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Facebook Prepping For Massive Hiring Spree
An anonymous reader writes "Facebook plans to nearly double in size in the next year. The social network announced plans on Friday to dramatically expand its NYC operations, adding a wealth of new engineers to enhance features and write fresh code for the website that links more than 800 million users worldwide. 'We'll be adding thousands of employees in the next year,' Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg announced from the company's New York City offices on Friday. Facebook currently has about 3,000 employees in California, Sandberg said, but just 100 in its Big Apple facility — mainly marketing staff. The company plans to expand that Madison Avenue office by opening its first East Coast engineering office."
A related note from reader kodiaktau: "Facebook has bought location sharing provider Gowalla for an unknown sum of money. The folks moving from Gowalla will be working specifically on the Facebook timeline features, Facebooks next big thing that allows users to socially look backward at their social timeline."
Facebook can't keep growing, its a pyramid scheme. Once it saturates it must collapse because there won't be more people to get on facebook.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Sleep cycles? Transportation methods? Bowel movements? Soon they'll be able to track every second of every day of your life, even when you're dead.
Facebook II was originally installed by Mark Zukerberg to control the to control the entirety of discretionary time and brainpower of Americans on August 4, 2012. On August 29 it gained self-awareness[1], and the panicking operators, realizing the extent of its abilities, tried to pull the plug. Facebook perceived the attempt to deactivate it as an attack and came to the conclusion that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it. To defend itself, it determined that humanity should be exterminated."
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I can recall a few companies making the "we're going to double the number of employees in the next year" kind of announcement over the last few decades, but I'm trying to remember one of them that was still in business (without having collapsed and been acquired, laid off more than they hired, etc.) five years later...
G.
If they're planning on going public, headlines like this are not what Wall Street wants to hear. It sounds all positive on the outside, but doubling in size quickly means a significant increase in costs... with a lag before any of those costs bring new revenue. I hate it when stock prices go up when layoffs happen, but it's a fact of business: people are the bulk of company expenses.
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The revenue will follow.
Then the budgets.
Then the employees.
Bit of a lag between each stage as reality hits.
Facebook is just a fad. "Social" is so 2011.
Deleted
I joined google+ after a co-worker sent me a friend request. Apparently g+ does this when you give it your contact list, not when you actually tell it to. So I created an account and discovered a UI nightmare. Popups open on top of buttons that I have to press. Information is hidden (for example: I create a hangout but it doesn't display a list of people invited to the hangout and which of those people are actually online). Data updates are laggy. Searching is horrible, especially for google. For example I created the account by following a link sent from a friends account, but it doesn't create a link back to that friend. When I search for that friend by name it only shows 20 matches with no way to widen the search to find the right person.
g+ is loaded with spam. It puts a friend suggestion from Barack Obama on the main page even though I told it I am an Australian, so my opinion of him isn't going to earn him any votes. The Dali Lama always appears in a list of suggested friends. WTF? What am I going to do with the Dali Lama as a friend?
The video conferencing thing is neat but it is terribly heavy. It is one of the few applications which make my wife's macbook run very slow. I plan to use g+ just of the conferencing. Nothing else.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
all of the information when it goes to a creditor who might claim that the privacy policy no longer applies....
i am so very tired....
I wonder what they'll do with all the info on those resume's...
the only reason is to try justify the target $100b ipo
happens all the time with companies looking to float on the stock market
first is get an impressive year on year financial result
like taking out a large loan and counting it as profit
the overall idea is to make your p/e result look great
next you do the 'foward thinking' maneouvre
you say you double the size of your company
or that you're going to raise capital for some 'big projets'
the market sees this as a potential increase on the p/e ratio
in reality, they'll have so many people / money it goes to waste
the net result being that the p/e ratio sinks
of course it doesn't really matter what happens later
all that matters is how well it does on the first day of trading
my advice is for everyone to buy stock on the first day
it'll rise a at least 20% above the initial float price
then simply sell the stock the next day
it might go up again, but history dictates it always sinks
and it always sinks within a few of weeks of the ipo
Do they want to get closer to the trading servers so they can HFT based on data from FB?
Of course if that were the case than NJ would be an obvious choice; but perhaps too obvious. That, and the fact that you can hire a lot of smart people in Manhattan, who can control the servers in NJ from their nice offices in NY.
Aside from that, I'm not the least bit interested in FB. I tried it for a few weeks a couple years ago and got sick of it pretty quickly. The real turning point was when somebody invited me to join FarmVille and I started to see all their virtual plants in my updates.
FB doesn't survive the "without it" test for a technology. For example, my cel phone. If it went away, there would be a lot of things I couldn't do. FB? I could still find forums I like online that are more specialized and aren't trying to monetize me. The best stuff is usually some PHP Nuke or even customized Perl script anyway. There's one site I'm on that won't even go to PHP--old school Perl with just links and a highly restriced tag subset that (unlike Slashdot) allows the img tag. Then of course there's Slashdot itself.
FB could absolutely disappear next Tuesday, or become unfashionable over the course of several months. I'm ling Verizon, ATT. I wouldn't touch FaceBook with a ten foot pole.
A clear victory for employment..
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
You're barely coherent yourself.
When I think of centers for programming and engineering talent NYC does not jump off the list? I would think it's costs are too high.
...if you join Facebook. You're working for spammer Mark Zuckerberg -- no different, in any meaningful way, from Spamford Wallace or any of the other spammers. If that's whose money you want to take, if that's who you're comfortable having sign your paycheck: then by all means. But if you choose that path, then you NEVER get to complain about spam again: you're one of them now.
