
- gregjor 4y ago
  I can agree with all of that but still question how it requires so many supposedly “best” engineers. Facebook won the network effect lottery years ago, creating (or falling backwards into) an addictive platform that people join because everyone they know joined, not because their platform has obvious technical advantages over competitors. They scaled the platform organically over time because they had to, not because of some genius master plan. My parents successfully use iPhones and iPads and GMail, along with Facebook. I can’t say they “like to use” Facebook, but if they want to see photos of their kids and grandkids they have to use it. I don’t know anyone who enjoys using FB, including my own kids. It seems users see it as a necessary evil — where else can they go?