
Facebook May Expand Staff by 50%, Zuckerberg Says - chaostheory
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a5U0NPzBl0EI
======
mrshoe
The current economic situation has left quite a few talented, experienced
hackers in the job market. Those of us who are hiring can really benefit from
harvesting this talent pool. From the outside looking in, it seems like
Facebook is already overstaffed, but I suppose they should take advantage of
the situation and suck up all the talent.

I just hope they hire someone who can make their chat feature actually work.

------
rizzn
This doesn't sound like a good idea at all to me.

([http://siliconangle.com/ver2/sabackchan/2009/08/24/why-is-
fa...](http://siliconangle.com/ver2/sabackchan/2009/08/24/why-is-facebook-
expanding-their-employee/))

MySpace and other startups succeed because they’re small and nimble – why the
heck is Zuck on a mission to hire as many people as possible? It sounds like a
recipe for failure. Am I wrong?

~~~
tsally
In the long term, Facebook's current product probably wont matter too much in
terms of monetary success. All that is important is that Facebook is popular
enough right now to corner part of the talent market. I would imagine that
once you have X number of skilled hackers at your company, your chance in
succeeding in any business venture go way up. The way I see it, Facebook just
wants to higher the superstars right now and they expect the money to follow
later. Google did a similar thing (although Google had a clearer path to
monetization).

~~~
rizzn
I suppose. I see more than a few dozen ways that Facebook could launch game
changing monetization methods in the past several years and have let them all
slip through their fingers.

And then, of course, you see the posts at Valleywag and ATD showing them doing
little more than playing ping-pong and video games all day, and I'm left
wondering if this talent grab ploy over there isn't just turning good coders
into good slackers.

I'm not saying FB's a titanic, but they do an awful lot of deck-chair re-
arranging there, it seems like.

~~~
unalone
Facebook's chock full of some incredibly brilliant people, and it hasn't been
resting. It's evolving faster as a site than any other web site that large.
It's cutting-edge both in terms of its design and functionality. It's not
perfect, but it's very, very, very good.

I trust Facebook's developers to know what's best for their company, at the
moment. I doubt they've missed thirty-plus possibilities for monetization
without thinking very carefully about all of them. Meanwhile, Facebook's
making money without letting more than a handful of users slip out of its
walled garden, so I think they're doing a good job so far.

 _And then, of course, you see the posts at Valleywag and ATD showing them
doing little more than playing ping-pong and video games all day, and I'm left
wondering if this talent grab ploy over there isn't just turning good coders
into good slackers._

Do you expect people to sit in front of a screen for sixteen hours a day,
being constantly productive? I've got a limited work experience, but one of
the things I noticed instantly going between jobs is that the better people
are working at a job, and the more they're trusted, the less they're expected
to spend all their time working. It's assumed that they know themselves how
much time they'll need to get their work done. (As an anecdote, I'll provide
the story of the people at the close-knit writing program I attended a few
years ago. We were given eight hours a day to write, probably spent two hours
writing at most and six hours on Youtube.)

~~~
rizzn
"Do you expect people to sit in front of a screen for sixteen hours a day,
being constantly productive?"

If I can do it, so can they. Perhaps not for 16 hours a day. I tend to cut
myself off at 12 or 14 (call me a slacker). A smaller dedicated staff with an
ethos of accountability beats out a large supposedly genius and top notch
staff that has a reputation for playing games during the majority of their
shift.

"It's evolving faster as a site than any other web site that large."

Constant change does not equal success, either in UX or fiscal reward. They've
yet to be decidedly in the black, they've yet to find a solid business model,
and they've yet to find dedicated evangelists in the tech blogosphere at
large. They're simply growing because they're growing, and that momentum won't
last forever (again, ask FriendFeed, Myspace, Friendster, Six Degrees of
Seperation, Orkut, Yahoo 360, and the rest of the zombies beckoning from the
graveyard).

~~~
rizzn
Unalone: I'm new to this particular forum as a regular user, so I'm not sure
why I'm not immediately able to reply to your post, yet you're able to
immediately able to reply to mine. I'm sure I'll figure it out in time, but in
the mean time, I'll respond up here:

I'll simply let you have the last word on all of these threads since I'm not
worth arguing on it. You're obviously much more qualified, and I unequivically
accept your summary judgement that Facebook is superior to everything else
ever.

Sorry.

