they havent monopolized talent, they pay for talent. Facebook paying high salaries has increased all of our pay, equity etc, whether you work there or not. The only thing this may be bad for is founders who are in a zero sum competition with FB for talent and now need to spend more money and equity to get it.

This is a very short-sighted view. Yes it has some immediate benefit in terms of pay, but you have to consider the long-term societal tradeoff of not developing addictive mental candy for people or developing societally useful technologies (or vice-versa, as it now stands). We can focussed on getting paid a lot now, or improving the wealth of everyone and generative the value we can all enjoy later.

> the long-term societal tradeoff of not developing addictive mental candy

Along with React, GraphQL and a bunch of other technologies with various degrees of popularity https://opensource.fb.com

Along with various startups building around the projects incubated at Facebook - Asana, Interana, Phacility, Qubole, etc.

Ok so React, GraphQL, and good pay. Definitely not short-sighted.

You don't think those technologies could have been developed by people at ethical companies, or even by the same people at ethical companies?

So why haven't they been developed by the time Facebook came around?

Why would it be remarkable that a few popular technologies come out of a big, rich technology company? People who create such technologies work at places like that. But there’s nothing about React or GraphQL that makes them only possible at Facebook.

A big, rich technology company has the resources to put people on the project full time and a revenue stream to justify such broad architectural project.

There's also financial support for building a community around improving the tech, by encouraging outside contributions via meetups, conferences, social events, better technical documentation, etc.

At smaller scale startup an engineer is surely welcome to work on his skunkworks project, but justifying expensive large-scale architectural undertakings on company's dime is problematic. Especially if a quicker fix is available and buys the company a chance to kick the problem down the road.

With that said, it's not impossible to build a major popular piece of technology within a small company (Joyent and Node.js being a good example), it's just harder.

You’re repeating what I wrote - Big tech is likely to produce new tech, but new tech comes from other places too.

This discussion is mostly irrelevant to the fact that this particular company is completely reckless and unethical. The technology they accidentally produce while building a dystopia to make people click on ads[1] does not justify anything.

1: https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI

The same reason Facebook didn’t develop them before they did.

React + GraphQL < B

Where B is the sum of the set consisting of:

-Breaking democracy in the US and the UK by being _the_ platform for disinformation.

-Disinformation assisting genocide in Myanmar.

-Use correlating strongly with poor mental health

-Manipulating behaviour to encourage poor attention spans for the sake of ad-clicking

-Constantly violating basic standards of privacy

-(I could go on..)

Oh wait, excuse my arithmetic. I forgot to add another JS framework like Relay to the LHS of the equation, that makes it a net positive from Facebook! :D

I don't think its fair to blame FB on the decay of democracy in the information age. Surely Twitter is also to blame them. I think the blame is on the users. Its not possible to be perfectly informed. It is possible to keep your mouth shut if you don't know something for sure. Perhaps its the fact that in real life, to say something you need to say it to someone's face and on social media you don't have that social weight to carry. This brings about people more likely to share misinformation. If this is the case, its not the fault of social media, rather the fault of internet culture. More personal responsibility is the solution. Not an improved ML system to detect fake news.

Yes, Twitter is also to blame.

It is a problem inherent in the structure of most social media companies. And Facebook is the most significant social media company, and thus contributor to the problem.

I think the sadder part of this argument is that nobody outside of software engineers know or care what GraphQL is, yet it’s being touted as a “societal benefit”. How about the fact that my grandma with limited mobility can still attend church virtually through the Live feature? Regardless of how often the scions of the Valley disavow their own technology (I would /never/ let my children use our products!), there are a billion or so other people who actually use it to real benefit in their quaint little lives.

This argument I agree is far more compelling than "reductio ad JS library"

> Breaking democracy in the US and the UK by being _the_ platform for disinformation.

Blaming facebook for "breaking" democracy in the US and the UK is ridiculous. I can't understand how this can continue being a claim remotely considered valid. I agree (or may agree, at least in part) on some of the other points, but not on this.

