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.
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.
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.
>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?
i turned down my friends' startup offer to go work in finance. 3 years later, they are multi-millionaires and i am not. that doesn't really bother me though. what bothers me is that they are happy and doing exciting work and i am not.
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
>> [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?
Probably half of my friends earning physics graduate degrees are not continuing in academic physics, with most of them going into something like quant finance or quant insurance.
The reason for this is primarily that there are simply not enough jobs right now for them in academia.
When I was an idealistic undergrad physics major I honestly never once thought about the job market. I assumed that you'd just go get your PhD and you'd become a physics professor, sort of like going to med school and getting a job as a doctor. You'd follow all of the steps and you'd be set...
Now being on the verge of finishing my PhD, I have a very different perspective and am fortunately in a decent position with employment options. Some of my friends are only now scrambling to make sense of their options.
"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."
Are there enough research positions to employ the majority of current physics and math students? I doubt it.
If you choose Finance as your desired profession, and Finance sees physics and math as a good source of new talent, then it's very rational to choose a physics or math major to get into Finance. As pointed out in a sibling comment, upside to physics and math departments is demand that wouldn't otherwise be there.
Research is only possible because of the economic surpluses made possible because of, among other things, liquid capital markets. Who do you think pays for CERN, the LHC, et al? Ordinary taxpayers doing those jobs you think are "disappointing". Maybe if scientists disparage them enough, they'll stop paying...
Most of finance these days is finding ways to subvert actual trading of value and dilution of risk, instead attacking (in the security sense) currencies and markets.
While markets and liquidity are helpful to the world the finance workers don't deserve credit for it - they're just workers in someone else's system for one, and usually predators at that.
I am working in finance because the professors I knew were not salty enough. I have to do a lot of scut work, and I really am not on an impressive salary, but I see massive real-world problems on a daily basis and get a live view of the things that really matter in the world economy.
Running trading algorithms would be pretty pants, but managing risk is not quite so ignoble.
Not Salty - lacking in flavour, meaning lacking life experience, naive, uninteresting.
scut work: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/scut+work
Noun 1. scut work - trivial, unrewarding, tedious, dirty, and disagreeable chores; "the hospital hired him to do scut work"
shitwork
chore, job, task - a specific piece of work required to be done as a duty or for a specific fee; "estimates of the city's loss on that job ranged as high as a million dollars"; "the job of repairing the engine took several hours"; "the endless task of classifying the samples"; "the farmer's morning chores"
To be fair, the tools they develop to understand a chaotic system like the stock market might be interesting outside of the field of algorithmic trading.
> My perspective is that of a Junior CS & Physics major reaching towards grad school and some sort of research
Your friends are smart enough to know that grad school in Physics is a blackhole. Once you finish the PhD, it becomes an endless round of hunting for poorly pair post-doc jobs.
Facebook just doesn't have many engineers. "Over 2000 employees" (wikipedia says) just isn't that many. Compared that to Google (~20,000 to 30,000?), Microsoft (~90,000), or the IRS - over 100,000, or the Pentagon - 757,000.
Facebook has an order of magnitude less than just about any other similarly sized organization. It's bigger than Wikipedia, though.
I disagree with the notion that "those who want it [Facebook] already have it..."
In fact, there are billions of users that don't have access to Facebook but would benefit greatly from it. Many of these potential users have 1/2G mobile phones, with little or no access to a PC. Much of what Facebook needs to do to achieve growth targets will be extending it's platform to these users by creating a consumable experience on such technically limited devices. That takes innovation.
I think the point he made that "the internet is stale" resonates heavily with something I have always been feeling and wondering about the twitters, myspaces and facebooks... the whole "web 2.0" shenanigans.
Those were by no means "new inventions", it has all been there before on the web just on a different scale.. and now the non-techs are catching up and celebrating all the "great, new technology".
But the last truly revolutionary inventions and "paradigm shifts" certainly did not happen during the last 5-10 years and yes, on the whole the web IS pretty stale IMHO - and I dare to say you can see just how stale it really is by how much every new "genius" website gets praised and hyped as if it was an invention like electricity and just lifted us from the dark ages into the future.
