Facebook Prepping For Massive Hiring Spree 105
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."
Pyramids (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Pyramids (Score:4, Insightful)
So? Nothing can keep growing indefinitely.
Re:Pyramids (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Didn't they also sell real estate from the right column of their frontend?
I remember Microsoft having put a great deal of money into that.
If google can continue getting rich from adds why shouldn't facebook?
Re: returns (Score:3)
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 s
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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.
There's also the business called "selling advertisements". Google has grown to its current size by just doing that.
Facebook has the eyeballs and the data to make its ads selling business even more efficient than Google. While Google has to guess whether you may be interested in (for example) a new movie, Facebook already knows what movies you like and could show you ads of the same genre, or starring similar actors. The possibilities are simply endless.
Advertising isn't a business with diminishing returns,
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In other ways, it works more like a ponzi scheme: http://www.jperla.com/blog/post/facebook-is-a-ponzi-scheme [jperla.com]
Now that you know what a Ponzi scheme is, I will tell you how and why Facebook is like a Ponzi Scheme. The argument is similar to how Paul Graham describes that Yahoo was a ponzi scheme in 1998.
Facebook posts huge revenues. In fact, recent reports are that Facebook is very profitable. This boosts both their respect in the world and their valuation. However, these returns, while real, are unsustai
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The pyramid scheme would be propping up user numbers to indicate marketshare, to inflate the stock and IPO
But facebook afaik is profitable (though not wildy), so in this it doesn't apply.
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You're describing pump-and-dump, not pyramid. Different schemes.
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It's called primping up for the great big "Goldman Sachs" controlled sale. The scumbag running dog of the financial world is directly involved in the great sale to the gullible public and of course the corrupt executives who control pension funds to, of Facebook. So it ain't a pyramid scheme yet but it soon will be. How come the company hasn't been shut down and all of it's executives thrown in jail.
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I don't think you really understand what a pyramid scheme is.
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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."
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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
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That is exactly why I think the whole public traded company model is kind of broken now.
Or the financial market or something.
The whole consumer economy model which was created after the second world war is not sustainable.
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I should think that as year-on-year a new lot of people become available for the Facebook network - those that have passed the minimum age requirement.
Of cause, others leave as they pass away, but if you ignore that (keep the accounts for data-mining and all that), you can get a net-growth-potential.
Also, if world population keeps growing...
(note: timeline considered here is at 10s of years, not millenia - once humanity kills itself off, growth will be very small)
Re:Pyramids (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pyramids (Score:4, Insightful)
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/ [cnet.com]
It isn't publicly traded (Score:5, Insightful)
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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If you're not paying dividends, and you're not growing, but you ARE profiting... where is all that money going? I'd say the shareholders have a right to be upset if a company neither grows nor pays a steady return....
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usually expansion
some times bailouts of failed sisters
some philosophers once dreamed of it going into R&D
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People are already leaving (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Predicting Facebook's imminent demise on Slashdot is like pundits predicting cheap, clean fusion energy - it's endlessly predicted, but somehow never actually happens. Facebook's imminent demise has been predicted regularly since it first appeared - yet five years after it first opened it's doors to all and sundry, it's still here.
I have never understood why Slashdot, supposedly so interested in technology, has been so quick and so relentless in it's dism
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As much as I detest facebook, it is in no way a pyramid scheme. Its growth does not depend on stacking layers of contributors. In fact, their payment model is almost perfectly flat (all the advertisers pay basically the same rates to get access to your data).
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Re:Think of all the places they're not tracking (Score:4, Funny)
Bowel movements
Twitter has that covered. [penny-arcade.com]
Just wait until next summer (Score:2, Funny)
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."
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I thought that was Siri.
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Siri is dumb to be self aware.
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That's ok. We have Batma... I mean Christian Bale.
Not a good sign (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Let us all pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that Facebook collapses, it honestly scares me what can be done with all the information.
Forget that man! What happens to (Score:3, Insightful)
all of the information when it goes to a creditor who might claim that the privacy policy no longer applies....
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even if they don't use that one (even though I believe some gov orgs are already benefiting)
they still have the possible Authority of Identity throne. Now how happy would I be if only
facebook could tell me who I am?
