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Facebook Stealing Googlers At An Alarming Rate
- hhm 19y agoThey are going back to Microsoft!
- ardit33 19y ago"They are going back to Microsoft!" -- facebook has a lot of ex-microsofties already. Anyways, I hope it doesn't get polluted too much with the ms mentality. The facebook experience and the newsfeed are loosing their simplicity and looking more and more like windows live.
- hello_moto 19y agoFor a side note: Google products start to look boring. No new features. No wonder they're losing their employees; nothing more to do.
- coffeeaddicted 19y agoDoes Facebook make anything interesting (from a programmers perspective)? I know a lot of cool stuff coming out of the google sweatshops, but I couldn't name anything interesting from Facebook. Am I missing out on something?
- hello_moto 19y agoSearch, GMail and Maps are the only 3 things I used. I don't even use Calendar, My Maps or their Cinema search whatnot. That's pretty much their products that I know of (and most of my friends outside Valley)
- coffeeaddicted 19y agoThat's already three more applications than I could name from Facebook :-) That wasn't a rhetorical question, but I've really no idea what would make Facebook interesting for a programmer. Google on the other hand is teasing me regularly with brandnew interesting API's (for which I never find the time to really check em out).
- altay 19y agoA lot of programmers seem to think the Facebook API is pretty interesting... and they've found the time to check it out, too.
- davidw 19y agoIt has some interesting possibilities, but as a hypothetical Google or Facebook developer, I'd much rather be hacking on something like Android than the Facebook API.
- coffeeaddicted 19y agoThanks, that's the stuff I was searching for. Facebook ain't that common here in germany and I'm no webdeveloper, so I didn't know until now about this API. I only had found the Facebook website which completely failed to impress me and if the name wouldn't drop so often I would probably not even have taken a second look. Well, time for new API's... maybe next year. If facebook is still the hype in 2008 ;-)
- mxh 19y agoFrom the article: "Entrepreneurs want to work at the hottest place on earth and right now that's Facebook." I see at least two false statements in that sentence.
- olefoo 19y agoYes, I don't know about the rest of you but I'd rather be working on what will be the hottest thing around in a year's time. Catch the wave _before_ it breaks.
- imsteve 19y agoGoogle's big wave came and facebook's hasn't. What's your point?
- olefoo 19y agoThe time to join FB was back when it was a harvard thing. If you join them now, you're jumping someone else's train, and you aren't shaping the company, you're just a plug compatible engineer.
- mwerty 19y agoI'll bet the 300th employee at Microsoft and Google disagree. This is like giving a reason for why stock X is overvalued. Time to buy it was last year. It can't possibly go any higher.
- olefoo 19y agoThere's nothing wrong with being a top-flight employee and helping build something big, but by the time a company has reached a size where two pizzas aren't enough to make everybody full the company has started to settle, the culture is beginning to congeal and the BIG decisions have been made. If you want to build something insanely great that works the way you think it should you have to pioneer and risk the arrows.
- amichail 19y agoHow much freedom does Facebook provide for its software engineers? Do they get something like 20% freedom?
- mynameishere 19y agoFYI that 20 percent thing is a trick for keeping potential entrepeneurs from quiting and starting their own companies.
- amichail 19y agoSo how is not having it any better?
- hello_moto 19y agoSo you can go home and do your own startup if you're not satisfied working with X company that doesn't give you 20%.
- boucher 19y agoFrom what I understand, it's not even that real. That is, if you can get all your work done in 80% of your time, then you are free to work 20% on whatever, but most people don't end up doing it because they have to spend 100% of their time (or close to it) on official work.
- plinkplonk 19y agobut, afaik, you can club all the personal time you don't use and take it as a continuous block of time, perhaps between projects. Anyone working for Google, please clarify!
- neilk 19y agoI don't work there any more, but you are correct. Many successful products started with banked 20% time. However, most individual 20% projects are not standalone projects. They are often tools or components or features or mini-sabbaticals with other teams. It is more possible to entrepreneurial at Google than any other company I know of. The workload is really high, but even so, the main barrier to effective 20% time is still oneself. Even at Google, most people talk about their brilliant ideas and don't do anything about them.
- Goladus 19y agoSome days, Tech Crunch seems more like a gossip tabloid than a serious news source. I once heard someone describe TV news as an ounce of fact poured into a sea of speculation, and this isn't the first TC article I've read that's gotten really creative with the speculation part.
- icky 19y agoI'm not alarmed. Are you alarmed? ;-)
- hello_moto 19y agoThis reminds me of a conversation I had with one of the Microsoft VPs. When asked about Google free lunch and recruiting tactics, he replied: "That's the culture in Silicon Valley. What's frightening is that people come and go within 2-3 years" These googlers came to my school and advertising how proud they are working at Google. Now we know the truth (^_^).
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- sbh 19y agoI don't think this has anything to do with the engineering challenges they have to solve at Facebook or the fun working environment. As that code-leak incident hinted some time ago, Facebook probably isn't more than a huge pile of spaghetti php-code. The only motivation of people for switching is greed. Facebook is pre-IPO, so stock options can potentially make some employees millionaires in case of a good IPO.