As far as I can tell, what is really useful and really hard about maintaining and extending Facebook is that Facebook presents all the facilities of the Internet without the factors which tend to make these facilities feel "stale" in their 'native' form.
Facebook presents the equivalent of blogs, websites and emails in an appropriately filtered form. Their job is the job of a good host at a good party - keeping the conversation going without being visible oneself. And thus Facebook keeping its algorithms current is a very hard but fairly invisible job (the visible stuff is so simple a competent php programmer could do it in a month).
The Web 2.0 movement was about opening up the data in computer consumable formats and APIs. Nothing more.
While exchanging data over the internet is obviously nothing new, having large organizations provide easy programmable access to their private databases was somewhat revolutionary. The whole App craze was born out of being able to create new interfaces to existing services, thanks to Web 2.0.
Web 2.0 was nothing new from a technical perspective, but it was a revolutionary social shift.
Web 2.0 for me was mainly about user-generated content like blogs, wikis, social networking etc.
You could do a lot if not all of that before as a tech and not-so-much tech but chances were that you did not. "Blog" made it hip and cool for everyone to write a lot about usually not a lot - but if you wanted to have a website you could very well do so before.
I assume you mean RSS and what followed the blogs back then - but this was not really the main idea of Web 2.0. Web services were happening at the same time but they are not "the" web 2.0, in my opinion.
Respectfully disagree that Facebook has peaked. Once growth settles down at 700 million users or so, they will roll out service after service. Start thinking about all the things you could do with it. Overthrowing countries is just the beginning.
You may be right that Facebook has not peaked, but saying Facebook overthrows countries is kinda like saying the inventor of the quill wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Civil dissent overthrows governments. Ubiquitous communication methods certainly help organise civil dissent - but let's not forget that the French in 1789 managed it with pamphlets and soapboxes.
Facebook or twitter didn't overthrow anyone. Those are just communication tools and there plenty of those.
Also Facebook sucks privacy-wise. You write something and everyone sees it. You don't want your police and ruling-party friends see your pics at a protest and criticizing your government.
When people are already on the streets - then its on Facebook. Which is an effect not a cause.
This is true - FB/Twitter are just tools, just like the Internet is (or at least a platform). Social did not overthrow any governments, but it enabled people to communicate more effectively and thusly organize and do something about their situations.
I was just down at FB headquarters last week. Great space. Tons of smart people. Tons. But... I used to be a big believer in FB, but after I started developing apps on their platform, I just started seeing things that I didn't like. You could log into one of our servers, flip on the logging, and just watch all kinds of crap from people I had no connection to scroll by. Besides the fact that most of it was pointless, mindless, drivel (I was saddened by humanity at this point), the fact that this was a 'workaround' around FB's privacy - I dunno, it didn't sit with me well.
I haven't personally used FB in a while - over a year - and yet when I glance at my fiancé's wall, god, the most ridiculous crap is on there and it's consistent. I asked her "jesus, does anyone have a fucking life..?!".
But beyond that, I just feel like FB is a talent vortex. I went around last week and met so many smart, excited people, yet, I felt they were just suckers. Sure, they're all going to be rich, no doubt about that. And maybe, some will leave to actually start revolutionary companies. But the fact that they're all there coding away on ways to make me the ad or figuring out more efficient ways to share my information (even if I specifically have said not to) - to me, it just seems a waste. It's great for Zuck because, after all, FB owns the copyright to so much of the things that are 'shared'. But it's not great for everyone else. It's not a 'social revolution', it's just about money and, really, conning it out of people in ways they don't understand (yet, ever?).
Publish it's databases, in so doing likely revealing the private details of 400-600 million people and possibly giving enough details to hack/trick into their bank accounts without any problems? After all, a lot of people do fill out the data sections on Facebook - some people clearly don't find being asked to give it your life as well as your email password atall creepy. I for one welcome our new secretly spying overlords, etc.
