
All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad - wslh
http://hueniverse.com/2010/11/all-these-brilliant-people-at-facebook-make-me-sad/
======
patio11
My mother, who was disabled by a stroke some years ago, relies on no non-
medical technology as much as she relies on Facebook. It is how she keeps up
with the family, who are scattered across the country (and, er, world),
without which she would never get to talk to aunts/uncles/cousins since they
see each other only at events/reunions and she often isn't well enough to
travel.

I respect that folks don't find a lot of value in FB. It isn't quite my cup of
tea either. But don't make the engineer's mistake of assuming "Since I don't
use it, nobody uses it" or "Nobody's use of this is important to them."

Also, one shouldn't let one's position in the tech echo chamber cause one to
overestimate how much resources Facebook really gets from society. Their
annual operating budget is, what, the size of the school districts in one
midsize US city or the IT department of a single large bank? Don't worry, we
will still have brains to spare after someone does an A/B test on poking.

~~~
frossie
To be fair to the OP, their argument isn't "since I don't use it, nobody uses
it".

Their argument was a (totally defensible IMHO) personal expression of
disappointment about all the brain work going into something whose impact
seems to have peaked (in that those who want it already have it, and the rest
of us don't have a problem it can solve).

Sure, Facebook is a utility to millions or even billions of people, but so is
electricity. I think the analogy is if thousands of brilliant engineers were
working for a fossil-fuel power company - it would be a natural reaction to
say "Gee I wish all those boffins were working on renewable energy instead".

You might not agree with it, but it is a legitimate sentiment.

~~~
danking00
I know three very bright, young graduates who have decided to enter the
Financial industry (i.e. Algorithmic Trading). One has a Bachelor's in Physics
& CS, another a Bachelor's in Physics & Math, and the other is finishing a PhD
in Astrophysics. They view the Financial industry as an intellectually
stimulating game (I don't disagree), and an opportunity to make 6-figures in
their early 20s.

This really disappoints me. Sure, _somebody_ needs to work in Finance for the
sake of liquidity and other things I don't understand. But, 35% or so of my
social group that are pursuing degrees in Physics are headed to Finance
instead of research. I'd much rather seem them expand human knowledge than
profit and live an easy life.

My perspective is that of a Junior CS & Physics major reaching towards grad
school and some sort of research be it academia or elsewhere.

~~~
scythe
>This really disappoints me. Sure, somebody needs to work in Finance for the
sake of liquidity and other things I don't understand. But, 35% or so of my
social group that are pursuing degrees in Physics are headed to Finance
instead of research.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and this one is as bright as it gets. Until
the rise of e.g. finance and actuarial science, getting a physics or math
degree meant just going into academia. Now, with more demand for math or
physics majors, there will be more demand for physics or math professors,
which ultimately means more money going into math and physics research.

The existence of the medical and legal professions contributes vastly to the
funding of schools of medicine and law, and this is no different. It's good,
not bad, that there are other things you can do with a degree in advanced
mathematics besides "teach grad students advanced mathematics and vie for
increasingly-scarce federal grant money".

>I'd much rather seem them expand human knowledge than profit and live an easy
life.

It's too bad we don't live in a country full of self-sacrificing saints, huh?

~~~
jtheory
But, but, but... thanks to modern technology, aren't there so many _better_
options for seriously smart folks with physics and math degrees?

The "other" option isn't dusty academia and obscure research anymore. It also
doesn't involve being a self-sacrificing saint and giving up any chance of
ever having a nice car, though finance may still pay better in some cases than
a high-math-content tech career.

~~~
scythe
>But, but, but... thanks to modern technology, aren't there so many better
options for seriously smart folks with physics and math degrees?

If people want to pursue money, who are you to judge?

See, I don't think you quite get how much this sentiment pisses me off. I'm
19. I just got a bachelor's in physics. I've done research in a bunch of
fields. And I'm going into graduate school next year.

People who think I'm somehow obligated to pursue anything beyond money can go
blow a goat. Am I? You're _goddamn_ right I am. I'm looking at tenure track or
something similar because I love the people in academia, and because I love
the work that I do. I love the people in academia because _they don't think
like this_. They aren't generally judgmental pricks who will fault someone for
pursuing their own interests. "generally".

I've dealt with so much shit from people who treat me like some sort of
fucking alien for being good at goddamn math. Every-fucking-body else in this
fucking country is more self-centered than a gyroscope. If I could reach you,
right now, I'd strangle you. Seriously. God-fucking-damnit.

It's bad enough that I get to watch the ivory tower crumble around me. It's
worse when people act like I'm obligated to live there.

In conclusion, go fuck yourself. You have no ground to stand on being
'disappointed' in me or any of my peers.