Claiming that Trump won just because of the russians putting ads on facebook is at least naive - and ignores the fears/actual issues a very big* part of the US population experience daily. Isn't failing public schooling a problem there also? Does that give us citizen more or less prepared to actually participate in democracy?

Politicians (of all sides) in the UK have accused the EU of being the root of all evil since they "joined", again and again and again: you lost your job? Blame the EU! We can't cut taxes? Blame the EU! You really want to blame facebook and NOT the politicians themselves because people voted for brexit?

If the Russians tried to manipulate (and for sure they did, oh gosh, I'm pretty sure the US and the EU states never do - or did - anything to manipulate elections abroad! Evil Putin, why you do this to us? :cry:) we rolled out the red carpet for them!

Democracy was broken because actual journalists did not do their job. Stop doing what they (may) want you to do, using social media as a scapegoat for their own (willing, sometimes, for sure, at least if you read what Chomsky has to say) MASSIVE failure of being the "champions of truth" they claim (and blindly believe - I worked on somewhat close contact with them for years, I've seen that) to be.

OData was developed before Graphql - pretty much does the same thing

I agree with your premise, that many Facebook employeees would give society a better return on its investment if they were employed elsewhere, but that’s hardly Facebook’s fault.

It's tempting to think that without Facebook they would get involved in cancer research or interplanetary travel, but given the Silicon Valley's funding cycles, they would be more likely to end up building yet another food delivery startup or revolutionizing something by putting it on blockchain.

Also, a bunch of recruiting venues exploited by Facebook are not that accessible to smaller startups.

E.g. one of the top previous employers for Facebook employees was Google (or some other outfit within Alphabet group, like YouTube). Most likely those people would've stayed at Google.

Another hiring source was university recruiting, which involves participating at job fairs at various universities, exhaustive days of back-to-back interviews, flying candidates for on-campus interviews, and eventually covering relocation costs (and potentially visas and immigration paperwork) for someone moving from Pittsburgh, Waterloo or Romania.

Would a smaller startup have the financial oomph to run a similar recruiting pipeline?

I didn't pin the blame on them. I place it as a cultural issue.

There's also its ostensible goal to connect people. I logged in for the first time in months just to see if I had been compromised. In about 15 minutes of goofing around, I got to enjoy countless happy baby pics posted by old college friends, and had a nice chat with someone I hadn't talked to in almost a decade, after I randomly commented on a status update. Then I logged off. I know that my kind of limited use is likely not the average scenario, and I can definitely understand people suffering when they get sucked in. But it's a site that does a damn good job of making it easy for me to find and interact with friends, and I don't believe the tech and design involved is trivial.

Still living in Europe, I must admit I always envied the people who work at Facebook, Google etc. This neutralizes my envy

What makes Facebook "addictive mental candy" other than you not personally liking it?

I know lots of people who feel they get and have got tremendous practical benefit from Facebook. It isn't "addictive" unless you use that term to mean anything some people make that other people enjoy.

Here's a study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28093386

"Our results showed that overall, the use of Facebook was negatively associated with well-being."

Naturally, even if this study is accurate it isn't definitive; the causation could go in the other direction, that the unhappy use Facebook more often than the contented. But it's still quite suggestive.

I saw this study referenced from this article: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/21/17144748/c...

A friend in HR that has friends in many of the Bay's companies told me that people at Google and other big companies hire to keep people away from other companies. Because they can.

So, yes, I believe they are trying to corner the market on the best programmers.

Wasn't Facebook part of the class action lawsuit that sought to supress wages and colluded in anti-poaching between Intel, Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe?

They may pay more, but they collude to make sure people couldn't leave without going far outside the bay. That's a monopolistic trait.

I agree they weren't putting a gun to people's heads but they were making the environment less available.

I don’t think Facebook was part of that group. More importantly though, it was in the aftermath of that, where large companies started more aggressively poaching employees, that large company compensation ballooned and startups started to complain about the top large companies hogging talent.

How have they monopolized the talent pool? By paying their employees better than everyone else?

By hiring talent out of college when every other company's looking for 10 years of experience in Kubernetes.

Not sure if this was meant as a joke or not. I can certainly believe clueless HR doing that.