It's an interesting point. At my day job, I had an extensive discussion with a coworker who spends his days in sales and marketing. I was telling him that I'm not really the right person to talk to about marketing campaigns on the Internet because I'm virtually immune to them. Even on systems without adblock on, I rarely notice advertisements and I don't think I've ever clicked one. I don't like talking to sales people in stores because I generally don't gain anything by the interaction. And I have no idea what popular commercials are because I automatically blank them out of my perception.
Apparently, my aversion to advertising is so strong that FB doesn't even put any on my page.
He was aghast.
He ran down a list of current commercials for popular products, ones that he had been paying attention to, nothing.
We went to his Facebook page and his was full of advertisements, mine? Not a one.
"How was this possible? I'm starting to have doubts about the effectiveness of an ad campaign?"
It was then that we both realized that FB and Google are almost entirely ad supported and I must be a very bizarre outlier, never to be used as a benchmark for ad effectiveness.
I don't even think you have to go to "extreme" cases of people who are disabled in some way, and use FB to communicate.
The truth is, Facebook obviously provides some value, since people use it. But because of the sheer number of users using it, the value it provides is multiplied by a lot. The overall value to the world is huge, simply because so many people derive value from it.
I do agree that we hear more about FB because it's highly visible. My friend once told me that a startup that could make the world a whole lot better, is to create something that improves traffic conditions by 10%. Especially in countries with heavy traffic, this would literally save millions of hours for people. But it's not a "sexy" field, so it's doubtful anyone would ever hear about it.
P.S. Sorry to hear about your mother, hope she's doing well.
On the other hand, FaceBook has built a platform where those sorts of endeavors could start from.
For instance they could put traffic info on everybody's page (with option to disable, of course), that would indicate the probability of encountering congestion on their usual travel routes in the next few hours. People could then use this info to plan their journeys better and thus relieve the strain on the roads. Since 'everyone' has Facebook and checks it multiple times per day, the service would have massive reach from the onset.
It's also big enough to sign deals like integrating FB into the cars themselves. Imagine buying a car that would read out your FB voicemail or wall posts as you drive along, voice controlled. If it wasn't something big like FB, the technology could be there but people wouldn't care.
"I don't even think you have to go to "extreme" cases of people who are disabled in some way, and use FB to communicate."
My family's found that to be true. I grew up in San Diego but all the rest of my extended family lives abroad and FB's been a huge boon. It's way richer than email and more convenient than phone or IM.
A family friend of mine has been hospital-bound for quite some time. He just got an iPad and the two things he asked to be set up were email and Facebook.
I asked if he wanted any apps or movies. He said those would be nice, but he needed email and Facebook.
Facebook gets lots of resources: really smart engineers (worth much more than their salary) and tons of time/attention (that could have been spent on worthier pursuits than Farmville). It's not just cash.
(Your estimate of their cash impact is mostly correct, though: $2B in revenues for Facebook, http://schoolcenter.k12albemarle.org/education/components/la...; claims to serve ~12.000 kids in a county on ~$145M requested budget, and I could see a city having ten times as many kids.)
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
Personally, what I'd like to discuss is if there is any moral value that Facebook provides. Does Facebook actually benefit society? (Maybe more precisely we can ask whether Facebook fulfills an aspect of Maslow's hierarchy of needs).
I just keep hearing the word 'value' used over and over here and it frustrates me that it is so often only associated with 'business value' rather than something more morally significant.
FB is important in letting me keep a full but just-in-time social calendar. I don't want to plan going out a weeknight far in advance, or even necessarily a big night on a weekend. But often I do want to go out. Facebook makes it easier to organise these things at a moment's notice. This is much better than planning ahead, because if you plan ahead you have to keep appointments even if you don't feel like it on the day. So socialising a lot that way gets to be a bit tiring. Doing things on the spur of the moment is better.
For example, the other night a friend hosted a vegan potluck for about 10 people with about four hours notice. That would've been hard to do without Facebook.
The comparison with meth is closer than you think. As the other comment says many people Facebook more than they enjoy doing so. If you really charged them for it, to establish this value, they've vanish in a second.
