Facebook's biggest problem in the next few years is going to be that it will struggle to attract new talent. Simply put if you're a senior SWE, even the possibility of FB putting a stain on your resume is going to drive you away, because there are so many other options out there. It's not worth the risk of always having to explain your time there because everyone has an opinion on the company these days. It's not that Facebook isn't a great place to work, it probably is. It's the fact that if you're at the level where you can get hired by Facebook, there are many many other options to reach for and the vast majority of people at that level are just going to reach for those other companies that are just as prestigious but carry none of the stigma.
Maybe a pithy way to render this article's point is, if you are a young, competent 20-something fresh on the job market and imminently hireable at Facebook (but nowhere else, let's say for the sake of argument), do you:
* Take a job at Facebook (or one of it's properties)?
* Strike it out alone in a startup you found?
If you're more likely to do the latter, despite the higher risk, then Facebook has a big problem. If the best and brightest no longer want to work there, then their time has passed.
I agree with everything you say, but I also think that it's incredibly unlikely Facebook will curate jobs any more than they do the rest of the content in Facebook. You're right about the opportunity to improve recruitment in these aspects, but it's not going to be Facebook that does it.
You would have to be nuts now to even think about taking a job at Facebook and if you are there, I'd think about leaving in all seriousness.
I predict that Facebook is going to have a hard time hiring good talent now. This is one of the downsides of filling up your stock with a lot of hot air. It's all short term gain.
It’s not anecdotally false that FB’s reputation and contribution to society is turning off some workers from applying.
My price premium to work at Facebook would be very high and I wouldn’t feel good about the deal. Sure not everyone feels that way but there is talent that they have alienated with their long history.
Facebook has been notoriously easy to get into for the past few years. Some of the people I’ve seen hired were B players at best. I think it’s been hard to hire top people since their reputation scraped the bottom of the barrel. Anyone who’s competent enough to get a cushy job with high prestige and pay has many options.
The first is that a senior developer at Facebook believes every single senior developer looking for a role at Facebook can revise the same things. Clearly the author believes that Facebook are looking for programmers who fit a very specific mould, to the point that they're willing to go out in public and state exactly that. I'd argue that points to a massive monoculture problem at Facebook, but I'm massively anti-Facebook so I'm biased.
Secondly, the author believes that senior developers, who likely have 10+ years under their belt if they're senior, need to spend a solid month revising in order to be successful landing a role there. Maybe that's worthwhile as FB pay well, but that's a hell of a time investment if you're not planning to stay at FB for a long time. That would certainly make me think twice if I was going to apply.
I can't take this article seriously. They are having a hard time hiring in 2022-2023 because of the scandal of 2016?? Facebook remains one of the TOP landing spots for any engineer still. The rep might be tarnished a bit, but you would be doing yourself a disservice if your company wouldn't consider an engineer with 2-5 years of senior SWE experience from FB. EVEN after the stock downturn it remains near the top in prestige and compensation -- though admittedly they are hiring a lot less and firing a lot more.
I think traditional journalism fails hard when covering tech because tech moves and evolves so quickly and this journalist in particular tries to weave a multi-year story that isn't as connected (or the threads they have chosen aren't) as it seems.
Both with Google's "Don't be evil" and Facebook's "Move fast and break things" the media got what they wanted, a nice sound bite that was (at least for a time) the motto of the company. Things change, companies evolve, the "risky" projects are more expensive, the failures are magnified (Google+, FB Phone, etc.) so companies themselves change. I don't think its fair to keep holding them to an ethos that hasn't/doesn't scale.
I don't know, I'm just tired of all these hit pieces on Meta/Zuckerberg. At least they have discipline (sharp revenue focus), conviction (betting on AI + metaverse), and focus (flatter structure than other peer companies even before the pandemic bloat) -- a lot more than I can say for a majority of tech companies these days...
I don’t understand how they still hire talented people (who have plenty of employment options). I will think very carefully before hiring someone who previously worked at FB.
Despite their recent unpopularity, Facebook still has a high hiring bar and a talented software engineering workforce that will provide valuable career experience.
While I feel this title is sensationalized and a little too over your face, like come on you guys all know it is NOT easy to get a facebook job, it is well paid and definitely can have a lots of challenging fun and had a offer from Facebook and at the same the determination/confidence to reject it, IMO, is a privilege not that many people in the world have, I do sympathize with the fact to have a long term career within certain company, you have to align your mission with the company's, otherwise it will eventually leads to suffering. Facebook has now its own identity crisis, a lost cause from within. It needs to rediscover or reinvent its vision, if not successfully done, such loss of great minds will definitely continue.
I've heard that FB doesn't really hire people with a few years of experience. They hire interns and new grads, but once you're past that they look for 5-6 years of experience.
It doesn’t mean grads are excited about working at Facebook, it means they accept an offer for the sake of common sense.
This will most likely work to Facebooks disadvantage long term however; Facebooks workforce can’t only be motivated by money.
There was certainly a time that people would’ve took way less money to be part of FB because they believed in the product and mission, which is now a joke.
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