> They can’t hire people with good ideas anymore because as we know money isn’t a great motivator

This is not entirely true. I have seen excellent people go to Facebook because they gave out the highest offers. Now whether they get people with good ideas is something I don't know.

I spent five years golden handcuffed at Facebook and hired a large number of brilliant, driven people there. Most of them are still there because of the obscenely large sums of money Facebook pays to keep them there. Note that Facebook does not do counteroffers, and instead makes sure to keep the best people financially motivated to stay each year.

Curious, why did you leave?

Since you are on the outside now, do you still agree with their mission and tactics or do you see them on a path towards 'user-engagement metrics over everything' ending in destruction.

What exactly does that mean, "Facebook does not do counteroffers"?

So you name an amount and either take you or not?

To clarify, if you're employed at Facebook and get an offer from another company, Facebook won't attempt to counter that offer to keep you. The initial offer to get employed at Facebook is of course negotiable.

Probably for the better. People who have already gotten a competitive offer must be determined to leave.

Yes, it is genuinely a good policy. It results in happy employees not being penalized for not shopping around for offers.

What do those people work on?

Zstandard is pretty nice: https://github.com/facebook/zstd

Facebook has some top notch systems and infrastructure.

Those people won’t be excellent for long in a Dead Sea.

I've never seen this comparison before. Are you suggesting that Facebook is similar to an endorheic basin?

They are referring to the Dead Sea effect: http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-d...

Hmm, interesting. I have always thought of it as a kettle lake. But you're right! There is a strong argument for endorheic basic.

I don't know if this generalizes across the company. They still have brilliant technical people, some of the best ML researchers, have open-sourced increbidly popular and influential frameworks like React and PyTorch. Just because their upper management or their business model might suck doesn't mean that they don't have great people working there.

Anecdotal, but I’ve seen several folks get offers from FB and other big tech, and I’ve seen FB throw much more money at people. They also have better perks.

I think they know they need to use money to overcome their reputation.

Sure, but it's still not enough.

FB recruiters are super aggressive and I have zero qualms unloading on them for their BS behavior, every. time. I've asked five (5!) times to be taken off their list and added to a blacklist for candidates and I still get emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages. The first two "buzz-off" messages were polite, but now I'm just downright rude and respond with my actual opinion on their employer (and subsequently what I think about them working for that employer).

Facebook is a bad company that does bad things. If you work there, you're gross.

I gave up telling them they were wasting their time, and now my spam filter takes care of FB headhunter spam for me, as it should.

FTR, I do think that's a bit unfair. Judging other peoples' circumstances is a perilous pursuit.

But I will say FB is parasitic on and dangerous to society and is run by amoral shitbags, I don't believe anyone with a sense of ethics or self-respect should work there.

I think it would be interesting to start an underground movement of engineers taking their inflated salaries and then doing a deliberately bad job while working there. I can do just about any job badly-- this could be my calling!

> I've asked five (5!) times to be taken off their list and added to a blacklist for candidates and I still get emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages.

This is like complaining to the person who called you about your vehicle warranty or any other spam auto-dialer. Recruiting is a numbers game so sending you an email with thousands of others requires no effort on their part.

Putting my # and email address on a blacklist in their CRM shouldn't be too difficult for a company with resources such as FB. If two-bit recruiting agencies can do it in the middle-of-nowhere Iowa then FB can do it.

Sorry, not changing my opinion here.

I'm not asking you to change your opinion. All I'm doing is explaining the rhyme and reason here. If you chose to continue getting mad at something so frivolous please carry on with your wasted efforts.

If the facts are as you said, that you've repeatedly told them to stop calling you, it may be worth talking to a TCPA Lawyer.

That depends whether the recruiters are in-house.

I’ve had the same issue with Google recruiters. I imagine they copy each other’s tactics. One time they asked why I turned them down; I was more than happy to respond. Haven’t heard back since.

The recruiters are the same people so of course they use the same tactics. The average tenure of a recruiter is 1-2 years.

Now I'm actually somewhat curious what the career of a recruiter looks like.

How do you even end up in a situation where recruiters are banging down your door with such offers? I know developers who have reverse engineered applications, fixed unbelievable bugs deep an application stacks, written top tier code that make them the go to people in teams for all the tough problems and yet they barely get any call backs much less for companies like Facebook. They have to grind leetcode for 1 year just to get interviews at no name companies in the mid-west(despite willing to relocate anywhere). Its like there is this "in" group of developers and if you are "in" you can act like how you do and if you are not, then you are in starvation mode with all the other starving fish in the sea.

