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All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

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Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#41

Post by 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.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#42

Post by briggsbio »

dschobel wrote: post #3

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...

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.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#43

Post by 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.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#44

Post by bjelkeman-again »

wslh wrote: post #25
dschobel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

There are lots of projects working on peace, health and poverty where someone with your skills could could help or work.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#45

Post by jackowayed »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #41

"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 sep…

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.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#46

Post by irahul »

gavanwoolery wrote: post #41

"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 sep…

> 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?

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#48

Post by dschobel »

briggsbio wrote: post #42
dschobel wrote: post #3

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...

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…

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).

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#49

Post by strlen »

dekayed wrote: post #8

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.”

> “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.

Re: All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad

#50

Post by nkassis »

georgieporgie wrote: post #43

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.
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