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."

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.

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.
 

!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.