This bodes very poorly for Facebook. The money may still come in but forward-thinking younger talent can be the crucial difference between a trendy company like Facebook and a corporate monolith like Oracle.
FB is already a legacy company in my opinion. It makes no products I am interested in using and gives no indication of ever doing so. I will never call them Meta and it's going to be funny when no one else does either. They haven't earned it.
Google, whatever its problems, gives some indication of keeping up with the times. Aside from undisputed leadership in AI, there are the little things: they recently overhauled their chat tooling (again) and (finally) added Slack-style emoji reactions. If they still had some of their mid-2000s mojo, it would be neat to see them try again with a social network product.
That's an interesting take. Most everyone I know find Google's chat changes utter shit, and have found alternatives. Personally, I dumped it and joined a Slack community of the one person I talked with most on it.
Besides being a complete disaster, UI-wise, it freezes up and ceases working constantly in the web UI. The remaining people I know who stay on Google's chat... I simply cannot talk to anymore. I send them email or use an alternative chat service they're on.
You might consider a different example of how you feel Google is keeping up with the times.
The metaverse bet you shrug off but adding emoji reactions impresses you? Google is in “accumulate capital to deploy the next technological shift” mode, Facebook is trying to make that shift a reality (Waymo excepted).
Google keeps a large suite of in-house built, enormously useful products alive and still manages to move them forward incrementally. FB has done nothing useful for me since I signed up in 2004. Given that, why would I care if they made a video about the incredible things they will do in the future? If I'm to believe they will deliver, shouldn't they have a track record by now?
And Google has led in AI for the past decade so I'm not sure how you got the impression that FB is doing and Google is just sitting on cash. Looks exactly opposite to me.
> FB has done nothing useful for me since I signed up in 2004. Given that, why would I care if they made a video about the incredible things they will do in the future?
Have you used a few VR devices over the last decade, including the last Quest?
No. I can't imagine putting on anything that would exacerbate my neck strain. Screen, stay where you are and I'll decide what angle to look at you from.
Maybe when they scale it down to the size and heft of swimming goggles.
> Google keeps a large suite of in-house built, enormously useful products alive and still manages to move them forward incrementally. FB has done nothing useful for me since I signed up in 2004.
I despised Facebook before everyone else but seriously:
Google is extremely well known for killing useful stuff that people love, not for moving them forward incrementally.
I can't remember Facebook killing off anything since parsley or whatever it was called.
Google has also been going backwards since I don't know, 2009 or something? (Back in the day it used to be that search results somewhat reliably contained the the you searched for. Today Google is in my opinion a copy of the competitors they outcompeted: customer hostile ads, poor results.)
Facebook is the ugly thing it has been since I don't know when.
Maps and docs as well. While Facebook is the king of time wasting apps, Google is the king of useful apps. They might abuse their role a bit, but at least the products are things that helps people.
> The metaverse bet you shrug off but adding emoji reactions impresses you?
I'm not sure the metaverse play really is anything other than continuing the same thinking that led to Facebook login required for Oculus. The idea is probably to roll out VR no differently than rolling out emoji reactions. It's what you do when you get big. 1B users * 10% using new feature = BIG NEW USER BASE and you get to report growth for years as 10% turns into 20%.
Not sure about that. I think management and culture would be the deciding factor. In fact our age demands diversity in the workplace and age is one of those dimentions.
Oracle is doing just fine. And if I had to trade places with Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Ellison, well, I’d say it’s not even close, but that implies there’s a metric at all.
If I had to trade places with one of those two, I’d pick Ellison. I didn’t even bother to look up their (theoretical) net worths, because at that scale it no longer makes a difference; what does make a difference to me is Ellison’s face isn’t regularly in the news attached both to stories about how they engage in censorship by removing people who break the site rules, and to other stories about how they take sides by failing to remove politicians who violate the site rules.
> forward-thinking younger talent can be the crucial difference
Are engineers really the ones driving at the company? I think that has not been true in "the industry" for a decade now. Marketing, upper-management are the ones steering the ships now — engineers just row.
Maybe that's why Google has made a few dozen amazing things while FB has made basically one thing and acquired the rest. A culture that respects engineering leadership.
It's hard to think of something amazing from Google that they didn't acquire other than the search engine. Maps, YouTube, Android were all acquisitions. Most Google internal projects are future entries in the "Google graveyard". The better stuff I can think of is mostly deep technical stuff like Map Reduce built to support search. Facebook has also done fairly well with things that are pillars to support the (formerly) namesake product.
GMail, various chat things, GSuite, Google Brain, Google Translate. Maps, Android, and YouTube were all massively developed and scaled after the initial acquisition.
Chrome, Gmail, drive, Chromecast, duo, call screening. There are plenty of entirely home grown products that have succeeded. Discounting products which have had the vast majority of their growth and featureset built out while under Google is also a but dismissive of it's role in making them successful.
i dont think a tech company will move away from a engineer centric focus, everyone which dared disappeared. Oracle as patent company is a different story
Is this actually true? I'm not sure what younger means but pretty much every anecdote of innovation i know is mostly late 20s early 30s engineers with a few YOE and a couple exceptions of whizzkids straight out of college (e.g Facebook). Genuinely quite interested if there is evidence round age and innovation in Tech.
At a certain size, big tech develops efficient systems to transmute forward-thinking younger talent into slightly jaded mid career pros excited for 1% improvements and 30s off the build. The world needs both types of people and companies need them both in different measures at different points in their trajectories.
Normally I’d agree with you but I think this article topic is fair. FB is a high profile company that has been an aspirational employer for many people (esp outside the valley) over several years. For that to change is interesting.
It's worse than that. We're assuming "X says [..]" is equivalent to a factual statement. Its the typical weasel wording by modern media which is simply looking to report click-bait/gossip (he says, she says), rather than expending any effort to verifying and reporting facts.
meh, facebook / meta will just raise the salary, enticing some would be employees to come or come back and they are already spending billions on this 'metaverse' thing.
Because to the general population there clearly is such a thing. The changing of the parent company name is a detail that most people just don’t care about. And I believe Facebook remains a subsidiary of the new parent company that is writing its own separate paychecks.
Finally, comments such as these don’t really add any value to the discussion.
On the one hand, is this surprising? Once you get as big as FB, it is inevitable that it is no longer the same kind of work environment as it was when it was a hot startup or a new titan. FB is not new. It is no doubt changing on account of that, because the way the world reacts to it is changing. They wanted to start their own currency, which many startups do, but because they were FB, the governments of the world made it clear they would not be allowed to succeed in that. When you are big, you cannot "move fast and break things" without triggering a much larger backlash from the world around you, and this inevitably means you don't move as fast.
On the other hand, I don't doubt that they are going to have to worry more about work-life balance and things like that, because they cannot just use their status as the new titan to recruit with (because they're no longer new). So, like many no-longer-new tech titans before them, they will have to change how they recruit and retain. FB is now more like Microsoft, IBM, or Intel than it is like the FB of old.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are built. They have their management systems and structures in place. It would be wrong to think that everyone at Facebook needs to be a genius for the company to succeed, and putting a genius into many of the roles that are needed to keep the company operating won't work out well for either the genius or the company.
Once you switch to maintenance mode, you have already lost. You will always need to innovate and for this you need smart people with good ideas and talent to make it work.
While this is a trend across the board since the pandemic, for Facebook it is particularly troublesome because it's deeper rooted than at other companies. On an almost daily basis it is becoming more and more public knowledge that Facebook is in more legal trouble than it can handle and that the company no longer has much good standing in society (which, for a "social" media company, is a bit of a problem). Young people are not stupid, no one wants to work at a company with no future, even if it still pays well. The root of all these problems is, of course, the toxicity of Zuck.
> Facebook is in more legal trouble than it can handle and that the company no longer has much good standing in society (which, for a "social" media company, is a bit of a problem).
Is it? I've always liked the perspective that Facebook's product, to governments, beyond mass surveillance, is societal stability (or lack there of).
If there's one company that could almost single-handedly cause an actual insurrection in the United States, it's Facebook. That sort of power doesn't have to be stated explicitly and the mainstream Liberal media spent 4 years stating it quite openly. Nancy Pelosi is a well known Facebook investor.
Any major issue from the government can just result in a "bug" that accidentally amplifies the opposition and just like that, the cause of the issue is voted out.
I imagine many FB employees also envisioned themselves working their way to levels of seniority where they could nudge policy and practices towards the better (however they might define that). After all, one might have said, there’s no other place where an individual’s career in tech can have greater impact on so many people’s lives.
Now, seeing how even senior people on dedicated integrity teams had little ability to steer the ship, and being constantly reminded of this by friends outside FB even if it had previously been whispered internally, must be sobering for many of these folks.
What sort of ship steering do you think these employees wanted? More moderation and censorship? Or less? Or just different? Or is it more around reducing engagement based goals that drive addiction to social media? Or is it around targeting children?
I suppose part of the problem is that even the employees likely don't know what sort of ship-steering they want, and hoped to gradually get enough context to eventually be able to see an optimal path forward. But unless conversations are happening constantly, that day will always be years in the future. And Facebook's internal framing that "those conversations should always play second fiddle to engagement" has effectively quashed any hopes of productive context-aware consensus.
