

Facebook Plans to Boost Staff 50% This Year, Zuckerberg Says  - trader
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a5U0NPzBl0EI

======
mdasen
That's ambitious. Especially considering that they aren't making money right
now. One would think that Facebook would be looking to cut costs rather than
take on new costs.

Facebook has some really impressive technology behind them, but they keep
expanding in a way that doesn't generate positive revenue. As Facebook becomes
more popular, it's likely to need more staff, but at some point it's also just
losing more money.

~~~
lacker
_they keep expanding in a way that doesn't generate positive revenue_

Well, they are looking at $500 million in revenue this year. Sure, their costs
are the same order of magnitude, but it's a far cry from not generating
revenue.

~~~
omouse
They're generating revenue but have no profit. I think that's what he meant to
say :S

------
wave
Is there anyone would like to share his or her experience working at Facebook?
Do they have a hacker friendly environment?

~~~
timcederman
I have a friend who works on the sales team, and he loves it there. Says the
energy and culture in the company is amazing (I specifically asked him about
it a while ago, since it was when there was a lot of talent moving back and
forth between Facebook and Google)

Looking at their hiring practices, it appears they are trying to get serious
hackers there. Unfortunately I haven't heard great things about the
engineering team from other folks, but none directly from an engineer, so
treat that as Valleywag level gossip.

------
9oliYQjP
I'm still in my 20s, so take my limited business experience with a grain of
salt. But every time I've witnessed a company pre-announce an aggressive
hiring binge like this, what happened was a hiring surge followed by an
equally precipitous exodus less than 18 months after the announcement. It's
funny that the article mentions cash flow because the exoduses I have seen
have been precisely because cash flow got out of hand with the implementation
of the strategy. It's not just salaries that increase. People need places to
work so new office space needs to be acquired; the IT infrastructure needs to
be updated to accommodate the new hires; people get promoted into positions
overseeing the new hires where they prove to be incompetent and this results
in wasted labour and duplicated effort; etc. One of the reasons I think such a
hiring binge is terrible is because it usually causes forward momentum of the
company to slow drastically if not stop entirely. The 12 month transition
period where the company is trying to come to terms with everything is a prime
opportunity for competitors to pounce and steal away revenue, resulting in
cash flow to slow.