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I don't know if Cisco *announced* this, but they were adding head-count at quite a clip in the mid-1990s ...
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/34067
Re:Not a good sign (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Maybe you are a bit far sighted though.
Agreed, Internet history suggests that this venture will again be replaced with
something else. Still I would just to conclusions just now. Facebook still has
shitloads of money, followers like never before, participation is at very high levels
(maybe starting to taper of at geek demographics because of g+) the company is
still very consistent (they only develop one product, hear this google?)...
All social places I remember started to feel like a zoo -to me- one or two yea
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>>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...
Fannie Mae's CFO a while back went on a hiring spree based on the premise that Congress would write checks to cover whatever costs they incurred, and so far he's been proven right.
Frie
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Microsoft doubled for several years in a row. Last I've heard, they are still in business.
go public, double your costs? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe they realize they need to expand their operating costs now, because they'll never be permitted to do it again, once they are public.
Well g+ won't challenge them (Score:2)
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
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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 gr
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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
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Resume's (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder what they'll do with all the info on those resume's...
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Resume's what since you have an apostrophe? :P
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Very good point with the trading servers. As someone who actually uses FB, I can't imagine anything worse than my employer gaining access to my friend list at everything I (and they) post in terms of work/life separation.
BTW, the value of Facebook is NOT in how well it does what it does, but in the fact that everyone you know is there, should you have any desire to talk to them as a group. For better or worse, it has replaced e-mail as a means of getting/keeping in touch with friends who live far away. I
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you have a fundamental misconception of HFT if you think any kind of data from FB would be beneficial
Free overtime ahead (Score:2)
A clear victory for employment..
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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.
As opposed to Silicon Valley or the Bay Area?
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Well it is :P it's the east coast startup city and devs can make a manhattan living wage just starting out and even move up to moderately luxurious Manhattan wages.
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Get the talent in, get 'em committed to a NYC city apartment lease, and then when the no OT for IT kicks in they can never leave 'cuz they can never save enough money for moving expenses...can't leave, and can't afford to be late for work or be viewed as "unproductive", either.
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You don't seriously think they were paying OT to their people before, do you? Software engineers are already exempt under the existing law. The only category it really adds is pure system and network administrators.
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The advantage is its central location between various tech incubation areas. Boston and Philadelphia both have technical corridors. Plenty of people in the Philadelphia region commute daily to NYC. Boston, probably not so much...but close enough that moving there isn't a big uprooting and you can still visit friends and family on the weekends.
Remember who you're working for... (Score:1)
It's a bubble... be careful. (Score:1)
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.
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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.
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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.
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Private isn't what makes facebook good.
What makes facebook good is all the stuff that the paranoid hate:
Photo Tagging, Auto-updating email/phone contact lists on my phone and interconnected profiles.
Blogs just post status updates. But how many people's blogs do you follow? I regularly see 10+ people's facebook posts on a nearly daily basis. Completely different level of interaction.
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There are much better, smaller, more private blogging options, with less spam, more freedom, and less privacy rape
For some people, when they blog, they want it to be seen and read. I use Facebook for that purpose, precisely because it's not private.
If you want "private" blogs, I suggest writing on your physical diary book.
I do have a blog somewhere in the middle -- not exclusively private, yet not as public as Facebook. Different tools, different purposes.
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fb does have a lot of value for a lot of people, maybe not for you. also, maybe not 100B$ value.
but people today use fb as the preferred way to keep in touch with new people they meet. blogging is for people who like to write stuff. most people don't, they just want to communicate. i think facebook is in for a long haul, or maybe something else facebook-like.
What to do? (Score:1)
Out of work linux guru. Unfortunately, privacy has meaning to me, what to do?
PASS.
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I just wish more people thought like you. Who knows how good the squirrelmails of the opensource world would be if all the young talented people weren't coding gmail.
!800 million (Score:3, Interesting)
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
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800 million active users. 400 million log in every day. fb doesn't even bother saying how many signups anymore.
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my bad. no need to be rude.
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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.
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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 [peo.on.ca]. 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 b
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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 a
Why NYC (Score:2)
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.
what do all those people do? (Score:2)
what possible reason would they need more for