The question on everyone's mind, of course, is: did leadership intentionally prevent these conversations and from-research-to-practice pipelines from occurring, or was their ineffectiveness simply an unintended side effect of the laser focus on engagement? Based on the anecdotes shared with media of how much of the balance was driven by public-relations considerations, one imagines that the perception skews towards the former. And that's not a good place to be from a retention perspective.
They’ve certainly faced an onslaught from the press, which has decided they are Philip Morris 2.0. It’s very unclear if that is going to translate into actual legal trouble.
If I was at FB I’d be more concerned with how young people are rejecting it.
Facebook presents an existential threat to the business of most traditional news media and they have a platform that actively promotes misinformation. The Press is doing their job: finding out what goes on inside Facebook and reporting on it. As someone not really involved either way, the responses of Facebook to legitimate questions has been entirely unsatisfactory and justifies the negative coverage they’ve received.
> Facebook presents an existential threat to the business of most traditional news media and they have a platform that actively promotes misinformation.
That's mainstream media's job... that's why they're pissed. Anyone remember Mika Bres-whatever saying on national television, "They're telling people what to think! That-that's our job!"
I had never seen this clip before, thanks for sharing. Is there more context or a longer clip? I think I heard the woman say “that is your job” at the end but it wasn’t clear who that was directed at.
Reposting parent since it was illegitimately flagged:
> Facebook presents an existential threat to the business of most traditional news media and they have a platform that actively promotes misinformation.
That's mainstream media's job... that's why they're pissed. Anyone remember Mika Bres-whatever saying on national television, "They're telling people what to think! That-that's our job!"
> Facebook presents an existential threat to the business of most traditional news media and they have a platform that actively promotes misinformation.
I heard that Murdoch particularly hates FB & Google since he's lost so much ad money to them. As a result his papers have gone to great lengths to give Google/YT/FB, etc bad press to try to convince advertisers to advertise in traditional print newspapers like the good old days (for which they margins are far higher).
Facebook's legal troubles are certainly not imaginary. They are actual, they are ongoing, they are overwhelming and there's more and more coming out all the time. Zuck and Thiel themselves are named as defendents on multiple very serious lawsuits which money alone could not spare them from (and not for lack of trying - untold billions have been spent in the past 5 years to ensure Zuck's name didn't show up on lawsuits. Until it did.)
Young people(of which I am one if 24 is considered young in this context) might reject FB but instagram(owned by FB well now meta) is probably the most engaged social media by people of younger 18-29. And whatsapp is the most used messaging platform in most regions of the world. If I was at FB, I would be most concerned with my company not being considered "cool", the potential kneejerk reaction of governments worldwide to show action(I am really skeptical that the underlying issues that led to the current issues with these megacorps would be addressed) even if there is no current legal trouble.
I’m afraid 24 is not young in this context. Teens are what these companies seem to care about (judging by the ad budget in the hundreds of millions), and in that demographic Instagram is behind both Snapchat and TikTok. It would seem that social media apps are like music: teens want an exciting new thing of their own (which, well, I have bad news about the coolness of music you like…)
Perhaps WhatsApp’s position is stickier, I’m unsure of it’s importance I’m driving revenue however.
I don't think the root problem is any one person, given that Twitter is even more destructive to society. It's the users, it's the incentives of the platforms, it's bad actors. There's low trust, a breakdown of institutions, a raging culture war. It's complicated.
Right, it's where the mob is and where the journalists and politicians are. They use and watch Twitter very closely and it informs what actions they take. Companies too.
When a company (like Facebook) or a nation state (like Russia) is deeply dysfunctional and it has for a very long time been ruled by only one person, it is in fact fairly reasonable to conclude that the root problem is, at present, that one specific person.
"Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity" poisoned everything in tech. Honest authenticity is a relic of the past, only the most empty, patronizing, virtue signaling pretenders can flourish there now.
I'm a hardcore leftie. so I agree with the sentiment behind these initiatives, and also agree with you that the current treatment is somewhat facile and annoying.
but really? if being offended by this is the most important thing about your choice of employment - maybe your priorities are a little skewed?
I’m not any particular fan of Facebook, but to run with the cancer analogy: normally a cancer consumes and destroys its host. To the best of my knowledge, Facebook’s market valuation has basically only gone up for the last decade. The only (and very recent) bumps for then have been privacy related, which are closer to the core business than to any diversity initiatives they might have. So where, exactly, is the cancer?
To run further with the analogy: it can go years without being diagnosed. Right now Facebook is in the 'I feel fine, I don't need to go to the doctor' phase. By the time the market starts penalizing a company things are usually on the decline, if not in free fall.
Why don't you go add a few more SQL injection vulns to your Mastodon fork, Fosco?
You and I worked together briefly and your incompetence was evident even then. You were unable to answer even the most basic questions about the area you were supposedly an SME in.
This is an entirely subjective take, but in the last few years FB seem to have evolved from one the coolest places for an engineer to being at the bottom of FAANG. I wonder if a significant amount of those people are looking for positions at Google/Amazon or they are taking their expertise somewhere else.
Startups stepping into the unicorn status territory are a much better bet. Their stock grants have value since the companies are getting closer to exit, and there's a real chance that the stock will 10-100X.
Your four year vest of $250k could be worth $2.5M - $25M in the future.
These are the best jobs. They can be extremely lucrative, and the work is exciting and palpable. Scaling a company to the point of IPO is fun.
Look at the market the company is entering. How big? Is the company growing like crazy? What's the competition? How's the leadership and culture? And do you like the work?
These kinds of studies have all sorts of issues. The main one is it's cheap to answer a study. Nobody has any skin in the game. What do you think of Apple? Oh great phones, very nice UX.
Where it matters is when you're asked to spend money, for one. And the other one is what we're discussing here, where do you want to work? The natural experiment of choice is more telling than what a bunch of people can recall about some name that they barely know anything about.
Yeah why do we even have this acronym any more lol. I don't think I want to work at any of them anymore. I used to think it was cool, but now,ehh. Work life balance is to precious I think even if another 50k is enticing.
I've never understood obsession with FAANG. Seems like it is only meaningful to younger folks in the industry looking to establish themselves. You want FAANG on your resume so you can get the job you really want.
The obsession is simply around getting a high pay and great benefits at a very stable company. FAANG seems like a high confidence path to more money than employees probably ever wanted or expected. The reasons behind that are worth considering. We live in an economy that is increasingly consolidated, where massive capital sits with a few giants, where new innovators are easily copied by those giants, where network effects and shady practices discourage new competition.
If we had a more competitive economy, with functioning anti trust law, and protections for small innovators rather than giant conglomerates, I think talent might be distributed differently. But otherwise it is rational to look at the situation, realize nothing will be done, and to just work at FAANG and let the dollars roll in.
Exactly this, plus high pay. However, I've known lots of people who have worked at FAANG companies and while they tend to hire extremely bright people that doesn't correlate with everyone doing interesting work.
As a friend put it, "yeah, I got to work at Google but I spent 3 years fixing obscure bugs in the Dart engine for Chrome."
Also, keep in mind that the FAANG companies sort of have to pay a ton because most engineers would likely rather work at a startup where they get to be big fish in a small pond and build something new.
Oh delusional amazonians thinking they can successfully prevent those in the know for lobbying for their removal from "FAANG".
Amazon is by far the lowest of the FAANG. Horrific WLB, worse pay than all others listed (esp the vesting schedule), toxic culture, terrible benefits (lol bananas). Don't delude yourself, Facebook is a great place to work and actually deserves to stay in the acronym
Fully agreed with your comment, but I wanted to correct one small thing regarding vesting schedule.
Recently, it seems like Amazon started to offset their poor vesting schedule in the first 2 years by giving the matching amount of cash bonus for those years of reduced vest. So technically, you still get only 5%/15% vested during your first two years, but with enough cash bonus for those two years to essentially make your "vest amount" equal to the real vest during years 3 and 4.
Note: I haven't done this myself as I am not interviewing with Amazon for all the other reasons you listed, but I had a few friends who interviewed with them in the past year. At first, I thought it was just a unique situation my friends managed to negotiate for themselves. But after checking the usual sources (r/cscareerquestions and a few other places online), it seems like my friends were far from being unique in that aspect, as I saw quite a few people reporting the same cash-bonus-offset method over the past year. From what I saw, it seems like a new thing they started doing at some point during COVID.
My bad, it could have been not new, but I've literally never heard of it until last year. Could have definitely been just me living under a rock, so I appreciate the clarification.
When I lived in Seattle a decade ago, I went to some kind of Amazon-sponsored event and multiple programmers who were working for Amazon at the time quietly told me the place was hell and not to apply.
Amazon is the FAANG of last resort where engineers go to do their penance and show that they can put up with a year of working for a terrible employer. Their company culture is garbage among engineers and are notorious for abysmal practices such as hiring people for the sole purpose of having someone to fire so some middle manager can hit their unregretted attrition metrics. Amazon does cool work, but after talking about it with friends and coworkers who have worked there and one that is trying to leave I would never work at such a terrible company.
I would guess people evaluate their job on money/work/stink axes.
All of FAANG pays well, so what's left is whether the work is interesting/important/fulfilling and whether the company has integrity/evil issues. Eg you might think F1 has interesting problems despite glorifying fossil fuel cars, or you might think drones are technically challenging despite being used to kill people. Loads of people become nurses and teachers because they want to help people, even though they don't get paid much.
