I was recently considering responding to the Facebook recruiter that keeps e-mailing me. Now I'm back to a definite no. These things start with people who are more on the fence.

Are you top talent, though? Facebook recruiters email everyone with a pulse, and some without.

I think I can plausibly claim to be top talent.

If top talent working somewhere was enough to keep top talent from leaving, then no company that employed top talent would ever loose their position without missing payroll.

You have a valid point. Top talent existed in places like Silicon Graphics, Yahoo, etc. I guess you're right, the top probably got off the sinking ship long before the rest of the crew realized what was happening.

However, I still think this event is not "bad" enough for the crew to start fleeing. This is a bump in the road. People may hate Facebook but people sure do love Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. Facebook has a pretty strong moat (for now at least).

Top talent has a bazillion dollars locked in stock options that have appreciated several hundred percent over the past few years.

'Top talent' generally have a lot of options, and there are plenty of companies in the Bay Area which have an engineer-friendly environment. Street-cred matters a lot more than you might think.

How certain was the same with Uber while they were going through the bulk of their issues? In a full employment market, not wanting to be associated with a company simply due to potential perception would be enough to have most candidates pass on an opportunity.

If facebook’s engineering talent is top tier, then how come I have to recommend to everyone to delete that awful battery draining app.

What kind of counter point is that?

If Apple has top tier talent, why do they ship an OS with a huge security vulnerability? With a map framework that has memory leaks? With a messaging app that messes up the order of messages?

If Google has top tier talent, why did they create an OS that allowed a third party developer to siphon calls, contacts and messages?

If this is your argument, then no company has top talent.

If top tier is a low enough bar that Facebook, Google, and Apple can hire exclusively from it, then it doesn't mean much at all to be top tier anyway.

"no company has top talent" is much closer to the truth than your implied assumption that even companies drenched in top talent must deliver shit products.

Well the better answer would be that top talent either work on ads or server side infrastructure. For client side its user device, battery, RAM and money and they could care less once they have thrown a free app in the face of users.

It takes some amazing engineering talent to build an app which drains your battery that slowly whilst uploading "everything" on your phone to Facebook's servers? :-)

Well, at least it scales well in those tasks.

Because swooping up all mobile audio and transmit it over would be a management decision, certainly not engineering. This is what most likely drains the battery and your data plan. You cannot explain this amount of drainage with CPU only.

Also swooping all kind of privacy data, like call logs, messages, contacts, calendar info is from management. Engineers really know better that this will be found out sooner and later, and then it's the end.

There's subtle exploits out there that efficiently manage to Hot-mic a phone and still use less battery than facebook.