Not that I'm saying it's inherently un-enjoyable, but FB develops the best system for FB, not for its users.
Not just that its all about ad delivery, but FB is famous for time wasting games that keep you coming back even when you aren't having any fun, using guilt trips. The value FB is creating is for advertisers, and only secondarily for the users being advertised to.
And it's not like FB created the social-networking value from nothing. They consolidated a lot on one page. Enabling chat and homepage in one package, etc, has value, but that's essentially it. The value of FB is email + chat + games + photos + single-package convenience - inconvenience.
The convenience of service consolidation is balanced by the inconvenience of FB being a monopoly (if something goes wrong you can always get another email provider, try getting another FB provider), the inconvenience of them sharing your personal info with developers, the lack of differentiation between family, friends, and acquaintances, etc.
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).
No, we also use HipHop, on a scale of about 8 mostly million users. It cut down our resource and response time drastically. I have not used Cassandra, but I am sure for some use cases it's great.
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)
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.
> “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
Said by a founder of a company (Cloudera) that commercialized an open source implementation (Hadoop) originally sponsored by Yahoo (an advertising company) of a paper (MapReduce/GFS) written by Google (an advertising company), the file system in which has been heavily improved by Facebook (an advertising company) and which is heavily used by all kinds of advertising companies, but which has been adopted (technology transfer) by companies in in biotechnology and other non-advertising spheres.
This is not a contradiction. The best minds of our generation are thinking about how to make people click ads -- and it's fortunate that along the way some of the technology they generate happens to also be useful elsewhere...
But that doesn't imply that most of what they produce is valuable to more worthy projects, or even much of it.
I'm trying to imagine a world in which more of those great minds were focusing their efforts directly on solving serious problems.
Go see papers at conferences like OSDI, POSP, SIGMOD. Note how some of the bravest ones are coming from ad serving and e-commerce companies (e.g., the ZooKeeper paper which is rather amazing). It isn't a mere accident: the technical problem that's being solved is hard and requires these kind of systems to built. The people who join those companies join to solve those kinds of problems, not accidentally decide to solve them.
The technical challenges involved in real time auctions and high volume ad serving are a serious technical problem. The optimization and machine learning work to target the ads is another hard technical problem. For many people (myself included) the technical challenge is the most important part of my work, big reason why I want to wake up and head in to the office.
When they decide to move on to another company, they'll come away with greater technical skills that could also be applied to smart meters, DNA analysis, physics, pure systems programming work and the like.
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.
I had asked a related question on Quora some months ago. There is a need in many scientific fields, especially life sciences, for experts in scalable infrastructure, statistical learning, visualization, graph analysis, and good software engineering, but since hard science doesn't pay well enough, the majority of these people are going to the Facebook's of the world. Nothing wrong with that, but we have some challenges in figuring out what "value" means, how we measure it, and perhaps most importantly, how we reward it.
There has to be some way of getting some fraction of the really smart computational people into other fields to figure out very hard problems. Unfortunately, the future of the internet is not the only future out there.
I don't know, I think you have it the other way around. Content and apps are a means for generating ad revenue- the advertiser is the customer.
Lots of technical value gets created in the process, but as companies like Facebook and Google have grown up, they've realized who their real masters are (not the user). See the recent $400m Admeld acquisition rumor to see this in action with Google.
OTOH Apple gets paid by the consumer. They're a real product company.
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.
You must be joking. An Egyptian couple recently named their daughter "Facebook" due to the instrumental role that Facebook played in the overthrow of the Egyptian government. Other rebellions have used Twitter extensively. YouTube was instrumental in publicly shaming a racist senator whose loss gave the Democrats the Senate.
Do you mind telling me about some projects in those fields(health specially)?. I'm learning about data mining/machine learning and I'd love to know how this fields are applied to solve important problems and what I can do to help.
don't have specific projects on a list that fits you, but I am sure there are projects out there which needs you help, both projects where you can volunteer or where you can get a job. For a start you could check out our list of health and IT projects in our system, for organisations which work in this area.