What you're less likely to do is work in an area where your work isn't interesting, contributes nothing significant, and rots people's minds.
I found it interesting that only half their job offers are taken up, that's super surprising to me. I suppose it's possible that people with one FAANG offer have more than one? If that's the case, all the rest of FAANG would likely have less stink than FB at the moment, and also wins on the work axis.
> only half their job offers are taken up, that's super surprising to me
It would be interesting to get some stats on this. But the common advice when applying for jobs is to "get competing offers" so you can negotiate. I wouldn't be surprised if people who are getting offers at FB, can get a few very high quality offers at other places as well.
Yeah. Are these the real numbers or the gamed ones?
All of FANG seems to play this game where they will not send you a formal offer until you informally accept their informal offer. All to juice the “percent accepted” numbers and to make it marginally harder to play competing offers off each other.
I assume they genuinely struggle with recruiting. Getting cold recruiting mails from FB lately despite being on the wrong continent. They must be scraping the bottom.
Dogfooding the product you're working on isn't that unusual even if it is FB. It dramatically improves quality when you're 'forced' to use the same product you're developing.
It becomes more questionable when that product is on the backend of hundreds of thousands of engineer-hours dedicated to optimizing engagement. Bit like saying "sorry bud, we don't want your chemical engineering talent in our meth shop unless you are a meth addict, surely you understand self-hosting enables us to make a superior product"
Yes I know. That's part of the problem. I don't want to be in that eco system. Even just to apply for a job at Facebook they expect you to already have a Facebook account. The arrogance of the whole thing is just problematic.
While there are lots of reasons to not want to use Facebook, it's also pretty reasonable that refusing to use a potential employer's product would be pretty much a non-starter when it comes to employment.
Do you think that Ford only hires people that have only bought Ford all their lives? They check your car on the way to the interview and if it's not Ford you're automatically DQ'd?
How would that work being a new hire at Tesla considering that they probably pay a lot of folks less than is required to own one?
Cars, appliances, housing, fuel & energy, food, etc. Huge, huge swaths of the economy don't require brand loyalty because it's not reasonable to expect.
A better analogy would be if you refused to even go to fords website, or if during a company event, you refused to even step foot in a ford car that drove you somewhere.
I don't have a problem using it at work if they give me a work account that isn't publicly visible. It's more akin to being forced to give up your private vehicle and use the company car but for everything. So even when you need a van... Nope you're stuck with a moped.
There was certainly a period when having Japanese-made cars in an American car manufacturer's parking lot was an invitation to (however much I disapprove) have your car smashed up.
But in more modern times, there's certainly a general expectation to use your employer's products when it's reasonable to do so even if they're not your preferred options. There are exceptions of course and tech companies are usually more flexible these days.
I've been forced to use it. It's Facebook, for work (it used to be literally branded with that name). Easily the worst productivity tool I've ever used.
They haven't adjusted any of the engagement levers for the workplace tool, so you get so many notifications that they become useless (and the email versions are just teasers to get you to open workplace), you get an out of order "news feed", the groups UI is hard to understand and difficult to search, messenger is enabled in the UI and you can't turn it off, etc.
But yeah, it's Facebook, and it's what they use for everything internally.
I've been contacted by a FAANG (or is it MANGA?) company too recently, one of the traditionally better ones.
Earlier I'd fallen ober myself for that but I ended up not following through. I love my current. I'm hesitant to work in a place where I can get thrown under the bus for being a man. I'm not sure I want to contribute to the surveillance economy etc.
There are varying degrees of discrimination across the tech industry, based on your skin color, gender, and political views.
Some are relatively mild, others will literally put resumes from the wrong group of people in the recycle bin. And the wrong groups are not the historically under represented ones.
Fear is a real thing. There is so much talk where people openly say they want to discriminate against men, or that men should watch themselves or that men are bad. Of course in reality most of that is just talk, those people doesn't hold that kind of power at most companies, but just letting them talk like that instils fear in a lot of men and those men will avoid such companies.
I worked at a place that is discriminatory and has hostile attitudes against men -
1) a team I was previously on had two open headcount. I knew a friend of mine that would have been a perfect fit for the role. I suggested my friend and was told that they weren't considering men or non-diverse candidates. I'm a mixed Latino and was told this from a white man
2) a government grant was given to businesses impacted by covid, and our business assisted with this. Preference was given to women and minorities. White men were held in a queue. Eventually a lawsuit was filed by white men claiming discrimination and the court stopped the program. Dozens of people in my company Slack were furious that the white men held up money disbursement because of their "racism". This was the narrative for weeks
3) there have been official mandates to interview minorities (non-white, non-Asian men) before anyone else (is this even legal?)
4) in an effort to combat wage discrimination against men, women are paid more on average than men in respective wage bands. This is announced quarterly and celebrated
5) women get special groups, off sites, and classes paid for by the company. woman and minorities get special coverage, special interest stories, community highlights, and praise. white and Asian males do not unless they are LGBT
6) a female colleague of mine (who I like as a friend) is an extremely low performer. We've all had to pick up the slack from her, and at times I've had to explain things repeatedly that I'd fail candidates in interviews for. she's never been given a negative performance eval, yet a collage who went through a bad quarter got fired
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edit: flagged, which is disappointing. I'm not anti-women or anti-minority. I am a minority on the race and sexuality dimensions. why isn't my experience valid?
I'm putting aside whether this telling is accurate, or whether this happened or not (given it is a throwaway).
Just answering the questions about legality:
1: 100% illegal. Any FAANG manager has likely had to go through hiring training that stresses this point.
3: 100% illegal.
4: Might be illegal under Federal law if this is a blanket policy, definitely illegal under California law (most "equality"-type laws and programs are deliberately worded to be gender and race neutral).
A recruiter working for Google sued Google over point 1. Maybe that lawsuit was all lies, couldn't find anything about what happened with it later, but at least it isn't just a bunch of anecdotes.
I realize it's not helpful that I'm also posting as a throwaway (I unfortunately believe there's a chance being on the record opposing these programs could bite me in the future or really even now), but I hope it's a datapoint, to sister comment exbarrelspoiler as well.
My FAANG currently has 3 on the books in writing (it is called diversity slating), and has for periods of time ordered 1 verbally by vice presidents in certain organizations, that hiring is frozen but if a diversity candidate is found exceptions should be made.
You are correct with what the training stresses, my impression is that has little impact on the bigger picture that companies are shamed for not getting these numbers up so they turn every screw they can.
I directly know of an international financial institution (that probably most of the HN-ers have heard of) telling my SO's company, "off the record", that they would prefer to have a woman engineer assigned to their IT contracting position (my SO works for a IT services consulting company). One of my friends works for a FAANG company and he told me that a woman was directly chosen over a man for a promotion only because she was a woman, the man had higher credentials and had done more for the company than said woman but in the end that wasn't enough. I'm from Europe, where things have not gotten so out of control as in the States, so I suppose over there these cases happen even more often.
> I'm hesitant to work in a place where I can get thrown under the bus for being a man
I'm genuinely confused here. Is this comment a thinly veiled political axe to grind? A misconception about how real life works day-to-day at these companies? What exactly does "thrown under the bus for being a man" mean? How would that work and what kind of conversation do you imagine happening?
FYI: You can get thrown under the bus because your manager doesn't like the way your face looks. You can get thrown under the bus by jealous coworkers, or just someone looking to deflect blame. You can get thrown under the bus for anything if you coworkers are sociopaths, jerks, or just don't like you. Don't work for teams or organizations like that. If you accidentally find yourself there: move somewhere else.
Even though a lot of FAANG (or MANGA) companies are in need of tech talent, good luck getting in unless you have some serious time to allocate to studying Leetcode problems. While this time investment will help you get in the door to such places, it's unlikely to make you a better programmer or help you at all in your current role.
It's funny, coming to Facebook from startups I thought I'd no longer deal with recruiting pipeline challenges. It surprised the hell out of me to see how much FB struggled with hiring senior engineers. The stupid hard interviews did a fantastic job of keeping experienced folks away, so the offices felt like college grounds (I don't mean to say this was done intentionally, they really did want tons of senior talent, but the interview process didn't help).
Personally, as a senior engineer with a decade and a half of experience I dropped out of the Facebook process once I learned how it worked. I have much better things to do than stress about optimally solving two LC mediums in 40 minutes without being able to compile the code.
Afiak they're about to open (extend?) a new office in London, not sure if that's related or not. When one of my friends told me that (he works for a FAANG company) I had a similar reaction to yours: "Where are they going to get the people for that in this market?"
I imagine some people who don't want to work at a FAANG still apply to leverage that offer somewhere else. It helps a lot in salary negotiations to be able to say "Facebook offered me $X, but I like you guys more, so how about we try to find a way to make that work"
> Loads of people become nurses and teachers because they want to help people, even though they don't get paid much
I know it's not the primary point of the post, but define "much". An RN makes around 80k on average, they're also hourly and can generally pick up overtime whenever they want. Nurse anesthetists make double that at minimum, practitioners are north of 120k. It may not be as much as a FAANG position but I'd consider that decent pay, especially for such a stable position with decent WLB(omitting pandemic). Up until the past few years RN only required a 2 year degree.
Teachers don't make as much, but average pay in my lower cost of living area, just crossed 60k. That's not terrible, especially considering they only work 9/12 months and can get more for summer school or many of them find side jobs.