Likewise it just seems so selfish to talk like this during a pandemic situation where so many people (including people in tech) are out of a job.

Live in a city with Facebook offices. Work for a similar company.

Recruiters offer phone calls not jobs. You still have to grind to pass the interviews.

So the strategy is basically to get into the FAANG club once and then you are golden as long as you keep up your grinding?

GAFAM if it has to be an acronym. Other big software companies work too. Basically yes otherwise.

Yep - 100% this. Once you get a household name on your resume you're golden if you can do a simple whiteboard interview.

> If you work there, you're gross.

I think that's a touch harsh. What if you just make sandwiches in a canteen?

Then you’re probably a contractor who is being mistreated.

In terms of pay, having compared offers before, one would be better of at Facebook than Google but tied with Apple. Apple has less perks but more monetary compensation to make up for it because their stock isn’t nearly the liability and Apple actually releases new products and services instead of sucking their existing property dry. Who would want to work at Facebook? There is literally nothing your company does worth getting excited to come to work for.

Huh I don’t know. Maybe the $200k salary for entry level developers is exciting? Or maybe it’s the ability to work on a product that is a household name for billions of people?

Working for Facebook doesn't have quit the social capital it used to. Besides there's a such thing as enjoying my and believing the work you do is valuable. If ultimately you can only trave your effort back to ad clicks, that's not very enticing.

You live in a bubble. 95% of the American public would hear that their son “got a job at Facebook” and think he made it. 95% of companies hiring developers would see “worked at Facebook” and move that resume to the top of the pile.

Finally someone with some perspective. Is it just me or is it just baffling at the amount of hubris there is in this thread? Its like there are two worlds, this small group of people who have no perspective whatsoever and the rest of the country having to deal with reality.

The rest of the country also has little positive sentiment for Facebook. They don't go so far as not to use it, but their opinion of it is not good.

Maybe it's because I don't live in an SV or other techie bubble that I see this, that I give more credit to the average person. Because I'm not stuck I'm an echo chamber of "general public are naive and don't care". They do care, they are more aware of some of these issues than you think. Assuming the only people who care or think about these issues are techies is an extremely condescending & patronizing view towards the average person.

Perhaps it helps broaden my view that live in a densely populated but not very techie/tech-company area and I have a large social circle of non techies. It shows me that your so-called bubble where hn/sv/techies make sweeping generalizations about the average person is often based in stereotypical fiction instead of reality. My age 65+ parents and in-laws couldn't tell you the difference between tcp & udp, setup a WiFi router, or understand the difference between a spreadsheet and a database or know what Full Stack means. But they have opinions on Facebook, and they aren't good. My few dozen coworkers of all ages are the same.

No, I live in a mostly non-techie social group with both Democrats and Republicans: they all view facebook negatively primarily through the lens of their political party.

Your own self-satisfied bubble of congratulatory "we techies are special and have a special perspective" bubble is blinding you. Ask anyone with a moderate interest in politics how they feel about facebook and the answer is mostly going to be "not great".

Most don't care enough to quit facebook, but as per the point of my original comment, facebook isn't going to have any sort of easy time whipping up public support against Apple for privacy issues they mostly don't care about one way or another.

A person would have to drink an awful lot of kool aid to think their work at Facebook is valuable to anyone but the Facebook shareholders.

Hey if your work on OSS infrastructure, it's not really that bad.

I honestly don't know the answer to this: How much are people able to choose to work on OSS projects vs. being told "This is the project you're working on."

Also, OSS tech that's in service to ad tech may still not be enticing. Even if it's not directly used for ad tech, everything you would do for facebook would ultimately be for the purpose of ad tech. Rationalizing that your particular work has non ad-tech related applications seems like just that: a rationalization. Other companies offer OSS work opportunities, as well as the opportunity to carve out, say, 5-10 hours a month to the project of your choice regardless of your day job.

I'm not coming down on one side or the other of such a moral choice. I don't think things are that simple. I think it's a spectrum, and people should weight these things when making a decision, if they have the luxury of doing so.

And I have to say, at this point ad tech is probably only one of a few major problems with Facebook content. News feeds, memes, etc. that are rewarded with shared & likes for being the most inflammatory/emotionally manipulative are at this point at least as bad as micro-targeting of ads, and I personally think are much much worse.