~~~
wnight
Sure, spend your life working on whatever you want, even something selfish. It
does decrease what you could do elsewhere and as such has opportunity costs,
but as you say it's your choice.

But "finance" means theft these days. It's only wildly profitable because our
economic/justice system is fundamentally flawed and nobody is allowed to stop
playing.

That would be disappointing to see a useful person seduced by. Not because
your skills make you a national resource or anything, but because the job is a
net negative to society. We'd be better off if you took up mugging.

~~~
scythe
>But "finance" means theft these days. It's only wildly profitable because our
economic/justice system is fundamentally flawed and nobody is allowed to stop
playing.

'tis the _voters'_ fault, though, isn't it? The quants didn't ask for the
system to be the way it is.

If anything, they, by exploiting this flaw, act to expose it, making it more
visible and more likely to be fixed. Imagine if more grad students did this.
You'd drive the stock market to collapse so many times -- at least in theory,
'cuz you're basically _draining_ it like a pool, and it's a finite pool -- the
government would be -forced- to give up on its newfound policy of Too Big to
Fail.

Conversely, the fact that students continue to enter grad school despite the
skyrocketing financial inadvisability therein, this only serves to swell what
is apparently a labor excess even further. If universities had to compete for
grad students on price, stipends would increase! Those who enter grad school
out of some sense of altruism actually do their fellow students a disservice.

...so, having read that, what the fuck am I doing, you ask? Well, I'm just
avoiding people I can't stand to be around. I like professors; I hate
managers. My perceived-value-of-research is skewed. As an added bonus
academics posess a level of freedom on par with the super-rich; if some
University wants you to immigrate to a country in order to do research, you're
waived right in. A PhD carries the sort of international mobility that's I
think is kind of useful having been born in a sinking ship. In America it's
called the O-1, but most countries have an analog. Paul Erdos was one of the
only people who could cross the Iron Curtain unscathed. My aunt and uncle, who
inspired me to go into physics, worked whatever hours they felt like and could
wear t-shirts and sandals to work -- they were physicists working for the US
Navy.

~~~
wnight
>> [broken economy, can't stop playing] > 'tis the voters' fault, though,
isn't it? The quants didn't ask for the system to be the way it is.

Not the voters. Voting can't fix anything because politicians can't be held to
their campaign promises.

But it is the citizens' fault in that we don't do something about the existing
laws that cover this malfeasance that aren't being used to stop it, or more
importantly, about how voting doesn't work.

> If anything, they, by exploiting this flaw, act to expose it, making it more
> visible and more likely to be fixed.

That line of reasoning is only valid if those same quants would accept me
emptying out their bank accounts by exploiting some bank vulnerability. (Such
as your birthday and mother's maiden name always being used as the master
identity check.)

> the government would be -forced- to give up on its newfound policy of Too
> Big to Fail.

Reality based government. Sigh. That would be nice. I thought they always had
that policy where banks were concerned though?

> Imagine if more grad students did this.

If they were trying to bring it down, like exploiting a security flaw to get
it fixed, it would only take one.

> academics posess a level of freedom on par with the super-rich; if some
> University wants you to immigrate to a country in order to do research,
> you're waived right in.

Good point, freedom and a license for eccentricity in one package. Very
helpful in a world quickly stuffing air-travelers into terrorist/not-terrorist
boxes based on your sense of humor inside the airport, etc.

> A PhD carries the sort of international mobility that's I think is kind of
> useful having been born in a sinking ship.

Makes me think of the Titanic, too big to sink!

Got any idea where to go? Start a hacker/scientist enclave in an abandoned
mine?

------
nir
Perhaps it should refer to all the brilliant people in %90 of web startups in
general. The majority of Silicon Valley's (NYC perhaps even more so) recent
output is fluff, stuff that impacts people's lives about the same as drugstore
celebrity mags.