Oh totally, but GP never said the words "normal", only "much"
> they don't get paid much
which is how I suppose we're on the topic of arguing the semantics of "much". I think GP should have said "as much" to clarify, since this is a comparison between two specific jobs.
It’s certainly very good. But many physician specialties are in the same ballpark. Unlike executives at public companies they are a non-trivial size population. There’s also white shoe lawyers, investment bankers, and management consultants but not as many as the doctors AFAIK.
I thought teachers spent much of the summer break maintaining certifications and incorporating new school regulations into their lesson plans for the next year. I don’t think it’s a 3 month break for them
To add another data point, _every_ teacher I know (I know three) use less than a month of their three month break on lesson planning/continuing education/staff obligations.
my sister was a teacher for 20-odd years, then she went through a Ph.D. program in education theory, and now teaches teachers. So below is not based on "knowing one or two teachers", but on knowing how teachers are trained/certified and what professional standards are.
Most teachers work hard over the summer, it isn't a break. Pay isn't great.
And a certain mainstream political group puts significant effort into demonizing the profession and destroying the pay/benefits packages... which matters, because in public schools, the politicians hold the purse strings.
I think many teachers (almost all that I know, and all of the good ones) would disagree with you on that. Lesson planning, training/continuing education, scheduling, etc.
> many of them find side jobs
..why?
That is to say, I'm sure most people on here could get a side job if they wanted to. Is there a reason why teachers get side jobs and, say, programmers don't? (Yes, that's a rhetorical question.)
Programmers get side jobs all the time. That's usually how you start your own business in my experience. People who work with people do it because that's what drives them and they find fulfillment in that job.
Probably not the side jobs most here have in mind but after almost 2 years of remote I’ve been seriously contemplating getting a night job at a bar or restaurant just to meet folks and the little bit of money (relative to my salary and equity) would just be a bonus.
Schoolteacher pensions in CA are worth millions, and they’re not taxed on the imputed value of this wealth. Also in CA they qualify for BMR housing, another untaxed benefit. And in CA they don’t pay SS tax.
This isn't really a benefit. Public employees with access to a state pension generally don't pay into SS because their state pension is is lieu of social security. They pay into the pension instead and have to hope it exists in the future, which for many states is significantly riskier than relying on federal social security.
there are nurses pulling in $200/hr locally (travel nurses usually). Due to shortages, some hospitals are allowing 6 days of work (typically 12 hr shifts) and nurses are making ridiculous amount of money, if they can manage it mentally and physically.
These aren't independent axes. For example, more money can make it easier to feel like you are genuinely contributing, or rationalize the idea that negative public sentiment isn't real and fake media reports.
> What you're less likely to do is work in an area where your work isn't interesting, contributes nothing significant, and rots people's minds.
Have you head of finance? What I think is that most current tech folks started their careers out of genuine interest, and so think along the lines you describe. But now that the money has really arrived, the balance will shift to the type-A aspirational folks who only care about the highest paying, most highly regarded career, and are looking for some FAANG->YC Startup->Management path. These people absolutely are happy to do whatever as long as they get external validation, and would have no compunction about working at FB as long as it keeps them on the track they planned.
We’ve crossed the Rubican on the injection of type-a’s in this field. The entire Agile layer is one hell of a ruse where they managed to employ an entire group of unnecessary people into what used to be a very natural workflow. I really don’t need a scrum master asking me every morning what the fuck I did yesterday, or size stories every other day. Believe me, I really don’t.
I almost want finance to be glamorized again so it can siphon these people away.
"I found it interesting that only half their job offers are taken up, that's super surprising to me."
It is not surprising if the goal is not to fill vacancies or expanding needs, but to prevent competing companies from having these people at their disposal. There will be enough offers to cover every possible person who could do this computer-focused work that might go to work for a competitor.
Another explanation is that there is a high attrition rate (e.g., like Amazon) and the company must overcompensate. Thus there will always be high numbers of advertisied positions that are never filled.
A third explanation is the company just has too much money and no clear ideas on how to spend it. (Case in point: Metaverse) Companies tend to sustain higher and higher levels of, for lack of a better term, "stupidity/foolishness" as the cash flow increases further and further beyond the company's immediate needs. Having heaps of cash on hand does not necessarily focus the mind; it can have the opposite effect.
You are interpreting this to mean "positions", but "offers" normally means a specific person was told "congratulations: we've agreed to hire you! here is what we will pay... are you in?" and so it does seem very strange that half of such offers are being rejected (and then implies the thought process explained of maybe people interviewing for multiple jobs and half the time choosing someone other than Facebook). (I honestly don't know which is "correct" for what is actually happening, but I noticed the disconnect between your two comments.)
I don't know, I think if you're interested in VR/AR, wearables, computer vision, building products for the "creator" generation, or even crypto (Novi) then FB/Meta probably has the best work pitch of all the FAANGs.
Facebook…erhm Meta.. makes cool and useful services. My uneducated guess is about 20% of their efforts go to delivering something compelling to the user. The remainder goes to figure out how they can manipulate, coerce, farm, and monetize said users. The problem is the level of perversion they have done and justified due to the need to monetize.
I had a guy pitch me on Comcast's tech office once.
He said you get to work on cool stuff, but it never actually gets deployed. And that everyone hates your employer, but you'll never get fired.
I definitely see how "work on cool stuff" + "don't worry about getting fired" could be pretty cool, if you don't have any investment in really creating things that are used.
That value proposition of stability is a high for those that have a life outside of work. Why does a typical engineer optimize for leetcode and FAANG salaries? Because they have shit else to establish self respect.
Not the last thing, or at least not the worst company to choose if that's important -
Oculus research has a better track record of publishing AR/VR research and opening up old hardware (unlocked Oculus Go) than anyone else doing serious AR/VR work.
There are enough companies that offer competitive salaries to FAANG and interesting work in those spaces. That FB is the best of a list of companies wall street grouped should be the notable factor.
If my inbox is any indication, hiring has picked back up in the last month. Tons of interest from big companies (Google, FB, door dash, and lots of smaller companies). It seems a bit odd to me as I thought the end of the year was usually a slow time for staffing.
I have to wonder if job satisfaction at Facebook has a very binomial distribution. This is pretty much true at any large corp, where there can be a ton of variation between teams, but from the outside looking in it seems that Facebook basically has a dichotomy:
On one hand you have teams working on interesting and industry-leading tech, like React, GraphQL, Oculus, etc. But on the other you have legions of people working to make the money machine printing, and I've got to think most of that work sucks: the nitty-gritty of keeping the site up, content moderation teams, all the ad plumbing. A lot of that stuff would be good for a new grad to learn how stuff works at such large scale, but that's the cohort who I think would be most turned off by Facebook's social/brand problems.
This is the case with most tech firms. Unless you’re hired specifically to work on OSS stuff, your likely job role is “boring” stuff. If you’re really good and deliver consistently, you get to work on projects with increasing scope and impact, and if you build a custom solution for a unique problem you face, you may open source it and it might end up solving other peoples problems…
I think it depends on the person. I have worked on "fun" tech at startups but ended up coming back to my role as a cog in Google's money printing machine (ad plumbing AND content moderation in fact!) The retention in my group is actually pretty great; it's trivial to have tremendous impact so career progression is fairly easy, and work-life balance is very reasonable. Personally I'm more motivated by this sort of environment and the ability to (slowly) make improvements that affect millions of companies and billions of people, than I am by hacking on greenfield tech that may or may not see users. But I know plenty of people who feel the opposite (as you allude to), and this sort of role wouldn't be a great fit for them.
> But on the other you have legions of people working to make the money machine printing, and I've got to think most of that work sucks: the nitty-gritty of keeping the site up, content moderation teams, all the ad plumbing.
From technical point of view, things like keeping such a huge site up, or building ads backend can be very rewarding for infrastructure minded folks.
I am a senior IC. I went from Google to FB for L+1. The salary increase alone was enough to convince me. Personally I don't think GOOG is much better than FB (if they are better at all) in all the areas in which people on HN complain.
I heard some horror stories about FB Work/Life balance before I came here. Turns out I work 10-15 hours a week less than when I was at Google, in a much better org, on problems I care about. Beyond my immediate manager (who at GOOG was great too), FB leadership chain is far better throughout my org except for one other person at GOOG. In my GOOG org people were constantly promoted and rewarded for the wrong things.
FB let me go through weeks of trying out teams before I selected one. Google put me on a team, told me nothing about it, and I had no idea what team it even was until the end of the first day when my manager picked me up.
Not really worried about the performance reviews a comment mentioned above since GOOG has the same (actually in my experience worse there).
Some people are excited about Oculus and the metaverse, but I can't stomach the idea of FB-owned VR. Social media already feels like a parasite and a drug thanks to FB, and putting an Oculus on feels like wrapping the vampire squid right across my face.
One of the recent thought experiments I've been pondering: "What if there was a blacklist that you would join by taking/continuing employment at facebook?"
The idea being that companies would agree to a pact in which they would blacklist anyone who works for facebook. What would be the consequences?
Some sub-questions:
1. Would a blacklist be legal? Do employment laws prohibit hiring decisions based on one's prior employment?
2. Would companies agree to join the pact?
2.a If tech workers were unionized, would the union have any power to persuade companies to join a pact?
3. What effect would a functioning blacklist have on facebook?
* The only effect I can thing of is FB would have to start paying more to retain/attract employees.
