I think the end (goal) of Facebook is not exactly a noble one but the means can still be impressive. Managing 110 million users (or 110 million of any high-maintenance node for that matter) is no picnic. Their engineering blog has some pretty interesting stories about the challenges they have faced.
If you are into changing the world by willing society forward with ground breaking [insert impressive thing here], your talents would be wasted at Facebook (despite Mark Zuckerburg's stated belief that fb can change the world by allowing people to share with each other and understand each other better).
I think they are solving complex problems (which is respectable) for a largely trivial mission.
Would you say that Google does not require first rate engineers? I would imagine that the most important part of their operation is scaling. They have admitted themselves that the difference in search results returned by the search engines is virtually nil, so their strategic advantage is really being able to support a lot of users (for the search engine as well as other internet services).
It depends on what you mean by first-rate. I mean, developing the sorts of things the parent mentioned requires a lot more talent than writing an app. But, to be fair, that requires an incredible amount of skill. Most people, including bright and capable people who work hard to learn, won't ever do something like that. But I agree that the people at Facebook, if not all revolutionary and brilliant, are all pretty damn good at what they do. Beyond scalability, too: Facebook has got more small little quirks that go towards usability than any other site that I know. Then they make a redesign that renders all those small quirks pointless because the new layout is vastly easier. Then they introduce more quirks.
The first time that I wrote a long message and saw the message window expand, I jumped with excitement. It was pretty awesome to find a new feature one day that I didn't expect and never would have thought to ask for.
I think that if people don't call fb engineers first rate then they have to refrain from using that label for many very good engineers (I used Google as an example in my last comment).
I am just reluctant to say that engineers at fb are not first-rate. Are we saying that they are second rate?
That's exactly the problem that I had with my comment. They're only not first-rate if you expect every engineer to be literally genius. That's too much to expect for any one company. So first-rate is as close to accurate a description as you could get.
I've always found it odd that not many hackers that I've met really get into discussing video game mechanics: either hardware or software. It's odd because video games are what got me into programming software, and the only time I've ever felt like making hardware it was designing imaginary game systems.
If you are into changing the world by willing society forward with ground breaking [insert impressive thing here], your talents would be wasted at Facebook (despite Mark Zuckerburg's stated belief that fb can change the world by allowing people to share with each other and understand each other better).
I think they are solving complex problems (which is respectable) for a largely trivial mission.
Would you say that Google does not require first rate engineers? I would imagine that the most important part of their operation is scaling. They have admitted themselves that the difference in search results returned by the search engines is virtually nil, so their strategic advantage is really being able to support a lot of users (for the search engine as well as other internet services).