Spot on, and not just young, liberal. Old-ish and privacy minded. Mid-aged and right.
Two crowds are critical though:
- this is the talent pool: college campuses. FB's changing tone (sponsoring scholarships, sponsoring scholarships for non tech -> tech transfers, etc) is evident.
- this is the management pool: mid-30's to 40's, married, coastal EMs or PMs, that have to explain at dinner parties where they work and why they do it. See: the whistleblower.
It’s the lack of work/life balance that gets to them, not the reputation of the employer.
There are millions of talented Engineers who'd die to work for Facebook, Google, Netflix.
Top 0.1%ile of 8,000,000,000 is 8 Million.
Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from competition from other countries due to their location advantage. Ironically these woke employees are demanding remote work, displaying their usual cluelessness about unintended consequences.
Like Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, its time for CEOs of tech companies to voluntarily kick out these entitled SJWs and hire true Capitalists, Libertarians, Indians, & Chinese. There are millions of them in this world and they are extremely talented and hard-working.
My comment wasn't directed at 0.1% pile. It's directed at mid-tier, good-not-great CS programs that FB is both targeting in ways that other FAANGs don't, and also have put on heavy marketing programs at. Signal or noise, hard to say, but they wouldn't be doing it if the need didn't exist .
What matters more is the self-fulfilling prophecy of if the PMs/EMs with the cultural sway decide to check out. It's incorrect to think these types don't matter due to the externalities tied to them, not just their management talent (there are a lot of good managers). An example is will the future Sheryl Sandbergs work, or not work at FB. These dinner table conversations are what starts to decide that, and their decision has a material impact on the company's future.
A lot of talented libertarian, conservative people can't work at facebook because it's too woke.
May be a Sheryl Sandberg will make way for Peter Thiels...and it's a fantastic thing for FB.
At this point too many FBers have to walk on eggshells.
A clean cut of SJWs will make FB a better and more powerful company
As a FAANG engineer from the enterprise world, plenty of enterprise developers would excel here. But they're not willing or able to sufficiently practice the leetcode grind.
> to voluntarily kick out these entitled SJWs
Another way to think of these people are the most talented, highly educated pool and casting them as somehow less capable or more entitled is just pure political spin. (There's people from this pool that are right leaning, but just a lower proportion of them.)
"All of humanity" a silly denominator.
There are fewer than 30 million software engineers in the world [1], so at 0.1% we're talking about 30,000 people worldwide. That's... not a lot of people. At all. There are waaaaaay more than 30K "we'll pay anything for the best" SWE positions in the world.
> Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from competition from other countries due to their location advantage.
On the contrary, I think those "liberal graduates" understand the US SWE labor market better than you do.
Tech is one of the least protected occupations in the United States. Driving up the supply of tech talent has been an explicit goal of the United States' immigration policy for 30+ years. Unlike medicine or engineering, there's no licensing barriers. And outsourcing has been an option for decades.
A lot of the labor market disruption you're predicting already happened. Stuff that could be effectively outsourced to IIT grads was outsourced over a decade ago. At this point, I'd bet good money that over the last 10 years or so automation (aka cloud and devops) was responsible for more IT layoffs than outsourcing.
> Ironically these woke employees are demanding remote work, displaying their usual cluelessness about unintended consequences.
I thought this would happen as well, but data seems to suggest exactly the opposite.
Also, while we're on the topic, outsourcing and skimping on engineering compensation obviously works -- just look at how IBM has taken over the tech industry while domestic firms like the FAANGs have languished ;-)
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[1] https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software...
An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool.
Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and being very successful at it
The IITs are truly world-class computer science programs. Better than most US colleges/universities. To say nothing of the fantastic engineers in Canada and Europe that can be had for fractions of American labor prices. MOOCs are noise.
> slack/remote-infrastructure
Slack-like technologies existed during the outsourcing wave in the 90s, and high-quality video conferencing existed during the wave in the early 2010s.
We've been through this rodeo before.
In college I was warned to major in Accounting instead of CS because all the programming jobs would be outsourced. Today, I make north of $600K and all of the entry level positions at the Big 4 ask for some programming knowledge, or at the very least strong SQL/Excel skills.
Again, I've lived through some of these waves. IBM et al. tried this twice and lost both times.
> An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool.
I'm... not even going to engage with this.
> Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and being very successful at it
I don't really know where this moral panic about woke culture in tech is coming from. It's not something I've experienced in the workplace. I don't doubt that there are microclimates within FAANGS where this is a problem, but I've never seen it and at this point have to assume it's not as pervasive as the panicked folks seem to think.
In meatspace, I've had a number of friends who've complained about cancel culture/wokeness. Mostly in our small group at church. TBH, if I had to guess based on my interactions with those folks at church, all of them are struggling in their careers because they are abrasive, argumentative, and have a tendency to steamroll conversations. That lack of social graces is the sort of thing people put up with in church/friend groups but have less patience for at work (particularly in non-executive roles).
I don't doubt that cancelling is a thing, but my general anecdotal experience has been that most people complaining about it are wrong about the motivation for their firing/non-promotion. For prideful people, it's often easier to believe the world hates Christians or Conservatives than to own up to the fact that people just don't like working with or especially under abrasive personalities.
Same here - it's an easy agenda to outrage about that's destroying the quality of discourse here on HN
What a strangely composed list, full of odd ducks, no?
Also, and ya I know how this sounds, but if Coinbase keeps it up they and similar companies will and are grabbing some of the same talent.
(And yes, you can point out reasons not to work at Netflix, but it seems like a whole nother level than the rest of FAANG.)
Yeah, mostly cos they make no money ;)
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/netflix-says-cash-flow-posit...
Netflix have needed external financing to stay in business up till this year. This is very unlike the rest of FAANG (Amazon is similar, but do throw off a lot of free cash).
What liberals can't stomach is a company allowing the spread of nasty election lies.
One halfway responsible way: "here is a paid announcement from someone that doesn't necessarily reflect our views: ${LIES}".
On the other end of the spectrum are sneaky, dark patterns and whatnot.
Maybe it's time for the old crusty developers making $60k on embedded systems to take a shot at it.
Well you're dead wrong about that.
+Not sure what counts as old and crusty, but...
So any institution that's considered repugnant by young liberals can now breezily be compared to big tobacco? Should the Republican party restructure its platform so that it can have snazzier candidate webpages?
Big tobacco is big tobacco because the product is widely seen as addictive and harmful, even by its biggest users. The nuance needed to argue that Facebook is bad but Twitter and Reddit are fine will never have this sort of broad appeal. Social media for me but not for thee?
"The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff. Even if its ageing customers stick with the social network, Facebook has bigger ambitions that could be foiled if public opinion continues to curdle."