(But it's not a new trend, TV or advertising or law or finance are/were
similar in that respect.)

~~~
Vivtek
The majority of everything has always been fluff. It's just we remember those
parts of the past that _weren't_ fluff, and forget 97% of it. Otherwise our
heads would be entirely fluff.

I vividly remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, just about the time I was
getting married. Until this spring, I had a similar tendency to think that
geopolitics "nowadays" was drab and boring. Evolutionary punctuation only just
happens so often, but that doesn't mean evolution has come to a screeching
halt. (Or rather, it _has_ \- just that it will continue with a screeching
lurch when it's good and ready.)

------
syllogism
It's easy to under-estimate the value web technologies provide their users,
because it's hard to visualise large numbers of people. It's the well known
"your brain doesn't naturally multiply" problem.

Let's say you have a technology product that does something pretty trivial,
but has non-zero value. Let's say you do something that's worth about 30c per
day of utility to each user. If you give this value to 10 million users,
you're creating about $3 million of value every day --- or $1 billion of value
a year.

That value doesn't seem nearly as real as the equivalent value deployed to a
smaller group of people. But that's just because 10 million people is
impossible to visualise. The value is still totally real though, despite your
lack of intuition for it.

If you believe Facebook delivers little total value, then you must believe its
value to individual users is almost totally nil, simply because of the
enormous number of people who use the service daily.

Even if you don't like Facebook much, can you really argue that it's
delivering _nothing_ to its average user? It's not delivering _any_ value to
them at all?

Facebook has 500 million users, and 250 million daily unique logins. If
logging on to Facebook delivers even a single cent of value, the total value
delivered by each Facebook engineer is already going to be staggering.

1c is an enormous underestimate of what people actually get from the service,
but let's run with this. At 1c per login, it's delivering $25 million per day.
It has 2000 employees, so each employee is delivering an average of $12.5k per
day. I'd actually put the value-per-login at over $1, which would take the
average contribution to over $1 million per day.

People would be wise to think carefully before questioning the way markets are
allocating capital and drawing in talent. There are certainly cases where the
capital allocation is inefficient, but there are also cases where your mental
heuristics give you blind-spots.

~~~
cma
I am not comparing Facebook to meth, but I just want to point out that the
same form of argument you just made would also apply to meth.

~~~
syllogism
For an addict, each meth use is delivering an enormous amount of negative
value. There's also the terrible negative value the addict may create for
other people. The same argument about multiplication would suggest that your
intuition under-estimates the total negative effects of meth on the world.

~~~
cma
I was referring to the markets part.

------
btipling
They are doing useful things, they're helping create scalable technology that
can serve 600 million people. Cassandra, HipHop, Thrift, etc are all products
from those minds. In addition the kinds of problems they are solving, such as
creating a platform for third party integration can be applied to many
different other areas. So yeah they're working on a social network, but all
the while all this good stuff is happening that we all can benefit
from...without a facebook account (I don't have one).

~~~
gubatron
Cassandra, ha ha ha.

Gotta love how inconsistent that thing is.

HipHop, have you tried it? I think that technology only works for them.

~~~
alnayyir
Care to elaborate on your dislike of Cassandra?

~~~
gubatron
My dislike with cassandra is probably because of the user experience in
facebook.

You post a comment or a picture and it's not consistent at all for all users.
Comments will appear in the wrong order (responses before questions
sometimes), or people won't see the pictures you posted until 4 to 5 hours
later. With Google you just don't get that kind of things, ever.

Maybe it's only a problem for facebook due to its scale, maybe the replication
rules they have set are a bit more strict and they will delay the process on
purpose to avoid unnecessary writes (in case users want to delete content a
few minutes later)

Then as a more psychotic/personal taste matter, I love the way MongoDB
documentation is presented. Cassandra's documentation on MoinMoin looks so
2002 but that's something most people will live without any problems.

Please don't take my opinion about Cassandra seriously because I've not tried
it at all. In our shop we tried Hadoop's HBase, then we tried MongoDB and
since it worked for us we didn't keep trying (mostly because of what we think
of Facebook as a technology company... php... their joke of an android api
which made the news... our bad impression of hip hop [so long and so much
resources to compile, at least when it came out], that when we saw Cassandra
being used by facebook we just said no way, it's reputation was tainted by
facebook in our eyes)

~~~
alnayyir
Cassandra is highly tuneable in terms of consistency and propagation, the
vagaries of Facebook's particular(ly huge) deployment I can't speak to, but
generally speaking you can make it have almost any properties you like.

MongoDB lacks that flexibility, but I like it too, for other reasons.