....
This is all just a thought experiment. A what-if question. I'm not seriously proposing a blacklist. I'm just curious about what would happen if one where implemented.
I guess the consequence would be to have a list of pretty good engineer at (maybe) lower prices for other companies, which would results in a competitive disadvantage.
It would also probably have a chilling effect on other potential hires : I know that I would think twice to work for a company that has this kind of blacklist. And if they do have a blacklist, I would think it thrice if they put in a company like Facebook, when other companies have a way more disastrous effect on the world in general, even if there is more publicity about facebook at the moment.
Finally, it would definitely be illegal to have at least european people on this list, but hopefully it would also be illegal in other jurisdictions.
What incentive would any individual company have to join such a blacklist? Re 1, California says you can't refuse to hire someone because of criminal history (https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/discrimination/ban-the-bo...), so refusing to hire b/c they worked for FB sounds like it would be doubtful.
I didn't really imagine any sort of incentive to join the pact. The motivation to join would be something akin to a protest against facebook's product. The goal would be to make it more difficult for facebook's product to exist.
I did consider laws that prohibit asking about criminal history. I don't think those specific laws would apply, as they are designed to help the previously incarcerated re-enter society through employment.
That said, I could see a court challenge to the blacklist with those laws being cited during arguments.
> I didn't really imagine any sort of incentive to join the pact. The motivation to join would be something akin to a protest against facebook's product.
The second a company does something like this (aka no real incentive event that can only potentially cause damage, solely as a "protest") is the second that company is going to look like a pretty bad place to work at. Mostly because it just means they care more about public outrage and putting on a show than actually doing their work.
And despite not having much interest in working for FB, I have way less interest in working at a place where other employees (and the leadership) are supportive of such proposals.
I know people getting packages well in excess of that. The difference between the bottom and top of software job pay packages is starting to resemble athletes or actors.
I wonder how much is from being fatigued from friends. If I see news I don’t like about any company I call whoever I’m friends with there to see what the tea is, but I might be a weirdo
I don't have much data points to share. But I've been seeing responses to people working FB have been horrible since for a while now.
It has been a common trend that when someone I know posts a job position in FB, nobody replies to it. At least not publicly (publicly means replying to tweet, replying to slack message in a well knit/known group of people). Even if they are replying personally and privately, that in itself shows a problem.
When I see someone working in FB, I can't deny that I am judging them. At this point, there is no reason to give a benefit of the doubt to how bad FB is to people, democracy and humanity in general. Sure, you can argue with technical meritocracy of some tech they produce. But how long can you sell yourself that excuse really when on the other side, adverse effects are mounting up?
As nerdy and smart as tech workers are, we are still in need of validation from others right? There definitely should be some effect on people being perceived as a bad person for working for a bad company even if it is paying a ton. FAANG engineers should be more than equipped to look elsewhere because of it.
Facebook's biggest problem in the next few years is going to be that it will struggle to attract new talent. Simply put if you're a senior SWE, even the possibility of FB putting a stain on your resume is going to drive you away, because there are so many other options out there. It's not worth the risk of always having to explain your time there because everyone has an opinion on the company these days. It's not that Facebook isn't a great place to work, it probably is. It's the fact that if you're at the level where you can get hired by Facebook, there are many many other options to reach for and the vast majority of people at that level are just going to reach for those other companies that are just as prestigious but carry none of the stigma.
On the other hand, I would personally find some sanctimonious interviewer asking me to defend my previous employment history from a perceived position of moral superiority a great screening tool for companies I would never want to work for.
Is it really a screening tool for the company? It more likely just says something about that particular interviewer. It's not like a company has a policy of telling interviewers to scrutinize past job appointments. That can be done by the recruiter if desired.
So I'm an engineer at my org. I'd never want to work for Facebook. If I'm interviewing you then yes I will ask you why you chose to work there when by definition you had other options.
Do you expect to have to justify your employment history for the rest of your life? Can you imagine some reasons why someone would work for FB that have no value judgment besides being different from your view of the world?
There seem to be a few assumptions you're making in the post above about someone you've never met and only know based on their current/former employer.
If you are asking that question, you already expect a certain answer to fit your beliefs and values. Therefore you are already biased and belong nowhere near a fair interviewing process.
As someone who worked for Blizzard 20 years ago, and is already cooking up "excuses" to offer interviewers like you...
I hope your candidate in this example is able to part the conference room blinds, and point out his better-than-yours car, house, or helicopter that he took to your job site. And then just drop a microphone on the way to the next interview.
If it's a moral issue with a company you've worked for, you won't get the chance to defend yourself in front of a sanctimonious interviewer; you'll get screened before that point.
This is a huge possibility. They are already struggling. The reality is I don't see Zuck backtracking on anything. Meta and the new tech coming around it is a good example of it. They are actually looking into doubling down on surveillance and being invasive.So them struggling should be a good point. Or a good thinng IMHO.
They could use AI to tackle this in the future now that we have Copilot of the sorts. It would be interesting to see how the cope up with it.
Facebook may be a dying company, slowly slowly slowly on the IBM timescale.
Facebook is definitely on the downslide. They staved off facebook's slide by successfully picking the next social network in instagram, but now that is probably going to lose its shine. If Tiktok is the next #1... That can't be easily acquired due to Chinese ownership...
They'll try the "metaverse" but man that is a big leap, and they are already poisoning their metaverse with stupid things like "must have a facebook account" which signals they are doomed to failure.
Facebook knows this. It's why they changed their name. Maybe the recruiting struggles signaled the death of the "Facebook" brand.
I'm sorry to break your fantasy, but FB is nowhere close to dying like IBM by pretty much any metric you can choose (apart from perception by random folks on the internet which frankly does not count for much).
Twitter is just as dangerous as Facebook as far as I can tell. So much outrage that’s spilled into riots and bloodshed has been fomented on there in broad daylight with little repercussion. Do you judge people who work at Twitter too?
Not everyone who uses Twitter uses it to connect to extreme political personalities. Plenty use it to keep connected to smart people in tech and elsewhere.
Twitter is not The Internet for a massive population of the globe; facebook is. If you doubt this, keep it in mind that "internet.org" redirects to FB.
Anecdotally, just last week I've seen someone I know on senior (IC) level actually amplify their transition to Facebook on LinkedIn ("so happy to have worked in X, so happy to join Y, blah blah"), and another former coworker messaged me about their team in FB that they joined in the past year. Also I get much more Amazon/Google/random startup recruiting than FB, so they don't seem desperate.
I had a couple friends who joined FB 5-7 years ago and reported horrible WLB, so I was avoiding it, but if the trend you are describing is correct (and that person from last week claimed WLB was fine), maybe I should consider it some day.
I think there's nothing really wrong with the company, and I would view a somewhat lower level of "caring about social issues"/"wokeness" per-employee to be a small positive :)
> But I've been seeing responses to people working FB have been horrible since for a while now.
This might be more indicative of your bubble than anything.
Facebook isn’t having a hard time hiring, despite whatever the headlines are trying to imply. There will always be a steady stream of applicants for high paying FAANG jobs.
Being able to choose exactly which ultra-high-paying tech job you take or being able to walk away from one of those highly paid jobs is a massive privilege that not everybody shares.
Exactly this. It is fascinating to see this bubble on HN, when on the outside I know there are tons of friends and acquaintances who are happy to get a call from recruiters, happy to land a job and happy to work there.
> Facebook's hiring problems are far from unique. Tech industry surveys indicate that talent shortages and hiring difficulties for engineers and developers are among the biggest concerns for companies right now, and the labor market has grown exceedingly tight across almost every sector in the United States over the last year.
It's possible that Facebook is doing worse than other tech companies, but the article doesn't go into that.
> This might be more indicative of your bubble than anything.
Sure. But this bubble that I was in since for a long time had been OK with JOB positions and talking about a career in FB before. So if there is anything else, that itself shows that "my bubble" stopped preferring FB. Shouldn't that itself mean there is a reduction in people choosing FB? :)
And I am coming across this online and elsewhere too. So my bubble is not the only one with this feelings for sure.
FB might have some negatives to society as a whole but there are also some positives (besides being able to talk to your family).
The ad product has enabled a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. I really can't understate how pivotal facebook has been -> because they know so much about you the targeting can be REALLY REALLY effective. For many products the traditional competitors like google can't even come close.
Being an e-commercialist+advertiser may make me biased but I've grown to love Zuck much more than I would've previously been comfortable with.
As the negative perception of Facebook engineering picks up it'll be interesting to see where this heads. There's been precious little conversation about the stewardship model of React.JS, in which Facebook has an outsized role.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to divest React from Facebook, given the potential reputational risk to the React project.
I think React is pretty soon gonna share same fate as jQuery. Svelte is slowly picking some steam, and with recent move of original author to Vercel I am more confident than ever that momentum is shifting. My friend directly got to work with Carmack, and him moving away directly from project should tell a lot about what the future of the hardware holds with FB.
Microsoft had to rewire itself in order to recover from Windows. Facebook (or Meta) needs same. Microsoft had to bring in a new leader, I think Zuck should step down, and bring somebody different before it's too late. I can imagine a fight for throne happening inside already.
