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,

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...