------
dekayed
I was reminded of the following article when I read this blog posting:

<http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/>

There's a great quote by Jeff Hammerbacher (an ex-Facebooker) that is great:

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click
ads. That sucks.”

~~~
dschobel
The ads are a means to an end.

More correct: "The best minds of my generation are making huge amounts of
money by solving really hard engineering problems and creating whole new
industries. That's awesome".

It's hard to overstate the economic impact of FB, Google + Apple. These people
are building the future of the internet. Ads just pay the bills.

~~~
wslh
Sorry for my Naivete, but I think that the world priorities must be peace,
health and poverty.

~~~
dschobel
Which one of those isn't furthered by the internet? It's not hard to argue the
fundamental merit in people working on advancing communication across the
globe.

~~~
wslh
I think that there are shorter ways to accomplish it beyond Internet
communication.

~~~
ThomPete
Then I guess you know what your next project is going to be.

~~~
wslh
I don't think I have the talent from that.

That's why the article is important, a lot of minds are spending time in lower
priority items from a humanistic point of view.

~~~
ThomPete
It doesn't take a clever computer scientist to set out for world peace, ending
poverty and increasing health.

If you really feel so strongly about it why not set up a fund that attempt to
fund exactly those 3 areas.

Talent has nothing to do with it.

------
llimllib
> I am in no way suggesting that almost 600 million people are wrong. The
> massive and highly engaged Facebook user base clearly gets value and
> satisfaction from the product. I am also in no way critical or judgmental
> about those who find value there. Good for them! But for me, there are so
> many other unsolved problems in the world, and they have little to do with
> social.

Hot tip: whenever anybody writes "I am in no way suggesting <X>", the chance
that they are suggesting <X> approaches 100%.

------
dschobel
Is it any worse than the reams of medical researchers working on giving old
affluent men hard-ons and their hair back?

I doubt it...

~~~
briggsbio
I guess I get where you're trying to go with that statement, but you're wrong.
Both of those afflictions cross socioeconomic boundaries. And the science
behind each, while certainly exploited for it's obvious economic benefit, is
nothing to laugh at. Talk to a patient with alopecia universalis (total
baldness across entire epidermis, including eyelashes, etc.) or primary
venogenic impotence (inability to get erection from birth due to leakage of
veins in erectile tissue). These people would never see treatments due to the
rarity of these clinical indications if there weren't more widespread need for
such medications in less severe cases (male pattern baldness and ED,
respectively). And there are literally hundreds of rare (orphan) indications
and millions of patients, collectively, that may never see effective
treatments. Solving the huge data problems that Facebook is working on (and to
our benefit, open-sourcing in some cases) will allow future services to do
incredible things. Achieving such scale and becoming not just a "social
network," but a nearly integral part of society, is pretty astounding.

~~~
dschobel
That the afflictions cross economic boundaries is obvious, but how about
access to those treatments? The fact that pharma companies pursue these issues
vs some more life-threatening is a pure profit calculation based on those with
the means to pay for them.

But don't get me wrong, I'm a dyed in the wool free-market man so I have no
issue with them applying their resources however they see fit, but let's
dispense with the fake moralizing and pretending that they have some great
motive beyond what will be the next cash-cow drug.

My argument all along is that the residual benefits in either case (medical or
internet tech) is a fundamentally good thing and that the author is misguided
in his criticism and misses the fact that it happens across all industries,
some where the stakes are even higher (such as in the pharma example).

~~~
possibilistic
Whoa, hold on... I think medicine and biotech are misunderstood here.

First of all, Big Pharma != Academia or biotech startups. The former group
concentrates on profitability and marketable drugs, whereas the latter two do
the heavy lifting for a broad spectrum of diseases.

Secondly (and more importantly), we must realize that there are two issues at
hand: the ease of developing an effective drug to combat a particular disease
state, and the predominance of a given disease in the general population.

Big Pharma already claimed the "low hanging" fruit decades ago. Many of
today's medical problems require a systems engineering methodology to approach
them as the pathways and metabolomics are just too incredibly complicated to
yield direct solutions. The search spaces are vast, multidimensional, and
tedious.

To make matters worse, it's really difficult to commit to studying an orphan
disease. A solution to a particular type of cancer, Alzheimer's, or HIV would
have wide applicability and save many lives. Finding a solution to a rare
genetic disorder, however, may help only a few thousand individuals. It's
incredibly sad that there is such suffering from rare diseases, but we have so
little mental capital to invest in fixing these problems. At present, biotech
and medicine is nothing like programming where iteration and debugging yield
fast results. Years of personal labor can become pointless if mistakes are
made.