Four years ago I was telling people in a session about water and development aid that they should use modern IT and web tools to do their work more effectively. As a result I ended up talking to Jeroen van der Sommen, now our chairman, and we decided to start Akvo.org to provide those tools. There is a huge need for IT tools in humanitarian aid and development work. You could be working on that if you are interested.
Indeed.
Not speaking about Facebook (no first hand experience to judge from) , but I 'm depressed by the amount of brainpower and wealth that our societies spend on zero-sum games such as high frequency trading and seo (I'm fully aware of there useful byproducts, but can't help to think that we'd be much better off with globally useful activities in the first place).
That quote is really stupid. Better would be to say something like the best minds of my generation have decided an optimal strategy is to figure out how to make people click ads or to do financial engineering. Why is that. And then do something about the why.
Frankly, listening to people like Hammerbacher (who is almost certainly now rich from fb) or Alex the twitter dude who started bank simple (who essentially admitted he got rich from Twitter, see discussion surrounding his claim Conway threatened him) now whine about other engineers trying to get theirs just like Hammerbacher and Alex did is bullshit. Viz Alex dissing lifestyle businesses, etc.
> 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%.
I don't know, ED is a pretty easy problem to trivialize, but when you think about how meaningful and important sex is in a relationship and life in general, I don't know if it's on the level of hair loss medicine. I'm not saying it's as ”important” as cancer, but I don't think it's trivial either.
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.
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).
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...
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:
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.
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.
The issue is that society thinks it's ok to charge $50k for a fancy car but not for a lifesaving treatment. In the former situation you have a choice, in the latter you have no choice.
Mmm, but that has unfortunate second-order effects. Why was so much effort expended on Viagra instead of a cure for AIDS? Well the elephant in the corner of the room is that drug companies need to make money to fund more research; people will buy Viagra but as soon as a cure for AIDS is discovered the governments of India and Brazil will set about mass-manufacturing it without a penny to the discoverer. Knowing this, even if they wanted to do it for the good of humanity drug companies couldn't - they'd be busted for failing their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders!
Why was so much effort expended on Viagra instead of a cure for AIDS?
Viagra wasn't created for the purpose of treating ED, it was originally meant as a treatment for high blood pressure and angina[1]. The fact that it caused erections just caused Pfizer to shift to marketing it as an ED treatment. So it's not like they were spending tons of research money specifically to "help old men have erections."
Knowing this, even if they wanted to do it for the good of humanity drug companies couldn't - they'd be busted for failing their fiduciary responsibility to shareholders!
Not necessarily true. Drug companies have worked on cures for diseases that are prevalent in the 3rd world, and they have even - on occasion - intentionally distributed that cure for free, to people who couldn't afford it. [2]
What's your point? "You dont like something? Well I don't like somethig else!" Well, other than demonstrating you don't know what you're talking about? "Viagra" was originally developed to treat heart conditions. Human testing subsequently demonstrated it was ineffective, but uncovered its tumescent properties.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
I always heard how hard the interviews were tough at Google, Facebook, et al. So never seriously considered applying.
Last year I was invited to interview at Facebook based on some work I'd posted online. I was quite flattered but never expected to get through more than a one or two rounds. Long story short, I've now moved to the US and am in my third week at Facebook.
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.
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.
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").
Thanks for your offer and for sharing your personal story! I do not think I am that serious and hopefully another HN reader will take your offer and see where it goes.
I look forward to checking out your library of articles that you have authored.
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.
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.
I saw an old cleric at a funeral of one of the protesters killed in Egypt on AlJazeera. He spoke of how they had mocked him for his blue jeans(!) and his facebook. He begged forgiveness and said that he saw now how he had been leading the way. Moving stuff.
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.
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.
> 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:
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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".
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.
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.
That something is valuable to someone does not mean that it is useful for society as a whole cf. zero sum games or worse:
Think about the guy whose job was to hide defects in nuclear power plant : certainly valuable for tepco, but for society as a whole?
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-23/fukushima-engineer-...
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?