On what timeline though? Vue was looking to be a very strong contender to passing up React, but that has dwindled and it's a solid second alternative but won't end up usurping React. Next.js is one of the biggest hotnesses around web development in general right now, bigger than Svelte, and based on React. While Svelte is nice and shows promise, it's still in the "early Vue" stage and has a long long way to go to make React into a jQuery. Not to mention how ubiquitous jQuery still is.
I think you're underestimating a few things here re React:
1. Before the React/Vue era, there was so much JS churn and many devs who went through that are not looking to change anytime soon.
2. Even if React goes into keep the lights on mode, what is going to compel someone to not choose React at this point? The uniformity of it in the JS world, the stability, and the flexibility make it a great fit for most use cases. What value proposition is it failing that would make it lose its place as the dominant front end framework?
It would take a massive, worthwhile new paradigm shift to occur in the JS world to unseat React IMO, and I don't see that happening anytime in the next few years simply because there is no need. React works TM which is big.
When you have a large company that recruits in large part on comp, perks, security, and prestige, over time that will destroy the company culture no matter how good it was at the start. Because you're gonna attract bland, boring, competent but mediocre people by recruiting on those things, and their mid-tier mindsets will gradually pollute and dilute everything that might have been remarkable about the place in the early days. At some point it gets bad enough that even the mid-tier people want to leave because the culture and work have gotten too boring even for them, or the prestige/security side has eroded because,...well, because too many people like them have been there for too long. This problem isn't unique to Facebook...all the FAANG type companies share it to various degrees. It is ridiculous and shameful to blame Zuck. Zuck has fed and clothed half this industry for most of two decades
For most companies, getting people to care about the mission is impossible due to labor alienation ("we're working on creating fake test data for companies that provide cloud services for payroll automation for cloud service companies that vend fake test data"), and comp, perks, security and prestige are all you can offer.
Let's say you work for one of these companies - how do you tell whether you are one of the good ones or one of the "bland, boring, competent but mediocre" ones? And are there any companies out there right now that are still chock full of good people?
The test is really simple. Let's imagine that tomorrow you doubled your positive impact on the success of the company as a whole. Will your boss be twice as happy with you? If not, progression is basically political, or maybe in some cases based on the skillful execution of tasks unrelated to anything valuable, and people who are very friendly or are very unconcerned with the company they're working for (and consequently will not be bothered by wasting enormous amounts of brainpower on achieving pointless goals), respectively, will fill out the ranks in very little time.
It is not that uncommon for the first step in success to be forgetting about what the company ostensibly exists to do to make room for the misaligned incentives, whatever they may be, that determine what it actually does. That's the essential element of the big company malaise. Anyone can be mediocre if they're not trying, or if they're trying extremely hard to do something that's ultimately pointless.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadGoogle, whatever its problems, gives some indication of keeping up with the times. Aside from undisputed leadership in AI, there are the little things: they recently overhauled their chat tooling (again) and (finally) added Slack-style emoji reactions. If they still had some of their mid-2000s mojo, it would be neat to see them try again with a social network product.
Besides being a complete disaster, UI-wise, it freezes up and ceases working constantly in the web UI. The remaining people I know who stay on Google's chat... I simply cannot talk to anymore. I send them email or use an alternative chat service they're on.
You might consider a different example of how you feel Google is keeping up with the times.
Nah, it's okay that I feel differently about a feature than you and say so publicly.
And Google has led in AI for the past decade so I'm not sure how you got the impression that FB is doing and Google is just sitting on cash. Looks exactly opposite to me.
Have you used a few VR devices over the last decade, including the last Quest?
Maybe when they scale it down to the size and heft of swimming goggles.
Groups compete well with reddit.
As they build a 'metaverse' groups, marketplace, and walls can form the foundation
you wall is your own personal space. Your groups and the marketplace become places that you go to.
Kinda reminds me when as a kid I was excited about windows 3d UI since it sounded cool, but quickly realized it's way less convenient.
I despised Facebook before everyone else but seriously:
Google is extremely well known for killing useful stuff that people love, not for moving them forward incrementally.
I can't remember Facebook killing off anything since parsley or whatever it was called.
Google has also been going backwards since I don't know, 2009 or something? (Back in the day it used to be that search results somewhat reliably contained the the you searched for. Today Google is in my opinion a copy of the competitors they outcompeted: customer hostile ads, poor results.)
Facebook is the ugly thing it has been since I don't know when.
- search (although this one barely qualifies in my opinion)
- GMail/GSuite (once provided ever increasing storage, also killed free GSuite etc etc but I'll count it, it exists and has even expanded a bit)
- YouTube
- Ads
- Android
- Chrome
Quite a portfolio actually. Says something about how much I dislike them when I had to think long and hard to admit it.
I'm not sure the metaverse play really is anything other than continuing the same thinking that led to Facebook login required for Oculus. The idea is probably to roll out VR no differently than rolling out emoji reactions. It's what you do when you get big. 1B users * 10% using new feature = BIG NEW USER BASE and you get to report growth for years as 10% turns into 20%.
If I had to trade places with one of those two, I’d pick Ellison. I didn’t even bother to look up their (theoretical) net worths, because at that scale it no longer makes a difference; what does make a difference to me is Ellison’s face isn’t regularly in the news attached both to stories about how they engage in censorship by removing people who break the site rules, and to other stories about how they take sides by failing to remove politicians who violate the site rules.
Are engineers really the ones driving at the company? I think that has not been true in "the industry" for a decade now. Marketing, upper-management are the ones steering the ships now — engineers just row.
Not sure if it’s still the case but until fairly recently you could still see writely in the different domains Docs cycles through when logging in.
Oracle is still one of the most profitable companies on earth. I highly doubt they care about being trendy.
they will always come back in the end.
* Why the downvotes?
Finally, comments such as these don’t really add any value to the discussion.
On the other hand, I don't doubt that they are going to have to worry more about work-life balance and things like that, because they cannot just use their status as the new titan to recruit with (because they're no longer new). So, like many no-longer-new tech titans before them, they will have to change how they recruit and retain. FB is now more like Microsoft, IBM, or Intel than it is like the FB of old.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are built. They have their management systems and structures in place. It would be wrong to think that everyone at Facebook needs to be a genius for the company to succeed, and putting a genius into many of the roles that are needed to keep the company operating won't work out well for either the genius or the company.
Is it? I've always liked the perspective that Facebook's product, to governments, beyond mass surveillance, is societal stability (or lack there of).
If there's one company that could almost single-handedly cause an actual insurrection in the United States, it's Facebook. That sort of power doesn't have to be stated explicitly and the mainstream Liberal media spent 4 years stating it quite openly. Nancy Pelosi is a well known Facebook investor.
Any major issue from the government can just result in a "bug" that accidentally amplifies the opposition and just like that, the cause of the issue is voted out.
Why not Twitter?
Source: https://mashable.com/article/twitter-pew-study-echo-chambers
Now, seeing how even senior people on dedicated integrity teams had little ability to steer the ship, and being constantly reminded of this by friends outside FB even if it had previously been whispered internally, must be sobering for many of these folks.
The question on everyone's mind, of course, is: did leadership intentionally prevent these conversations and from-research-to-practice pipelines from occurring, or was their ineffectiveness simply an unintended side effect of the laser focus on engagement? Based on the anecdotes shared with media of how much of the balance was driven by public-relations considerations, one imagines that the perception skews towards the former. And that's not a good place to be from a retention perspective.
If I was at FB I’d be more concerned with how young people are rejecting it.
That's mainstream media's job... that's why they're pissed. Anyone remember Mika Bres-whatever saying on national television, "They're telling people what to think! That-that's our job!"
I do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quU_Tbv96Wk
> Facebook presents an existential threat to the business of most traditional news media and they have a platform that actively promotes misinformation.
That's mainstream media's job... that's why they're pissed. Anyone remember Mika Bres-whatever saying on national television, "They're telling people what to think! That-that's our job!"
I do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quU_Tbv96Wk
They (FB and the news media) do indeed.
Perhaps WhatsApp’s position is stickier, I’m unsure of it’s importance I’m driving revenue however.
Twitter has perhabs less than 10% of users as Facebook.
but really? if being offended by this is the most important thing about your choice of employment - maybe your priorities are a little skewed?
You and I worked together briefly and your incompetence was evident even then. You were unable to answer even the most basic questions about the area you were supposedly an SME in.
https://fortune.com/worlds-most-admired-companies/
https://morningconsult.com/most-loved-brands-2020/
Your four year vest of $250k could be worth $2.5M - $25M in the future.
These are the best jobs. They can be extremely lucrative, and the work is exciting and palpable. Scaling a company to the point of IPO is fun.
Look at the market the company is entering. How big? Is the company growing like crazy? What's the competition? How's the leadership and culture? And do you like the work?
I'm seriously considering moving to FANG for perceived stability and income. Stock which might 10x vs stock which at least has a market value.
Where it matters is when you're asked to spend money, for one. And the other one is what we're discussing here, where do you want to work? The natural experiment of choice is more telling than what a bunch of people can recall about some name that they barely know anything about.
If we had a more competitive economy, with functioning anti trust law, and protections for small innovators rather than giant conglomerates, I think talent might be distributed differently. But otherwise it is rational to look at the situation, realize nothing will be done, and to just work at FAANG and let the dollars roll in.
As a friend put it, "yeah, I got to work at Google but I spent 3 years fixing obscure bugs in the Dart engine for Chrome."