I don't know if it's justified for me to feel this way, but I wish more of the
brilliant minds in programming would switch to a biotech/research profession.
Computing is such a well-traversed and developed field and solution space.
While it isn't glamorous, medicine and biotech really need you...

~~~
mechanical_fish
My take is that it's just too early in biotech. Back in 1973 it was certainly
possible to envision Facebook and Twitter. For example, if you read Steven
Levy's _Hackers_ you'll learn about the Community Memory project:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory>

But computers and their associated tech like telecom were so expensive in 1973
that Community Memory was impractical at scale. There was no Facebook around
to offer Lee Felsenstein an enormous salary and a potential IPO. The
infrastructure wasn't yet built out, the audience wasn't yet there, and
investor consciousness had not yet been raised. It took another twenty years
of development to get from that point to the Web, and then another decade or
so to get to Facebook.

Biotech is still stuck in the equivalent of 1973. We've identified many of the
processes that need to become cheaper and more ubiquitous in order to conduct
biotech research in your basement, but the tools are still large, expensive,
and tedious to use. So at this point if you go into biotech you'll either
spend 12 hours a day pipetting liquids by hand, waiting for the PCR machine,
and pasting your data into Excel for analysis, or you'll spend 12 hours a day
raising money to pay for the pipettes, the PCR machine, and the other
scientists who are running them.

I've spent years as a biotech postdoc, and I've spent years as a programmer,
and it's no mystery to me why people would rather be programmers, and would
rather hire programmers. The day-to-day work is more pleasant, and the results
have got such evident and immediate value that you can get good pay for them
with relatively little effort or risk. Plus, you're part of a really big and
freewheeling global culture, not only of web users but of web programmers.

~~~
bbgm
And I know many many people who view programming as boring and love setting up
experiments and assays. I was the only person in my group who looked at
computers as anything more than a convenience.

------
notJim
I see the value of Facebook (though I don't personally get a whole lot out of
it), but at times I greatly sympathize with the author's broader point that
brilliant minds are being put to use doing things I find empty.

I'm very into graphic design, and interaction design, but the fact that it all
goes to selling soap and deodorant and candy makes it feel like such an empty
pursuit for me. How many of the people coming with these things could instead
be putting their talents toward more artistic or meaningful ends?

Of course, ultimately I'm a capitalist, and marketing does provide a valuable
service to a capitalist society, and there are myriad reasons the people doing
this kind of work _should_ be doing it. Sometimes, I take a step back though,
and can't help but wonder if there's a better way. Ultimately, if I want to
change things, it is incumbent on me to provide an alternative, and I just
don't have one.

~~~
temphn
Arguably, soap, deodorant, and candy are a lot more important and useful than
most art, appreciated only by a few.

~~~
ja2ke
It doesn't take a brilliant mind to sell them, though, so in that respect it's
a waste.

You need brilliant people if you want to fan the flames of emotional need in
your customers, pursue deliberate brand segmentation and diversification and
other stuff like that which takes traditional commodity goods and mutates them
into the Swiffer Max Wipes Mop Pack EX Refills or whatever but culturally soap
on its own sells itself at this point.

------
hugh3
If it makes you feel any better, any truly brilliant people working at
facebook will probably make enough money in the IPO to be able to retire and
work on whatever brilliant stuff they might feel like. At least for a while.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Well if Google is any example, some portion will create opportunities as angel
investors for the next round of entrepreneurs.

Its interesting to see how the various 'waves' in the valley seem to suck in
everyone briefly.
Farchild/Intel/Tandem/PARC/Apple/Sun/Netscape/AOL/Apple(again:-)/HP/Google/Facebook/...

It would be interesting to know if its similar in other places.

------
antirez
This is completely naive... today Italy is voting for a referendum. After 35
years we are near to reach the quorum, and beat Berlusconi special protection
laws, avoid water privatization, and so forth.

Part of this I bet is thanks to Facebook, as in the latest days there was a
massive campaign to go voting, ran collectively by all the people that think
this vote is important, on Facebook. For us "internet geeks" Facebook may be
not so cool, but the reality is that he is making the _average_ person, a
"connected person".