I was indeed alluding to stories of real job postings doing just that with other technologies (not Kubernetes specifically).

there is also prestige associated to big names like Facebook (and Google, Apple, etc)

> there is also prestige associated to big names

I hate that this has happened. The Bay Area used to be a place where working for the big, shiny company that makes your parents happy wasn't prestigious. It was safe. But taking a risk and starting something new was admired. The present state of affairs reminds me of Wall Street.

What happened was that VCs started sucking up all the equity and it became not worth it from a risk-reward perspective for most people to work at a startup. This, coupled with companies staying private longer meant that in the lat 5 years, you were better off working at G/FB than a small or mid-sized startup.

e.g https://www.slideshare.net/a16z/state-of-49390473/29-29Becau...

While VCs certainly played into this, I'd say founders merit the bulk of the blame. VCs are generally more amenable than founders to larger equity pools for employees. They're also much more enthusiastic about IPOs than founders, since they want liquidity events for their investments.

Thank you both. VCs and founders together have sucked up all the potential value of working for a startup, leaving only risk and below-market pay to employees. Until this changes, big name companies are not just safer but higher expected value.

It was a little different when you could afford to buy a house in the Bay Area without $2m in the bank.

Yes, so much this. There is a very real opportunity cost to forgoing high salaries (and this opportunity cost is front-loaded as well since home prices keep appreciating).

There was always a level of prestige associated with certain companies even in the 80s and 90s, no?

The tech industry, despite its shortcomings, is vastly superior to Wall Street in that regard. It's still a meritocracy above all else.

Plenty of smart people break into tech after doing something else for a few years. If you want to go into investment banking, you better come from a consulting or have already been working in finance. Your only last bastion of hope is to get an MBA and then join the rat race.

I think that prestige only exists in the minds of some people who work there or have worked there. If I had a nickel for every time someone started a sentence with "well when I was at Google" for a scenario that is nothing like Google... Facebook's move-fast-and-break-things culture is fortunately a little less envied, in my experience.

The prestige most definitely exists and is especially relevant for people who dont have a strong public portfolio to show off their talent. An average developer from Google/FB etc. has an easier time getting access to opportunities than even an outstanding developer at a no-name company. Companies/Hiring managers go through an implicit thought process along the lines of "if she/he go through google she/he must be good" which opens doors and helps in salary negotiations.

Working at Google confers prestige among lay people as well, in my experience.

What other big companies are associated with similar prestige?

In the SV tech community, Dropbox, Uber, Snapchat, Spotify, AirBnB, Lyft, Netflix, Pinterest, Robinhood to name several.

Outside the tech community, probably Amazon, Microsoft, and Instagram (most people don't know Facebook owns Instagram).

Why is there a difference between inside and outside the tech community?

The economic success, brand awareness, and hipness of a company with the general public is only somewhat correlated with average level of engineering talent at a company. Different successful companies take different approaches to hiring - some focus on hiring a lot of reasonably competent engineers, while others focus on only hiring the best (and generally pay them a lot).

> some focus on hiring a lot of reasonably competent engineers, while others focus on only hiring the best (and generally pay them a lot).

Are you saying the latter two don't do that?

Based on their privacy issues, influence scandal, etc. its scary to imagine what the company looks like without the best and brightest.

I think about this a lot too. All companies eventually decline or go through rough patches. A Google that's fighting for survival and losing money would be much more open to working with the Chinese government or selling user data to the highest bidder.

Trusting these entities based on their noble intentions today makes no sense to me if there's no legal agreement or regulation to restrain them tomorrow, when they get desperate.

Same could be said for Google

Lmao. Very good point.

> Is it wrong to be glad FB's reputation has tarnished (and stock price sideways) over the past year or so?

No, not at all. Their positive reputation was in many ways unearned, and it's a good thing to be glad that their own actions and attitudes are finally catching up with them.

That's fine, but it would be okay with those of us who live elsewhere if maybe the tarnishing didn't come as a result of things like this.

They pay like 2x more than competitors that aren't big tech companies.

From everyone I know at top tech companies this isn't happening at all. If anything the stock dip was a good thing for new grads because they got more shares.