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.
figuring out how to generate power cleanly and cheaply on every home in the world. A whole continent like Africa would surely have a great use for cheap+clean energy generation.
making self driving vehicles.
creating better battery technology.
figuring out a way to get rid of lawyers.
working on super intelligence.
brain computer interface (the one input mechanism that would do away without keyboards)
augmented reality projection straight to your visual cortex, no more computer monitors would only be the beginning of something like that.
The problem seems to be that there's not much demand for people to solve those problems (not that I agree that all of those are worthy goals, particularly the "get rid of lawyers" bit).
Solving some of the things you mention could produce immense benefits for everybody, but it seems like the common wisdom is that it's too risky to pay people salaries equivalent to "finance/entertainment/social media smart people salaries" to work on them, at least not in the same quantity as those industries hire.
Finance, entertainment, and social media companies are out there digging through resume sites and college campuses, actively looking for smart people to solve problems, because they are really sure they can make enough money to compensate them well for their efforts, and have a lot left over.
I'd love to work on energy generation, space exploration, brain computer interfaces, or longevity, but I expect I'll be working on more mundane problems until my student loans are paid off and my emergency and retirement accounts are back to where they should be, because there's reliable money in mundane problem solving.
Of course, I may not be smart enough to help out on "big problems," or I may not have the right connections, or enough risk tolerance. I still hope to find out one of these days. :)
OK, I guess I qualify for being useful. However, if I succeed I will put millions of drivers out of their jobs and put high pressure on the educational system to produce highly educated workers instead of drivers, and on the political system to create laws for the modern world. However, neither of those institutions can keep up with the current pace of innovation. Fortunately, Facebook's popularity has fueled a surge in applications for computer science education and ignited political revolutions world-wide from Barack Obama to the Egyptian revolution. If it wasn't for their useless work, innovation might come to a halt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They'd be more likely to connect on StackOverflow or GitHub than Facebook.
Facebook is a place where you go to chill and waste time, connect with old friends, check pics of old crushes, catch up on gossip, play games, or share links.
The last thing you'd do there would be to search for another student, it's not built for that.
I suspect that Facebook -- and its use -- will continue to change over the course of the next decade. Currently, it looks like the most promising technology for mass user interaction that has been developed.
StackOverflow is basically a high signal-to-noise ratio content farm. It sells the illusion of fame in exchange for generating content. There is no meaningful social aspect to it. I don't see any signs of it evolving over time, as it seems to exist for a very specific purpose.
Facebook is a mish-mash of previously existing communication technologies, mainly being presented to people who haven't used the prior forms extensively.
A chat system, a 'twitter' like system, a limited blog with comments system, photo sharing with comments, and the familiar followers/contacts that many site have these days.
While amazingly successful, I'd hesitate to call Facebook 'a technology'. They haven't pioneered much except for jamming all that stuff together for a very large audience..
Facebook is a mish-mash of previously existing communication technologies, mainly being presented to people who haven't used the prior forms extensively.
Alternatively: Facebook is a collection of wide-ranging social technologies combined in a tasteful, approachable manner, which has captured the interest of a wider range of the general public than anything before it, by a wide margin.
And will a Chinese student meet a German one and bah blah etc. on Facebook in 10 years? I guess we'll see whether it's even around in 10 years. My belief is that people will have moved on by then. 10 years is a long time and there's nothing particularly special about Facebook.
I invite you to reread my original comment on the subject, particularly the bit in parentheses. The point isn't that Facebook is the place where things will happen, but that all this seemingly inane social software focus will likely reap indirect benefits that are being ignored by the original author.
So, your prediction is that the greatest energy advances of this century will specifically come from two people in different countries who meet on the internet? It seems overly specific, yet also general enough to not be surprising. I'll go along with this.
"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.
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.
> The fact that they are employees is a dead give away - if they are really talented, they would not be working for someone else
I don't know much about FB employees but can assume there are really talented based on the amount of traffic they handle, and the software they release(Cassandra, Thrift, HipHop).
I don't see a relation between being working for someone else and talent. Rob Pike, Ken Thomson and many more work for Google. By your generalization, they aren't really talented?
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.