This is the thing. I don't like facebook, and they do a lot of bad things.

They also have some amount of good they do.

Very few things are purely good or purely bad, which should be a caution against all-or-nothing judgements. For example I think Apple is bad for inching its way towards an ever more restrictive MacOS. But I think Apple is good for its efforts to protect user privacy and give users more control over it. And as a FAANG, it's example puts pressure on other companies to compete on privacy as well. (Though I think we know Google will never go that way, unlike Apple their business model isn't based on hardware or software sales, but on the very private information Apple wants users to have control over)

So does the US govt. Does that mean you will reject a grant from them for your cancer cure or solar panel research? Less evil USians will die from cancer as a result potentially, along with the rest of the world.

That was the point of what I was saying.

Despite Facebooks evil, there is good that comes out of it.

Yeah it’s very exciting to work on the best ways to spread misinformation, incite division and ruin democracy. Or maybe they’re pulled in by the charismatic CEO-bot?

The CIA still gets people excited to work for them so ruining democracy and spreading misinformation are certainty draws for the right people

You’re right. I would bet the CIA is at least a little less starry eyed about the “good” they do in the world, compared to Facebook engineers.

> because as we know money isn’t a great motivator

HR industry would like you to believe that, but it's an intentional bastardization of the original research by Kahneman and Deaton (1), twisting their words to fit their cost cutting agenda. The original finding states that past a rather high threshold (~$75k), additional raise alone is an insufficient motivator. Below that threshold, money alone works just fine as a motivator. Above that threshold, pay hike still enhances other motivators.

In Bay Area, I agree that ethical concerns likely dwarf money. $120k/year in Europe would let them scrape the creme de la creme, despite near universal dislike among tech-crowd.

(1) https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/08/27/1011492107.abs...

75k a year number is brainwashing, being rich is better. 75k is poverty with a family in many parts of the USA

> They can’t hire people with good ideas anymore because as we know money isn’t a great motivator

I know tens of people from my past who currently work in Facebook. When I knew then, they were all decent people with long careers in the tech industry. Yet, they chose to work for FB.

A fresh grad son of my ex-Boss is starting his career with FB.

Unfortunately FB's brand is not as tainted, yet, as it should be or as some of us in the HN echo-chamber like to believe.

When their internal memo about "connecting people" was leaked to the public, some FB employees wanted to actively select for loyalty in their hiring process:

> Leakers, please resign instead of sabotaging the company

> How fucking terrible that some irresponsible jerk decided he or she had some god complex that jeopardizes our inner culture and something that makes Facebook great?

> Although we all subconsciously look for signal on integrity in interviews, should we consider whether this needs to be formalized in the interview process?

> This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17179100/facebook-memo-le...

>> This is so disappointing, wonder if there is a way to hire for integrity. We are probably focusing on the intelligence part and getting smart people here who lack a moral compass and loyalty.

Oh the irony.

Tell that to John Carmack, who apparently is quite fine with tainting his legacy and wasting his last few good work years working for Facebook of all companies. And to top it all off, they're going to ruin Oculus, too (where Carmack is working), going by the latest moves in that division.

It would be very hard to “taint the legacy” of a person like Carmack.

He will be excellent no matter where he is because he is given essentially free reign to work on what he enjoys the most.

And if that changes it will be unlikely to be the company that did it, since a person in his position would just move to another company and re-acquire free reign.

I don’t usually complain about spelling, but you used it twice. It’s “free rein.”

https://grammarist.com/spelling/free-rein-free-reign/

Hehe, while you are usually quite correct in that spelling, in Carmack's case "free reign" may actually be more appropriate since he exercises pretty much sovereign power there!

I think he left (for all practical purposes) to focus on AGI now. There were rumors he didn’t like the way fb execs were planning of taking oculus. Think he’s still an advisor or similar, but spends his good time no longer there

Given what I learned when a friend purchased multiple Occulus, I think Fackbook really fucked up. Each unit has to be attached to a different Facebook account, and creating multiple Facebook accounts is forbidden. Bye bye having 2 units at home for when friends come over. They deserve to be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under anti-trust laws.

Tuning as in investing billions of dollars to actually make it a feasible product?

Sure, they do bad moves there as well, but oculus is where it is purely because Facebook decided to burn billions of dollars there.

He's only 50. How 'few good work years' do you think he has left?