It seems a bit arbirtrary to pick high salaries as the reason for it. And to not blame spending billions on unprofitable projects like the metaverse, or having their profits affected by Apple's restrictions on tracking, or the steady decline in user experience. or the general image of the company being affected by a long list of scandals... <<< I would blame these factors before I point at graduates who earn above the market average.

I'm sure FB would love to be able to spend 2x on salaries if it came with a guarantee of turning the metaverse into a successful business venture, or of grabbing all the attention hours currently flowing to TikTok.

It's hard to claim that a project failed because its budget was too big.

In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class. Healthcare is just the same.

The causal relationship is in the opposite direction: high salaries cause high housing costs. Law of rent gives a theoretical explanation of this, but we can see this empirically too: rents go up in cities after tech companies with high salaries start opening up offices there, not before. There are also plenty of places with low rent that have higher tech salaries than places with higher rents (compare essentially any US city to Toronto).

> In the end it's a circle of money, from investors to mega-companies to their employees to their landlords which are again part of the investor class.

At least in California, there's not that much overlap between tech company investors and landowners. The housing ownership is much more distributed, and often to "mom and pop" landlords. This is the flow of money in Silicon Valley (expressed in a slightly comic manner): https://twitter.com/nextdoorsv/status/1400165321609199620

It's a bit different in other locations with more consolidation in land ownership, but even there, I doubt there's much overlap (I have less knowledge of housing dynamics outside California, because they actually change, so I'm just guessing here).

I think it's actually both - when tech companies enter a new town, they tend to hire boatloads of people, placing pressure on local housing markets, and thus raising prices - and landlords or people willing to sell and relocate to take a quick and easy profit know that the new class of people has substantial money to pay.

What I was referring to was stuff like [1] or [2] - investors with no real option to park "dumb money" (aka funds that are structured to invest into low-ish risk markets) have discovered that soaking up residential real estate is a good way to invest that money.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-...

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/investors-bought-third-us-ho...

It just happened that out of their control 1. Apple squeezed them out of ads revenue 2. Market went to shit

I hate Facebook as a company but I don’t see them making strategic mistakes…. Everyone is getting fired everywhere

I'm skeptical. With all their money and knowledge and whatnot, they've only managed to create something that looks like a dated console party game but not more. I don't see how that's the future.

Furthermore, do they expect everyone to buy a... say... $400 headset to use the Metaverse? The low entry barrier was probably one of the biggest reasons for the success of Facebook. If you need specialized equipment nobody will use it.

that's the point of R&D and long shot, if it was possible already it's not a long shot :/

Meta just needs a killer feature for the Metaverse. During the pandemic they bet hard on office-by-VR, but they moved too slowly missed the pandemic and many other deadlines before making a good product.

Nobody bought an iPhone or iPad because of Facebook. You could also install the Facebook app on that, but you could also use your notebook or your desktop pc or your cheap Android phone or whatnot to use Facebook. Most people already had some "Facebook ready" device at home.

Nobody will buy an Oculus headset if its main/sole use is the Metaverse.

Zuck is betting that more people will use VR in the future, and if you believe that hypothesis then it makes sense to invest infinite money in making sure your company becomes the Apple of VR instead of the Nokia.

How wisely that infinite VR money is being spent is another matter.

We'll come back in a few years or decades time to see who will transform the glasses into another platform, just like the watch and the phone did.

The company cannot innovate and has bet the farm on their ability to innovate.

I’ve said it before: Facebook should monetise WhatsApp via payments (real payments, not crypto) and other services. That’s something within their capability and very much within their reach. Maybe they’re seeing that as a backup when VR fails, but the longer they leave it the bigger the risk someone else takes that market.

Marketplace?

