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."

Comments

Re:Pyramids

[schnikies79]

So? Nothing can keep growing indefinitely.

Re:Pyramids

[gcnaddict]

It's not about the growth, it's about establishing itself as a leader of datamining and analytics. That's basically all Facebook really is.

Not a good sign

[Gavin Scott]

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.

Re:Not a good sign

[koan]

Let us all pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that Facebook collapses, it honestly scares me what can be done with all the information.

Re:Not a good sign

[CaptBubba]

It can work pretty well when a small company does it to open up a new production line or to meet expanding demand for an increased distribution area. I cannot think of a big mature company which has done it and managed to not implode at least partially.

However now is the time to do it, assuming the IPO rumors are true. Expanding that much when you are publicly owned can raise serious questions from shareholders about whether or not you are maximizing their return, because as you noted it often doesn't work out so well.

Re:Pyramids

[koan]

Agreed, but be sure you understand who is doing the data mining and "psych profiles".
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-57318396-17/cias-vengeful-librarians-track-twitter-facebook/

Re:Think of all the places they're not tracking

[MichaelSmith]

Bowel movements

Twitter has that covered.

go public, double your costs?

[Speare]

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.

People are already leaving

[Colin Smith]

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.
 

Forget that man! What happens to

[darkharlequin]

all of the information when it goes to a creditor who might claim that the privacy policy no longer applies....

Resume's

[mevets]

I wonder what they'll do with all the info on those resume's...

Re:Well g+ won't challenge them

[msobkow]

To each their own. I found Facebook more lacking for features I use, like being able to edit and update posts to turn them into little essays over time.

Facebook's UI is constantly jumping around in the browser, making it very annoying to read or watch content. Google's doesn't do that, even if other people are posting to your feed.

Most importantly of all, I'm not stuck with an epic "friend" hangover from when I played Zynga games and needed Mafia members. And right from the get-go, Google lets you group those friends as "Gamers" or some such so you can get rid of them when you're done playing. Facebook added lists long after I'd started with them, so it was too late for such organization.

I still don't see the difference between "social media" and a well run forum other than the lack of indexed topics.

Re:Pyramids

[Runaway1956]

Alright - explain how Facebook is a pyramid scheme. Are people being paid to recruit more Facebook members, or what?

I'm no great fan of Facebook, but you seem to be talking about biology in a quantum physics class. Social networks might be used to create and to drive a pyramid scheme, but the network itself is not a pyramid scheme.

Re:Pyramids

[flimflammer]

I don't think you really understand what a pyramid scheme is.

Re:Pyramids

[xero314]

I don't think that I would say facebook is a pyramid scheme by definition (though if you use the promise of notoriety or acceptance as your currency then maybe) but it does have the same fatal flaws as a pyramid scheme.

Facebook acquires it's revenue by sale of personal information (direct or aggregate I can't say for sure). This information has continued diminishing returns as each new bit about a person becomes less valuable once you have a significant profile. The only way to continue revenue growth, through sellable information, is to continue to gather fresh information. This can only happen by adding more people's data, not more data on the same people. More people only join if you can give an incentive to the current users to stay as members and/or have them convince their associates to join and share their information. Eventually you run out of new people, and revenue drops do to the aforementioned diminishing returns.

Facebook already knows all this so its not like I'm sharing any big secret, which is exactly why they are looking to double in size now, so that they can bring in enough fresh information (new users) sooner rather than later. The are creating their own stock bubble, and they are well aware of that.

Re:Well g+ won't challenge them

[penguinchris]

I think you're missing the point of G+ a bit... you can't think of adding people like Obama or the Dalai Lama as "friends" - it's more like following them on Twitter. Exactly like that, actually. It's not like they're going to add you back and look at everything you post.

So... G+ is more like Twitter than Facebook, but it encourages more in-depth conversation.

Personally, though I keep it open in a tab (I keep a lot of tabs open) I generally forget to look at it. For a while, I was using it pretty regularly with a small group of friends, but we all just kind of stopped posting stuff on it (though I do still think it's better for small group discussions than facebook - but we don't post on facebook either). I go through my extensive Twitter feed several times a day, though. I wait for the in-depth conversations about stories that are interesting to me to occur either here on slashdot or on boingboing.

It isn't publicly traded

[bigsexyjoe]

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.

Re:It isn't publicly traded

[justforgetme]

usually expansion
some times bailouts of failed sisters
some philosophers once dreamed of it going into R&D

Re:Pyramids

[Ihmhi]

I wish someone would explain this to, you know, every person in charge of a business ever. "We didn't have growth this quarter! We're fucked!" "The economy is in the shitter, everyone's fucked man! Calm down."

Re:Pyramids

[Surt]

You're describing pump-and-dump, not pyramid. Different schemes.

!800 million

[owlnation]

"the website that links more than 800 million users worldwide"

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)

You'd think /. 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.

Re:It's a bubble... be careful.

[ieatcookies]

Facebook adds exactly as much value as it's customers feel they get. For some that's enormous and others it's nothing. You may hate Facebook and think it's useless but you can not deny it's popularity, it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

Re:Pyramids

[PyroMosh]

If you're a privately held company, that's fine.

But if you're traded, you need to show growth or some forecast that stock value will go up or you become a less attractive property for investors. Then your stock price goes down.

The end result is that corporations act myopicly in pursuit of high stock prices for each quarter. Long term strategy falls by the wayside.

I'm not saying I agree with the system, in fact I think it's fairly broken. But growth *does* matter the way the system is currently set up for publicly held companies.

Re: returns

[TaoPhoenix]

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.

Re:It's a bubble... be careful.

[perryizgr8]

it's not going anywhere anytime soon

I think you're wrong. I think Facebook is definitely going somewhere soon. There is google plus on the horizon, and the discontent with Facebook is growing every day. You say that Facebook is popular. I'll give you that. But myspace was also popular at one time. And before that livejournal was popular and so on.

lol!! you kidding? g+ was dead before it hit the road! i mean the stupidest thing to do when you launch a "social" network is to not let you invite your friends over! and that too without offering anything newer or better. even the ui looks stupid to me, all that whitespace making me scroll for no reason.