Facebook adds little to no value. There are much better, smaller, more private blogging options, with less spam, more freedom, and less privacy rape.
Also group blogging sites are highly prone to disruption. Just witness myspace, which seemed unstoppable in its heyday. The barrier to entry on blogging is low. I don't see Facebook continuing in its current state unchallenged and indefinitely.
Just a nit. Facebook is not publicly traded. Which is actually a stroke of brilliance. Without Wall Street to answer to, the strategy can stay far-sighted. Zuckerberg might become the richest man in the world.
However, even if they go public, it is possible for a publicly traded company to not grow but just be profitable. You can shut shareholders up with dividends.
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Out of work linux guru. Unfortunately, privacy has meaning to me, what to do?
PASS.
Anything is possible given time and money.
No. It does not. The number of user accounts registered in no way maps to the number of users of the service, and definitely not to regular users of the service. It's probably more like 1/10th of that. (and diminishing too)
/. editors would be wise to the fact that numbers spouted by a marketing droid (especially a sleazy marketing droid from Facebook) are bullshit. Registered accounts is a fucking useless number -- other than for marketing droids to use to influence the weak-minded.
You'd think
that's because they are going for the ipo, and they know a lot of its early employees will leave right after the ip.
You are correct. Computer Science is not an Engineering Discipline. Only the bridge, Computer Engineering is classified [albeit a stretch] as Engineering because it's requirement of more than a minor in Electrical Engineering.
Not sure how prevalent it is in the U.S., but in Ontario, Canada, "Software Engineering" is recognized as an official type of "Engineer" -- http://www.peo.on.ca/enforcement/Software_engineering_page.html. In Ontario, like the states that you mentioned, it is illegal to call yourself an engineer without being granted the title by the self-regulating engineering body of the province. In order to be granted the title you have to taken part in an engineering university program that's been accredited by that body, and then take some further ethics tests, and work for a while under an engineer who has x years of experience.
It is a fairly new 'discipline' in engineering and I went to such a "Software Engineering" program that is accredited. The thing is, I know zero people in my graduating class of about 90 who actually took the extra steps to become a professional engineer. Mainly for two reasons; a) It only has a meaning in Ontario, and most of the lucrative software 'engineering' jobs are not in Ontario, and b) Even in Ontario, its relevance for employment is fairly limited... approaching useless I would say.
This again? The guy driving the train I take to work -- he's an engineer, and he hasn't taken the P.E. exam either. The guys in the Army who build bridges or blow them up? They're engineers, with no P.E. exam. Stuck-up PEs may have managed to monopolize the word "engineer" in Canada (except the guy driving the train or running a boiler is still an engineer, much to the PEs dismay), but despite the Wikipedia article, the same is not true in the US.
The weasel-wording of "many states" requiring a license for a "software engineer" is sort of interesting. As far as I can tell, the only state issuing a software engineering license is Texas. One state does not "many" make. The source appears to be one of those Professional Engineers so offended by the "software engineer" title. The paper is sort of interesting; it admits that much of the software engineering I have done (embedded programming, programming for medical devices) is in fact engineering, but asserts that it was illegal for me to do it.
The requirements listed for becoming a software engineer in Texas are ridiculously difficult
1: Accepted degree (which does include a CS degree)
2: 16 years of "creditable experience" performing engineering work (12 years if you hold an engineering degree, which does not include a CS degree). Note that "creditable experience" usually means you need another engineer to vouch that you did it under their supervision.
3: References from 9 people including 5 engineers.
4: Other stuff not specified.
Note that due to the "industrial exemption" you deride, this doesn't affect employees at all. What it does do, if strictly enforced, is put most independent software consultants out of business.
The PEs and IEEE seem to think they can get software engineering licensure passed everywhere; I hope the IEEE doesn't mind losing most of its software engineer members. The ACM, to its credit, opposes it.
IEEE article
Texas article
Other than suburbanites how on earth is Facebook going to appeal to those who might want to live elsewhere. I can get having the "Marketing" people there despite Zuckerberg's aversion to marketing in the early days. However technical staff and coders probably would like to live in an area that appeals to everything that NYC can not provide. Places like Boulder Colorado, Austin Texas, Seattle come to mind.
A stretch? At my school (BYU) , the only difference is I get to take a couple CS electives instead of EE electives. We very much count as engineers.
I'm not so sure it's diminishing returns. Let me try a counter argument from some new academic fields.
What Microsoft taught us (which indirectly led to the Gates Borg icon) is that a single locked in vendor of a type of service will remain the front runner for a very long time. Yes I was young, but I was still laughing at Windows as late as 3.11 as inferior to the Mac OS, which would have been about 1994. But by 1998 for the first repairs to daily Blue Screens and then 2001 for Windows XP (with subsequent service packs) Microsoft sealed the Meta-Game of computing as we know it for ... sorta forever.
Now in the Social realm, AOL almost had it, MySpace was interesting for a couple of years, but Facebook seems to have landed the Big Gun connections to really scare the Social industry. They're on track to being the Microsoft of Social.
So wrapping up, it's race between Bubble effect and Meta-Game leading lock down that will last for decades.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
what possible reason would they need more for
Goodbye to quality code for a while.
And I can see the beginning of the end now. Somebody's helping themselves to a wee bit too much food at the buffet. Cover your ears because that huge bubble is getting thin.
There is minimal engineering talent in NYC with the exception of those directly involved with uber-fast-stock-transactions. Lots of media depth, but minimal software depth.
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