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Say what you want, but I left my entire, close-knit family behind in Ohio when I moved to San Francisco for better opportunities on better engineering teams. No

Say what you want, but I left my entire, close-knit family behind in Ohio when I moved to San Francisco for better opportunities on better engineering teams. Nothing in my life keeps me connected with them the way Facebook does. Nothing else draws together an audience as broad. From my teenage age cousins who use FB their way, to my Baby Boomer parents, to my Greatest Generation grandparents. They're all there in one place. Also, they've faced enormous engineering challenges. Yes, Facebook style problems have great fanout results. You can almost accuse it of being easy in that way. But at their size and with their growth rate, nothing is easy. I'm not a big facebook user. I didn't touch it until i moved away and my family over time started using it. But your slur here is absurd. Facebook has given a lot of great engineering back to the community. Thrift. Cassandra. Open Source networking hardware, etc.

23david 13y ago
Yes the Facebook product has some utility. And they do have big engineering challenges, and have contributed to open-source. These are not unique to Facebook, and if these are the criteria for working there, I can think of a lot of other places to work at that: a) Have products that my friends and family would enjoy/use. b) Have interesting engineering challenges that a new employee can work on. c) Allow employees to contribute back to open-source and maintain their open-source projects on company time, with significant engineering resources. The OpenCompute project is pretty unique to only Facebook, so if hacking on data center hardware is your thing, Facebook is pretty unique in that regard. Would be curious to know how many people are in that group though... I imagine it's pretty small compared to their general software engineering workforce. You can do similar work at Google, but they don't let you release your work Open Source. :-) Trade secrets and such...

23david 13y ago

Yes the Facebook product has some utility. And they do have big engineering challenges, and have contributed to open-source. These are not unique to Facebook, and if these are the criteria for working there, I can think of a lot of other places to work at that: a) Have products that my friends and family would enjoy/use. b) Have interesting engineering challenges that a new employee can work on. c) Allow employees to contribute back to open-source and maintain their open-source projects on company time, with significant engineering resources. The OpenCompute project is pretty unique to only Facebook, so if hacking on data center hardware is your thing, Facebook is pretty unique in that regard. Would be curious to know how many people are in that group though... I imagine it's pretty small compared to their general software engineering workforce. You can do similar work at Google, but they don't let you release your work Open Source. :-) Trade secrets and such...