This is huge... and deserves the best minds in the world.

~~~
oscardelben
I really hope not. If we really need Facebook to go to referendums we have
some serious issue. I think what really is moving people is the nuclear
referendum and water privatization. Only a minority really cares about
protection laws.

~~~
sixtofour
We do have serious issues. Anything that gets people to vote, and ideally to
think about their vote, is a good thing.

------
saool
While I don't buy the "facebook is just games and noise" stuff, I do think we
should be focusing a bit more in things like clean tech, space missions, etc.

Why does almost everybody want to go work for facebook instead of tesla or any
other innovative company not primarily focused in "web" development?

And yeah, the big equity bucks, but I think those could be moving towards
other tech fields too...

~~~
gubatron
why? getting stock options and getting rich when it goes IPO, that's why.

------
wallflower
Facebook's number of active users served per employee is very impressive. The
ridiculous number of photos uploaded every second.

I've long ago figured out that I'd never be able to pass the screens for
Facebook, Apple (and at one time, Microsoft). I do still dream of Apple, even
after reading the $0.99 Fortune Kindle single on how 'it's not about getting
hired at Apple, it's about being able to _stay_ '

What makes me happy however is creating apps that people use (and sometimes
even enjoy using).

~~~
aristus
What makes you think that you'd not make it in? I'm a community college
dropout. Research the company, check out some of the "easy" puzzles, etc. And
send me an email if you are interested.

~~~
pagefruit
Just curious, how has your experience been getting jobs as a dropout? I
dropped out of college a couple years ago as well, but found that a lot people
wouldn't even talk to me simply because I didn't have a degree (or stopped
talking once I told them), so I graduated eventually.

~~~
aristus
Lots of luck and some hard work. At the time (mid 90s) the job market was much
better and everyone was hiring people to build ecommerce sites. It's harder in
some ways now to get that entry level job. On the other hand it's phenomenally
easier to start your own projects and get experience and attention. In the
early 2000s I did a few open source projects which helped a lot. In 2007 or so
I started writing articles on a regular basis, basically patching up holes in
my education by taking on some subject and trying to explain it. If you lack
one social signal ("he went to MIT") you can replace it with another ("he
started the foobar project" or "he wrote that post about xyz").

------
46Bit
I very much have to agree. Perhaps I'm unsociable, perhaps it's because my
interests long since diverged from those of most of my now-ex fellow students,
but I really couldn't give a flying monkeys about most of their inane
ramblings.

To use a sentence which at times gets posted all over Twitter: Facebook is
where you meet old friends you don't really care about, Twitter is where you
meet new friends. Fact is, it's true.

The one point I definitely do disagree with is that the focus on startups
which aren't really that much about pushing humanity forward is so bad. Look
at SpaceX - admittedly it came out of something which definitely did have
intrinsic value, but 10 years down the line there might be an ex-Facebook
biotech.

------
ern
If you want a specialized device like a digital camera, then Facebook is not
the place to look for advice from high school buddies, but for advice on what
phone to buy, it could be. I asked my FB friends for advice on that very
topic, and it was very helpful - and knowing the people giving the advice
helped greatly because I was able to decide whose opinions to give weight to,
and they knew my circumstances - they advised me on which phones are robust
enough to withstand a toddler at home without me explicitly asking about that.

Friend groups and the newsfeed do a good job of controlling awkward
oversharing - I see updates mostly from people who I care about, and this
seems to be constantly improving. This has added immensely to the value of
Facebook for me, and a time saver. The effort Facebook puts into this is very
valuable and certainly not a waste of resources.