Like, from a margin perspective I get why they didn't want to do this, but it would have been a fantastic hedge against what happened with Apple and would probably have prevented Shopify from ever scaling.

software - nope, it's all new, they can't do it

The real issue seems to be that they're losing $3bn a quarter building the Metaverse (eg Reality Labs) at the same time as losing ad revenue because of things like Apple's antitracking changes and failing to innovate Instagram allowing competitors like TikTok to eat a big chunk of their market.

Facebook scales. It’s not easy to scale computing infrastructure to support billions of daily active users. Only a handful of companies can do that right now. On top of that they scaled an ad business that can target billions of people. There is only one other company in the world who can do that.

> What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10?

See it’s less about “quality”, it’s more about “quantity”. Scaling is a different problem on its own. I adore Unix but I admire what Facebook did as well. Scaling any project over 10 exceptional people is one thing and scaling a project with 10,000 engineers is a completely different thing and Facebook succeeded at that.

Whether that’s a good thing or not that they have succeeded is a separate discussion.

I don’t doubt that delivering an online service, even a crappy service, at FB scale presents some unique and difficult challenges, and I’m sure FB employs lots of smart and talented people. But given the number of supposedly “best” engineers they do employ the results seem underwhelming. I find it more impressive that Amazon manages to keep AWS up and reliable while constantly introducing new services, and that Apple manages to support a billion iPhone users without spewing ads in their face.

While the process was a trainwreck that I'd never entertain again, I will admit that while on campus, I met and talked to some really, really smart people.

I just remember being kinda sad that all this talent was being wasted on ads and holding attention.

Back to the point, I think anyone who has been there could attest it's not all just leetcode studiers...well, maybe some amount, but they employ a lot of really smart people.

Not to mention creating some of the widest-used OSS libraries on the web.

Plus, it’s one of the few platforms our grandparents can use, and we all know how hard it can be to make software that older folks like to use.

So they are clearly not hiring terrible devs. (Well, sure some of them are, but that’s the case everywhere)

My parents successfully use iPhones and iPads and GMail, along with Facebook. I can’t say they “like to use” Facebook, but if they want to see photos of their kids and grandkids they have to use it. I don’t know anyone who enjoys using FB, including my own kids. It seems users see it as a necessary evil — where else can they go?

Maybe best at grinding LeetCode, best at playing office politics, best at tolerating toxic work environments...

But likely not best in actually building good software. No doubt quite good at that, but probably not meaningfully different than any other tech company in the area hiring from a similar talent pool.

And because the candidates also need to be optimized for the qualities mentioned in the first paragraph, likely there’s a trade off where average software development skill ends up being lower due to needing to maximize other personality factors first.

Due to the absurd amount of SWEs on Facebook, surely someone or a team happen to working there will score a huge FOSS hit sooner or later just due to the numbers.

They clearly have engineers that are good, but he questions if the engineers are better than the good engineers found at any other run-of-the-mill company. They aren't exactly performing sorcery over there, just solving problems like every other software business.

That doesn't mean it's any less impressive of the people who did build all this, but I just don't think we need to compare, we can recognize the accomplishment on its own.

But that's not what we're talking about. The question posed was if Facebook's good developers are better than good developers at run-of-the-mill companies. That is not clear. People at Facebook, with an average tenure of only 2.3 years, have almost certainly also worked at run-of-the-mill companies so that already suggests that you can find good developers all over the place.

That developers at Facebook solved problems Facebook had doesn't prove no other developer could also solve Facebook's problems if they also worked at Facebook. Solving problems is literally the job of a developer, so it seems highly unlikely that all other developers outside of Facebook cannot also solve problems. Of course developers are only going to solve the problems in front of them.

Any metric you like. Facebook is massive and has a huge range of people. There'll be people who sit in the top 0.1% for literally every method of ranking them you can dream up.

I've never understood that viewpoint. It's equivalent to claiming a cashier is underpaid because $7.50/hr is a tiny percentage of the sales that go through their register.

The world doesn't work like that. You're paid based on the cost of replacing you, not the value you deliver.

The market seems to be sustaining it just fine.