Also, keep in mind that the FAANG companies sort of have to pay a ton because most engineers would likely rather work at a startup where they get to be big fish in a small pond and build something new.
If you are the dumbest person in the room then you will become the last pick for interesting projects, and someone has to do all the boring work.
Amazon is by far the lowest of the FAANG. Horrific WLB, worse pay than all others listed (esp the vesting schedule), toxic culture, terrible benefits (lol bananas). Don't delude yourself, Facebook is a great place to work and actually deserves to stay in the acronym
Recently, it seems like Amazon started to offset their poor vesting schedule in the first 2 years by giving the matching amount of cash bonus for those years of reduced vest. So technically, you still get only 5%/15% vested during your first two years, but with enough cash bonus for those two years to essentially make your "vest amount" equal to the real vest during years 3 and 4.
Note: I haven't done this myself as I am not interviewing with Amazon for all the other reasons you listed, but I had a few friends who interviewed with them in the past year. At first, I thought it was just a unique situation my friends managed to negotiate for themselves. But after checking the usual sources (r/cscareerquestions and a few other places online), it seems like my friends were far from being unique in that aspect, as I saw quite a few people reporting the same cash-bonus-offset method over the past year. From what I saw, it seems like a new thing they started doing at some point during COVID.
Hiring bar at Amazon is lower, WLB widely recognized as terrible, constant stack ranking horror stories, etc.
All of FAANG pays well, so what's left is whether the work is interesting/important/fulfilling and whether the company has integrity/evil issues. Eg you might think F1 has interesting problems despite glorifying fossil fuel cars, or you might think drones are technically challenging despite being used to kill people. Loads of people become nurses and teachers because they want to help people, even though they don't get paid much.
What you're less likely to do is work in an area where your work isn't interesting, contributes nothing significant, and rots people's minds.
I found it interesting that only half their job offers are taken up, that's super surprising to me. I suppose it's possible that people with one FAANG offer have more than one? If that's the case, all the rest of FAANG would likely have less stink than FB at the moment, and also wins on the work axis.
It would be interesting to get some stats on this. But the common advice when applying for jobs is to "get competing offers" so you can negotiate. I wouldn't be surprised if people who are getting offers at FB, can get a few very high quality offers at other places as well.
All of FANG seems to play this game where they will not send you a formal offer until you informally accept their informal offer. All to juice the “percent accepted” numbers and to make it marginally harder to play competing offers off each other.
It becomes more questionable when that product is on the backend of hundreds of thousands of engineer-hours dedicated to optimizing engagement. Bit like saying "sorry bud, we don't want your chemical engineering talent in our meth shop unless you are a meth addict, surely you understand self-hosting enables us to make a superior product"
How would that work being a new hire at Tesla considering that they probably pay a lot of folks less than is required to own one?
Cars, appliances, housing, fuel & energy, food, etc. Huge, huge swaths of the economy don't require brand loyalty because it's not reasonable to expect.
But in more modern times, there's certainly a general expectation to use your employer's products when it's reasonable to do so even if they're not your preferred options. There are exceptions of course and tech companies are usually more flexible these days.
No it doesn't. Are you familiar with a product called Workplace [0] released in 2016 [1]?
[0] https://www.workplace.com/
[1] https://www.pocket-lint.com/apps/news/facebook/139126-facebo...
They haven't adjusted any of the engagement levers for the workplace tool, so you get so many notifications that they become useless (and the email versions are just teasers to get you to open workplace), you get an out of order "news feed", the groups UI is hard to understand and difficult to search, messenger is enabled in the UI and you can't turn it off, etc.
But yeah, it's Facebook, and it's what they use for everything internally.
Earlier I'd fallen ober myself for that but I ended up not following through. I love my current. I'm hesitant to work in a place where I can get thrown under the bus for being a man. I'm not sure I want to contribute to the surveillance economy etc.
Maybe another day I'll answer yes, but...
This is not a thing.
Some are relatively mild, others will literally put resumes from the wrong group of people in the recycle bin. And the wrong groups are not the historically under represented ones.
Are you worried your ability to be employed working on tech would be put at risk as a man working in FAANG? What would that look like?
1) a team I was previously on had two open headcount. I knew a friend of mine that would have been a perfect fit for the role. I suggested my friend and was told that they weren't considering men or non-diverse candidates. I'm a mixed Latino and was told this from a white man
2) a government grant was given to businesses impacted by covid, and our business assisted with this. Preference was given to women and minorities. White men were held in a queue. Eventually a lawsuit was filed by white men claiming discrimination and the court stopped the program. Dozens of people in my company Slack were furious that the white men held up money disbursement because of their "racism". This was the narrative for weeks
3) there have been official mandates to interview minorities (non-white, non-Asian men) before anyone else (is this even legal?)
4) in an effort to combat wage discrimination against men, women are paid more on average than men in respective wage bands. This is announced quarterly and celebrated
5) women get special groups, off sites, and classes paid for by the company. woman and minorities get special coverage, special interest stories, community highlights, and praise. white and Asian males do not unless they are LGBT
6) a female colleague of mine (who I like as a friend) is an extremely low performer. We've all had to pick up the slack from her, and at times I've had to explain things repeatedly that I'd fail candidates in interviews for. she's never been given a negative performance eval, yet a collage who went through a bad quarter got fired
---
edit: flagged, which is disappointing. I'm not anti-women or anti-minority. I am a minority on the race and sexuality dimensions. why isn't my experience valid?
Just answering the questions about legality:
1: 100% illegal. Any FAANG manager has likely had to go through hiring training that stresses this point.
3: 100% illegal.
4: Might be illegal under Federal law if this is a blanket policy, definitely illegal under California law (most "equality"-type laws and programs are deliberately worded to be gender and race neutral).
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...
My FAANG currently has 3 on the books in writing (it is called diversity slating), and has for periods of time ordered 1 verbally by vice presidents in certain organizations, that hiring is frozen but if a diversity candidate is found exceptions should be made.
You are correct with what the training stresses, my impression is that has little impact on the bigger picture that companies are shamed for not getting these numbers up so they turn every screw they can.
I directly know of an international financial institution (that probably most of the HN-ers have heard of) telling my SO's company, "off the record", that they would prefer to have a woman engineer assigned to their IT contracting position (my SO works for a IT services consulting company). One of my friends works for a FAANG company and he told me that a woman was directly chosen over a man for a promotion only because she was a woman, the man had higher credentials and had done more for the company than said woman but in the end that wasn't enough. I'm from Europe, where things have not gotten so out of control as in the States, so I suppose over there these cases happen even more often.
I'm genuinely confused here. Is this comment a thinly veiled political axe to grind? A misconception about how real life works day-to-day at these companies? What exactly does "thrown under the bus for being a man" mean? How would that work and what kind of conversation do you imagine happening?
FYI: You can get thrown under the bus because your manager doesn't like the way your face looks. You can get thrown under the bus by jealous coworkers, or just someone looking to deflect blame. You can get thrown under the bus for anything if you coworkers are sociopaths, jerks, or just don't like you. Don't work for teams or organizations like that. If you accidentally find yourself there: move somewhere else.
Unless that continent is Antarctica I don't see the problem here.
I'm not so sure about that. Zuckerberg is on record saying old people just aren't as smart.
Afiak they're about to open (extend?) a new office in London, not sure if that's related or not. When one of my friends told me that (he works for a FAANG company) I had a similar reaction to yours: "Where are they going to get the people for that in this market?"
I know it's not the primary point of the post, but define "much". An RN makes around 80k on average, they're also hourly and can generally pick up overtime whenever they want. Nurse anesthetists make double that at minimum, practitioners are north of 120k. It may not be as much as a FAANG position but I'd consider that decent pay, especially for such a stable position with decent WLB(omitting pandemic). Up until the past few years RN only required a 2 year degree.
Teachers don't make as much, but average pay in my lower cost of living area, just crossed 60k. That's not terrible, especially considering they only work 9/12 months and can get more for summer school or many of them find side jobs.
Source: levels.fyi
> they don't get paid much
which is how I suppose we're on the topic of arguing the semantics of "much". I think GP should have said "as much" to clarify, since this is a comparison between two specific jobs.
To add another data point, every teacher I know uses at least a third of their "break" for lesson planning. Usually more.
Most teachers work hard over the summer, it isn't a break. Pay isn't great.
And a certain mainstream political group puts significant effort into demonizing the profession and destroying the pay/benefits packages... which matters, because in public schools, the politicians hold the purse strings.
I think many teachers (almost all that I know, and all of the good ones) would disagree with you on that. Lesson planning, training/continuing education, scheduling, etc.
> many of them find side jobs
..why?
That is to say, I'm sure most people on here could get a side job if they wanted to. Is there a reason why teachers get side jobs and, say, programmers don't? (Yes, that's a rhetorical question.)
This isn't really a benefit. Public employees with access to a state pension generally don't pay into SS because their state pension is is lieu of social security. They pay into the pension instead and have to hope it exists in the future, which for many states is significantly riskier than relying on federal social security.
This might just be a Midwest thing but those sidejobs typically involve something drinking related
Have you head of finance? What I think is that most current tech folks started their careers out of genuine interest, and so think along the lines you describe. But now that the money has really arrived, the balance will shift to the type-A aspirational folks who only care about the highest paying, most highly regarded career, and are looking for some FAANG->YC Startup->Management path. These people absolutely are happy to do whatever as long as they get external validation, and would have no compunction about working at FB as long as it keeps them on the track they planned.