------
itissid
I think they were useful in egypt and tunisia to get people organized for the
revolution that is still sweeping the middle east.

~~~
chopsueyar
I still don't know how the American Revolution occured without Twitter.

------
hoodoof
The idea that Facebook employs all the smart people is silly, there are far
more smart programmers in the world than you can imagine, they are not all at
Facebook.

------
rglover
There was another post similar to this a few days back. While this focuses
specifically on Facebook (for seemingly hoarding intelligent people), the real
issue is that there are little to no philanthropic movements in the tech
industry. Reiterating my remarks from the aforementioned post, this is merely
a result of "people" being bored and caring too much about themselves. For
whatever reason, consumers have yet to be enlightened that there are others on
the planet who may not be able to play farmville all day, let alone _eat_.
This behavior is understandable, though, because we've developed pretty much
everything with a narcissistic angle. Share _your_ photos, talk to _your_
friends, it's all about you, you, you. Until we abandon or differentiate
between this attitude and a more caring/understanding one, then the
intelligent folk are going to flock where the money is: narcissism.

------
biot

      > Facebook doesn’t provide me with anything useful.
    

If the site owner is reading this, here's how you can hide the "Share on
Facebook" link that appears on the Apture bar at the top. Add this as a custom
CSS rule:

    
    
      .aptureTMMShare a:first-child {
        visibility: hidden;
      }
    

You're welcome.

------
oceanician
This guy sounds like a very cliche anti-social geek. What does he do outside
of work? What gallery openings? What gigs? What social walks? I'm guessing
that if you're not sociable, then a social orientated website is of no value.

It could be said that there's a lot of rubbish out there on facebook, and
sites like meetup.com, last.fm, eventful, flickr are much better, but they
don't have anything that ties them all together like facebook actually does.

The solution is not to stick your head in the sand, and ignore human
interactions. You can't convieniently go 'humans, do this. I don't like it.
I'm going to ignore them all'

Anyways, I'm looking forward to seeing what the Diaspora approach evolves
into: <https://joindiaspora.com>

------
cagenut
Well, better connecting people's mundane lives than figuring out how to
'financial engineer' something I guess.

------
zitterbewegung
Just because you don't find it useful doesn't mean that other people don't
have utility in facebook.

------
JabavuAdams
It's interesting to see that most comments here focus on justifying Facebook's
importance, rather than questioning the other half of the argument: are FB's
employees really that brilliant?

It just seems that what they're doing is not that hard, compared to what
people do in other engineering disciplines.

------
kfigaj
True...but on the other hand FB is now the Internet for many people. What is
more FB is just a begging of the communication revolution. It is so funny how
many companies are now trying to get rid of the main role of email in business
- to name just a few Chatter, Yammer, Discourse...

------
melling
There are almost 7 billion people on the planet. What is really sad is that
most will never have the opportunity to contribute in any meaningful way. In
reality we should be lamenting that we don't have 100 million more "brilliant"
people working on the "important" problems.

------
someone13
The site seems down for me, so here's a mirror (courtesy of the Coral Content
Distribution Network).

[http://hueniverse.com.nyud.net/2010/11/all-these-
brilliant-p...](http://hueniverse.com.nyud.net/2010/11/all-these-brilliant-
people-at-facebook-make-me-sad/)

~~~
lukejduncan
how about a mirror of the mirror?

------
rodh257
The link is down for me. Ironic given that lots of the brilliant people at
Facebook are working on ways to make websites stay up under heavy load.

------
Stormbringer
Facebook actually provides useful services. It provides many many pointless
services as well, but it does have some redeeming value, particularly for
staying in touch with people overseas.

What would be much worse is if all these talented engineers were working for a
large advertising company with a poor human rights record and no respect for
your privacy. Now _there's_ a nightmare scenario.

------
BornInTheUSSR
I'm not the biggest fan of the present vision for facebook, but these
brilliant people are enabling others through their open source contributions
<http://developers.facebook.com/opensource/> to make things we find meaningful

------
agaton
If you ask yourself "What's most important in my life?" the answer will
probably be "the people and relationships in my life".

Can't think of any better thing to work on than ways to improve our
relationships with the people in our lifes. I'm happy that the best talent
dealing with it. I wish I did.

------
dynosaur
" When it comes to content, I much rather rely on the editorial board of the
New York Times for my news, than what my “friends” find interesting. "

Relying on strangers for information while deriding one's peers as a source of
information doesn't strike me as a wise course of action.

------
AbyCodes
quote :"There are many reasons why engineers want to work for Facebook, from
the potential windfall to learning just how they are able to ship so much
technology so fast. It is an engineering dreamland."

What kinda innovations and technology is facebook shipping out so fast? To me,
facebook is a streamlined and polished way to keep in touch with people and
share information, which the internet already offered and was made for. Whats
more to it than that?

Google, IBM, Intel, Research and development, etc would be some of the places
which I would be interested in working, as I see them as innovators. Facebook,
twitter etc are just "apps" for me

------
codyguy
Totally agree. The only problem about indicating 500 mil people could be wrong
is that your voice gets drowned in the noise. Just wait it out and then send a
post..."I told you so".