~~~
unalone
rizzn: Don't be a sarcastic arsewipe. On Hacker News, everybody argues
everything. That's how we learn from people who know things we don't. If
you've got a legitimate argument to make against Facebook, make it; if you
don't, you're allowed to stop arguing at any time. It's not like people will
dislike you here for not pressing an argument. The one thing you _will_ get
judged for is snark. Stop it.

If you don't see a reply button (I think that's a glitch in the site; happens
to me all the time), then you click the "link" button up top, next to
"parent". That'll give you a box in which to reply.

I'll apologize for the abruptness of my last comment to you. Hopefully you'll
understand there was a reason behind it, and that reason is: This debate
springs up once a month, and every time somebody new comes up saying Facebook
is like MySpace is like Friendster, and every time I feel the need to explain
why they're wrong, and it takes an hour and leaves me with a bad taste in my
mouth. I'm a bit of a Facebook fan, and I figure that since most HN users
aren't I might as well step in and shout my things.

If you'd like to, I can craft a response to you that addresses that one point
specifically. As it is, I spent a good twenty minutes looking for previous
things I've said in the hopes that you can get the gist of my argument, and
hopefully respond in a non-arsewipe way that leads to fun conversation that
leads to us each enjoying the sight of our respective names in future debates.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=513550>

 _In 2005 I was working on the quality assurance team for a social network
start-up with a pretty neat set of technologies. Part of my goal was to get
other people to move off MySpace. The site I was with, Zoints, had a cleaner
design, more features, and some parts of it were much more intuitive. People
refused to switch. They had friends on MySpace, and they had nothing to gain
from switching. Social networks are all about the users, and they were in one
basket._

 _This is important not just as a lesson of how hard it is to make people
switch, but of how good Facebook is. Everybody had a MySpace, but they
switched over to Facebook anyway. By the time Facebook let high schoolers
register, they had 85% of all college students as active users, and half of
those were active daily. Now I would suspect it has more than just 85% of all
high schoolers registered, and it's leaking down to middle school
registration. People at work use it a lot, and as a result entire families are
signing up._

 _Many people here don't ask themselves just how that happened, which is damn
shortsighted. I mean, my mother signed up. My grandfather signed up. He
comments on my Facebook statuses. My young cousin got an account. And it's not
like Twitter, where people want to "tap into a network". It's not like getting
a blog. Simply put, Facebook keeps people in contact better than any other
application does. It provides an incredible interface. People who know nothing
about tech just "get it". They figure out how to write photos and write notes
and update statuses and make friends. It's that easy. It's so easy, and so
universal, that middle schoolers get them, not just to be cool, but to talk to
other kids. Older family members get them to talk to their relatives. My
mother currently has a network of 39 friends, including mothers in the
neighborhood and friends at work. That's pretty damn impressive._