I almost want finance to be glamorized again so it can siphon these people away.
It is not surprising if the goal is not to fill vacancies or expanding needs, but to prevent competing companies from having these people at their disposal. There will be enough offers to cover every possible person who could do this computer-focused work that might go to work for a competitor.
Another explanation is that there is a high attrition rate (e.g., like Amazon) and the company must overcompensate. Thus there will always be high numbers of advertisied positions that are never filled.
A third explanation is the company just has too much money and no clear ideas on how to spend it. (Case in point: Metaverse) Companies tend to sustain higher and higher levels of, for lack of a better term, "stupidity/foolishness" as the cash flow increases further and further beyond the company's immediate needs. Having heaps of cash on hand does not necessarily focus the mind; it can have the opposite effect.
It's nice to be paid a reliable 400k/year and work on something you think is cool.
He said you get to work on cool stuff, but it never actually gets deployed. And that everyone hates your employer, but you'll never get fired.
I definitely see how "work on cool stuff" + "don't worry about getting fired" could be pretty cool, if you don't have any investment in really creating things that are used.
I've known a lot of people who have a thriving life outside of work, but are also very driven and value their work highly.
Oculus research has a better track record of publishing AR/VR research and opening up old hardware (unlocked Oculus Go) than anyone else doing serious AR/VR work.
Apple, on the other hand...
This one thing that happened 3 weeks ago is a "track record"?
As long as it isn't GPT-3... (:
On one hand you have teams working on interesting and industry-leading tech, like React, GraphQL, Oculus, etc. But on the other you have legions of people working to make the money machine printing, and I've got to think most of that work sucks: the nitty-gritty of keeping the site up, content moderation teams, all the ad plumbing. A lot of that stuff would be good for a new grad to learn how stuff works at such large scale, but that's the cohort who I think would be most turned off by Facebook's social/brand problems.
You're right, everyone there was pretty happy. We had a great office by the beach in Venice. Free ubers to work. Great snacks.
I really only left because I wanted to spend some time in Asia and do my own thing for a bit. Different strokes for different folks!
From technical point of view, things like keeping such a huge site up, or building ads backend can be very rewarding for infrastructure minded folks.
I am a senior IC. I went from Google to FB for L+1. The salary increase alone was enough to convince me. Personally I don't think GOOG is much better than FB (if they are better at all) in all the areas in which people on HN complain.
I heard some horror stories about FB Work/Life balance before I came here. Turns out I work 10-15 hours a week less than when I was at Google, in a much better org, on problems I care about. Beyond my immediate manager (who at GOOG was great too), FB leadership chain is far better throughout my org except for one other person at GOOG. In my GOOG org people were constantly promoted and rewarded for the wrong things.
FB let me go through weeks of trying out teams before I selected one. Google put me on a team, told me nothing about it, and I had no idea what team it even was until the end of the first day when my manager picked me up.
Not really worried about the performance reviews a comment mentioned above since GOOG has the same (actually in my experience worse there).
The idea being that companies would agree to a pact in which they would blacklist anyone who works for facebook. What would be the consequences?
Some sub-questions:
1. Would a blacklist be legal? Do employment laws prohibit hiring decisions based on one's prior employment?
2. Would companies agree to join the pact? 2.a If tech workers were unionized, would the union have any power to persuade companies to join a pact?
3. What effect would a functioning blacklist have on facebook?
* The only effect I can thing of is FB would have to start paying more to retain/attract employees.
....
This is all just a thought experiment. A what-if question. I'm not seriously proposing a blacklist. I'm just curious about what would happen if one where implemented.
It would also probably have a chilling effect on other potential hires : I know that I would think twice to work for a company that has this kind of blacklist. And if they do have a blacklist, I would think it thrice if they put in a company like Facebook, when other companies have a way more disastrous effect on the world in general, even if there is more publicity about facebook at the moment.
Finally, it would definitely be illegal to have at least european people on this list, but hopefully it would also be illegal in other jurisdictions.
I did consider laws that prohibit asking about criminal history. I don't think those specific laws would apply, as they are designed to help the previously incarcerated re-enter society through employment.
That said, I could see a court challenge to the blacklist with those laws being cited during arguments.
The second a company does something like this (aka no real incentive event that can only potentially cause damage, solely as a "protest") is the second that company is going to look like a pretty bad place to work at. Mostly because it just means they care more about public outrage and putting on a show than actually doing their work.
And despite not having much interest in working for FB, I have way less interest in working at a place where other employees (and the leadership) are supportive of such proposals.
+ Cassandra DB
+ pyTorch
+ Jest
+ GraphQL
+ Oculus Quest
Are these real salaries? How??
also, I’ve heard that Netflix salaries in particular are higher than most other tech giants because they don’t offer any other benefits.
It has been a common trend that when someone I know posts a job position in FB, nobody replies to it. At least not publicly (publicly means replying to tweet, replying to slack message in a well knit/known group of people). Even if they are replying personally and privately, that in itself shows a problem.
When I see someone working in FB, I can't deny that I am judging them. At this point, there is no reason to give a benefit of the doubt to how bad FB is to people, democracy and humanity in general. Sure, you can argue with technical meritocracy of some tech they produce. But how long can you sell yourself that excuse really when on the other side, adverse effects are mounting up?
As nerdy and smart as tech workers are, we are still in need of validation from others right? There definitely should be some effect on people being perceived as a bad person for working for a bad company even if it is paying a ton. FAANG engineers should be more than equipped to look elsewhere because of it.
There seem to be a few assumptions you're making in the post above about someone you've never met and only know based on their current/former employer.
I hope your candidate in this example is able to part the conference room blinds, and point out his better-than-yours car, house, or helicopter that he took to your job site. And then just drop a microphone on the way to the next interview.
:)
They could use AI to tackle this in the future now that we have Copilot of the sorts. It would be interesting to see how the cope up with it.
Facebook is definitely on the downslide. They staved off facebook's slide by successfully picking the next social network in instagram, but now that is probably going to lose its shine. If Tiktok is the next #1... That can't be easily acquired due to Chinese ownership...
They'll try the "metaverse" but man that is a big leap, and they are already poisoning their metaverse with stupid things like "must have a facebook account" which signals they are doomed to failure.
Facebook knows this. It's why they changed their name. Maybe the recruiting struggles signaled the death of the "Facebook" brand.
I had a couple friends who joined FB 5-7 years ago and reported horrible WLB, so I was avoiding it, but if the trend you are describing is correct (and that person from last week claimed WLB was fine), maybe I should consider it some day.
I think there's nothing really wrong with the company, and I would view a somewhat lower level of "caring about social issues"/"wokeness" per-employee to be a small positive :)
That’s just humble bragging on LinkedIn. It’s so common on that platform to humble brag everything that I wouldn’t read too much into that one.
This might be more indicative of your bubble than anything.
Facebook isn’t having a hard time hiring, despite whatever the headlines are trying to imply. There will always be a steady stream of applicants for high paying FAANG jobs.
Being able to choose exactly which ultra-high-paying tech job you take or being able to walk away from one of those highly paid jobs is a massive privilege that not everybody shares.
Not sure why you tried to take a jab with the community here that way, sounds pretty salty for an unknown reason.
> Facebook's hiring problems are far from unique. Tech industry surveys indicate that talent shortages and hiring difficulties for engineers and developers are among the biggest concerns for companies right now, and the labor market has grown exceedingly tight across almost every sector in the United States over the last year.
It's possible that Facebook is doing worse than other tech companies, but the article doesn't go into that.
Sure. But this bubble that I was in since for a long time had been OK with JOB positions and talking about a career in FB before. So if there is anything else, that itself shows that "my bubble" stopped preferring FB. Shouldn't that itself mean there is a reduction in people choosing FB? :)
And I am coming across this online and elsewhere too. So my bubble is not the only one with this feelings for sure.
The ad product has enabled a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. I really can't understate how pivotal facebook has been -> because they know so much about you the targeting can be REALLY REALLY effective. For many products the traditional competitors like google can't even come close.
Being an e-commercialist+advertiser may make me biased but I've grown to love Zuck much more than I would've previously been comfortable with.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to divest React from Facebook, given the potential reputational risk to the React project.
Microsoft had to rewire itself in order to recover from Windows. Facebook (or Meta) needs same. Microsoft had to bring in a new leader, I think Zuck should step down, and bring somebody different before it's too late. I can imagine a fight for throne happening inside already.
1. Before the React/Vue era, there was so much JS churn and many devs who went through that are not looking to change anytime soon.
2. Even if React goes into keep the lights on mode, what is going to compel someone to not choose React at this point? The uniformity of it in the JS world, the stability, and the flexibility make it a great fit for most use cases. What value proposition is it failing that would make it lose its place as the dominant front end framework?
It would take a massive, worthwhile new paradigm shift to occur in the JS world to unseat React IMO, and I don't see that happening anytime in the next few years simply because there is no need. React works TM which is big.
It is not that uncommon for the first step in success to be forgetting about what the company ostensibly exists to do to make room for the misaligned incentives, whatever they may be, that determine what it actually does. That's the essential element of the big company malaise. Anyone can be mediocre if they're not trying, or if they're trying extremely hard to do something that's ultimately pointless.