------
iaskwhy
Some days ago a friend asked me if I could work on Apple, Microsoft or Google,
which one I would choose and I stopped for a while thinking. Then he said "oh
and Facebook" and my answer got out in a microsecond. It's pretty much the
only company in the world where you work with people (as a whole, their life)
and not with a user or a buyer.

------
Aron
A whining anti-FB rant from a single POV gets 250 upvotes? There was no value
in this link.

------
tybris
What are "useful" jobs?

~~~
mhansen
Any job that someone's willing to pay to have done - by paying for the job,
they indicate that it's worth that much money, and hence at least as useful as
that money was.

~~~
vegai
Lawyers, drug dealers, assassins, politicians, bankers, managers, accountants,
stock traders, to mention a few: all paid significant amounts but not really
that worthy, are they?

~~~
mhansen
They wouldn't be paid if they weren't worth the money they were getting; the
customers would rather keep their money.

Lawyers: Do I really need to explain that they perform an important, valuable
role?

Drug dealers: Can't say much here. Drugs are tricky, economists call them
inelastic, and they can make people irrational.

Bankers: I sure like being able to invest my money and use it everywhere via
EFTPOS

Accountants: It's a hell of a drag doing taxes. It's very valuable to have
someone do this work for you (if it wasn't, everyone would do their own
accounting).

Bottom line: determining value is a tricky economic/algorithmic question.

Luckily, we have a price system, where people can set prices. If the customers
pay that price, that's a strong indicator that the service is worth that much.
It's not perfect (see bubbles), but it works pretty well on average.

------
ignifero
I take it the post refers specifically to the bright engineers who work at
Facebook. I think he's right. Take Bret Taylor for example. This guy made
Google Maps while at google, a tool that seriously changed a business. While
at facebook do you know what he did? He converted their APIs to the
(unfinished) oauth standard and in the process also deprecated a ton of
features that were available to developers. They also released 4 _widgets_.
ZERO innovation there , in fact the platform was more feature-rich 2 years
ago. Taking a look at the documentation reveals how crippled and unfocused it
is at this time.

On the other hand, there's twitter. Now _that_ 's a company that could use a
few good engineers to stop the embarrassing downtimes.

------
georgieporgie
Random prediction: ten years from now, a student in China will connect with a
student in Germany over Facebook (or whatever mass-appeal social site rises to
power). A friendship will grow into a partnership, yielding some of the
greatest advances in energy technology of the century.

~~~
nkassis
Unless they start working out a universal translator (Actually if they aren't
working on this then they are all newbs ;0p) then it's unlikely to happen.
Other issues would be that Facebook isn't enough for collaborating on science
projects.

~~~
georgieporgie
English is the international language. Facebook in ten years won't be what it
is now. Also, as I said, it would happen on whatever social platform is in
power, which, in ten years, will probably ubiquitous to an extent that we
cannot currently imagine.

------
slowcpu
It is sad that bright people end up working for many rather worthless
companies, producing so many worthless products and services.

------
hootmon
Don't make me laugh, cool tech at farcebook... NOT.

Warmed over AOL training wheel walled garden bullcrap is not cutting edge.
Whoop De Dooo, its got an API.

Sorry but I left AOL years ago, and guess what, no one cool ever worked for
AOL or Farcebook.

------
erikpukinskis
tl;dr: I am old. lol.

~~~
tzs
I don't know why you are getting voted down. That's actually a pretty good
summary.

------
gavanwoolery
"The sheer strength of their [the Facebook team's] talent is almost unmatched
in our industry, past and present."

I do not doubt that every employee at Facebook is a competent (or even fairly
smart) person, but I kind of doubt they are the most talented people in the
software industry. Most of them have not created anything mind-blowing, and
many of them are simply employees because they are one or two degrees of
separation from Zuckerberg or Harvard/Stanford alumni.

The fact that they are _employees_ is a dead give away - if they are really
talented, they would not be working for someone else, especially for the
trivial amount of (or lack of) stock that most of them are given.

~~~
jackowayed
Not everyone is willing and able to face the instability, stress, long hours,
bad pay, etc. of a startup. Some that are willing and able are choosing not to
do so right now but may sometime in the future.

Many, probably most, of the great contributions to our field have been made by
_employees_. Being an employee, especially an employee at a company with a ton
of very smart engineers working on the cutting edge, is a valid choice that
many extremely talented people make.

~~~
gaius
90-95% of FB's current employees didn't join "a startup", they already had
masses of funding at that point.