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=255532>

 _Facebook becomes just a point for those few times you want to plan things
way in advance, or when you just need to vent to friends. It becomes useful in
a way. Not productive, but useful. And what makes it useful are the things
Facebook built itself: photos, events, notes. Any applications beyond that are
only good for amusement's sake. The top app developers get that._

~~~
rizzn
Well, this is the first time I've been engaged in an extended conversation on
HackerNews (not sure when I first started here, but it's been mostly one-offs
and very little back and forth up to now). Excuse my shock - was a bit rough,
but consider me initiated.

I've been pretty anti-Facebook for quite some time, far before it was cool to
be anti-Facebook, so I'm probably carrying some baggage there as well.

\---

To your points - I think that MySpace v. Any Other Social Network in 2005 and
MySpace v. Facebook in 2009, 2008, or 2007 are two different situations
entirely.

MySpace WAS Facebook in 2005. Facebook was something else entirely - some sort
of exclusive social network you had to be a college student to use. I didn't
fall into that demo, so I couldn't use it at the time, being far past college
age.

If you compare the two networks now, it's hard to imagine that they're both
supposed to be the same class of website. MySpace has let design-rot take root
like a bad termite infection. It has problems going back to its inception with
spammers.

Facebook doesn't have those problems, and it's working well to ingrain itself
to the fabric of the web... but it's not making money, and they seem to have
the same disease Twitter has, which is this lack of hunger for picking the low
hanging fruits in terms of viable tried and true monetization methods.

I wrote on this at some point when I was at Mashable - when we were all
theorizing as to what Project Beacon was going to end up being. My theory,
which was way off as it turns out, was that they were building an offsite
behavioral ad network that webmasters could use in the same way they use
AdSense. They're slowly crawling to this now, I hope, but they're a long way
from it, and it's the one killer app that could strike a blow at Google's
AdSense and capture a SIGNIFICANT share of the worlds web ad market.

Instead, their content to run what basically amounts to poorly targeted
remnant ads INSIDE THE SITE, where they're least effective.

I'll put it this way by giving you an example from an unrelated series of
posts I did way back when splogging was a majour scourge on the net. Remember
those search engine results we were all getting several years ago that look
like a monkey wrote the blog posts? You'd search for "underwater basket
weaving" and you'd get a splog with that as the title, and nonsensical
computer generated blog posts surrounded by adsense ads?

They worked and made money for the sploggers because the content wasn't what
the user wanted to see, and most surfers are as likely to click a relevant
link as they are to hit the back button.

Facebook content is _too good_ for ads to work. When I log into Facebook, I'm
looking at what I'm there for because it's content tailored to me. All those
pageviews mean nothing for ads because I never get bored enough with the
content to click on them.

The wilds of the web are much different - content on the web coming from
search engine results has varying degrees of relevance to me as a searcher,
and ads are much more likely to be clicked.

All this to say that Facebook may be great and all, and they may have the
greatest momentum ever, but if they don't get serious and look at the BASICS
of how their monetization model works, they're not going to get anywhere. I've
been banging this drum since early 2007, and it's frustrating as hell to see
so much squandered opportunity. Going on a hiring spree and re-arranging the
UX won't fix that problem, and that problem is the crux of what makes a
business... money.

~~~
unalone
Sorry if I was a dick to you! I didn't mean to offend you with that first
thing I wrote.

\---

I see where you're coming from re:Facebook's money. I never gave it much
thought what Facebook was doing: I just sort of innocently assume businesses
will find a way to survive somehow. So when I was thinking of you saying
Facebook wouldn't last, I was thinking only in terms of eyeballs and not in
terms of making money. What you just mentioned - MySpace's design-rot - was
what made Facebook the superior site once they opened up past colleges. I
think that that, along with Facebook's feed, are the two core parts of the
social network business, and once Facebook had that, they made themselves hard
to unroot by some follow-up act.

 _I wrote on this at some point when I was at Mashable - when we were all
theorizing as to what Project Beacon was going to end up being. My theory,
which was way off as it turns out, was that they were building an offsite
behavioral ad network that webmasters could use in the same way they use
AdSense. They're slowly crawling to this now, I hope, but they're a long way
from it, and it's the one killer app that could strike a blow at Google's
AdSense and capture a SIGNIFICANT share of the worlds web ad market._

Huh! I'd never thought of that, but you're right: Implemented right (that is,
actually getting ads that people click on), they could provide a moderately
attractive, supremely targeted ad network. I could see myself using that on a
site.

 _All this to say that Facebook may be great and all, and they may have the
greatest momentum ever, but if they don't get serious and look at the BASICS
of how their monetization model works, they're not going to get anywhere. I've
been banging this drum since early 2007, and it's frustrating as hell to see
so much squandered opportunity._

That makes sense. I'm very sorry. I thought you were saying something other
than what you were actually saying.

~~~
rizzn
No worries, water under the bridge.

And trust me, if they implemented this, you'd see me do a complete 540 on
Facebook. That's right - I'd do a 360 spin plus another 180 just so I'm facing
firmly in line with the Facebook supporters.

I love Google, but AdSense needs some real competition on the publisher front
to get them to respect publishers ... something like this that was effective
and had momentum enough to seize marketshare with web publishers would be the
kick in the pocketbook Google needs to shape up and fly right.

