Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 444 posts

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#391

Post by JohnFen »

filoleg wrote: post #210
jfasi wrote: post #38

I just spent three months hiring in NYC, and now that I think about it, I haven't seen a single person mention they were considering counteroffers from Facebook. For context, Facebook and Google are the two largest tech companies with a significant NYC presence. It's telling that a substantial portion of our candidates admitted to considering competing offers from Google, but literally no one was considering Facebook…

Anecdotal, but in the past year, I had tons of recruiters from Google/Amazon/etc. knocking on my LinkedIn box. However, not a single one from Facebook. Maybe they just simply didn’t fund recruiting efforts as much as the other tech companies or weren’t hiring as aggressively.

One of the (many) things that pleased me about deleting my LinkedIn account was that I no longer routinely heard from the likes of Google/Amazon/Facebook.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#392

Post by JohnFen »

dymk wrote: post #273

> After the publication of this story, Harrison contacted CNBC to say “these numbers are totally wrong.” > “Facebook regularly ranks high on industry lists of most attractive employers,” Harrison said in a statement. “For example, in the last year we were rated as #1 on Indeed’s Top Rated Workplaces, #2 on LinkedIn’s Top Companies, and #7 on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work. Our annual intern survey showed exceptional…

Also, every one of the metrics he cites there are of dubious value in terms of real-world meaning.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#393

Post by JohnFen »

randomsearch wrote: post #269
hinkley wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google never figured out how to make serious bank outside of the marketing department. The fact that they kept the wheels on as long as they did, I gotta give them some respect for that. But they were always destined to end up being amoral at best and a cesspool at worst. If you are starting a company and think you want to be proud of it for the rest of your life, sell a real product, not your users.

Not true: they make billions from cloud services. Re: “you are the product” meme. I guess it’s a mechanism for raising awareness of privacy violation, but I really don’t like it. If you were literally the product, you would be a slave. You’re not. What they sell is your attention. A big reason for not liking “you are the product” memes is it misses the key aspect of manipulation, which phrases like “the attention eco…

Honestly, that seems like splitting hairs to me.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#394

Post by ck425 »

krageon wrote: post #346
jfasi wrote: post #38

I just spent three months hiring in NYC, and now that I think about it, I haven't seen a single person mention they were considering counteroffers from Facebook. For context, Facebook and Google are the two largest tech companies with a significant NYC presence. It's telling that a substantial portion of our candidates admitted to considering competing offers from Google, but literally no one was considering Facebook…

> one of the things candidates respond to most is the story we tell about our company's past, present, and future I hear this storyline fairly often (though exclusively from corporate recruiters) and I have a super hard time understanding why this would matter. Can someone who actually listens to this kind of (IMO) propaganda weigh in and help me understand why it matters to them?

It matters in terms of internal opportunities to advance. Say your one of the first data science or product people in a fast growing company, that's a lot of potential opportunity for someone ambitious and self driven.

It also matters in terms of how good will this look on my CV/the story I can tell later. I joined a now well established and fast growing tech company as employee no 267, we're now at ~1200. That looks great on my CV or in an interview where if I talk about scaling issues (both technical and cultural) they'll likely believe me.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#395

Post by JohnFen »

_bxg1 wrote: post #232
mrtksn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that it has anything to do with altruism. Back then, it was not the right time to optimise for profit as new and exciting things were happening daily, it was time to explore not to exploit. These days the exciting things are happening in other areas, so for the Internet giants, it's time to optimize for profit.

Also, as a smaller player, they stood more to benefit from open source projects (Android and Chrome) and open standards (the web and email). Now that they're on top, the most rational strategy is to secure their position by destroying the bridges they used to get there, locking down those open technologies.

In other words, the most rational strategy is to become evil.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#396

Post by bradlys »

JohnFen wrote: post #389
bradlys wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... does any startup when compared to FAANG? Salaries are basically the same but the total compensation is, obviously, wildly different since expected value for startup stock is horrible.

> I mean... does any startup when compared to FAANG? Yes, in my experience. Unless, as you mentioned, you count stock options or similar (which I don't).

You should really count them. They're basically cash after you vest with a public company. Startups have a very low chance of that stock becoming worth anything even after it vests.

Comparing faang compensation at $300k tc vs $180k salary plus Monopoly money... Faang wins often enough since you never get enough stock in startups for it to be really worth it. (Short of being a founder)

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#397

Post by bradlys »

swivelmaster wrote: post #317
bradlys wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean... does any startup when compared to FAANG? Salaries are basically the same but the total compensation is, obviously, wildly different since expected value for startup stock is horrible.

Facebook is offering new CS grads from top schools $180k+ a year plus $30k+ signing bonus. That's cash. Most startups can't afford that unless they are very well funded.

$180k salary? I know they offer some ridiculous numbers for top candidates but that seems high for any new grad. That'd push them near $250k with stock.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#398

Post by JohnFen »

seisvelas wrote: post #61
allthecybers wrote: post #9

This is not a surprising headline. If you have values about privacy, decency, civil discourse, honesty or integrity you wouldn’t want to work there. Also, if you feel the company was collusive or willingly complicit in the dissemination of fake news and Russian propaganda efforts during our elections, it’d be a big fat “no” to working there. And it’s not just our democracy that is undermined by FB. There’s a litany o…

I have no money and a very shitty laptop, and thanks to Google Colab's free, hosted Jupyter Notebooks I'm having a blast learning Keras. I'm not saying they're saints, but they've given me something free that's improved my life. Maybe it's ultimately greedy in the sense that later if I need a cloud platform I'll definitely use GCP. But I think that kind of mutualism is actually better in practice than altruism.

> they've given me something free

No, they haven't. They're just making you pay with a different sort of currency.

I'm not saying that's good or bad, and I'm not saying that you aren't getting value for what you're paying. I'm just saying that the notion that these things are "free" is incorrect.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#399

Post by _bxg1 »

JohnFen wrote: post #395
_bxg1 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, as a smaller player, they stood more to benefit from open source projects (Android and Chrome) and open standards (the web and email). Now that they're on top, the most rational strategy is to secure their position by destroying the bridges they used to get there, locking down those open technologies.

In other words, the most rational strategy is to become evil.

Correct. Which is why pure capitalism is broken.

Re: Facebook has struggled to hire talent since the Cambridge Analytica scandal

#400

Post by JohnFen »

quantumsequoia wrote: post #355
gambler wrote: post #44

>Facebook candidates are asking much tougher questions about the company’s approach to privacy, according to multiple former recruiters. This narrative is highly suspicious. Zukerberg openly and repeatedly said that he doesn't care about anyone's privacy for well over a decade [1]. The whole company is built around collecting and selling private information. Why would people who care about privacy interview with Face…

The whole Facebook sells data thing is something I see said a lot, but haven't seen anything show. Is there any evidence of this? Wouldn't selling data be detrimental to their business model of being the golden goose for showing ads to people interested in your product? If people get user data, they can better target people themselves rather than paying Facebook to do it

People often use "selling data" as shorthand for "providing access to groups of people based on what the company knows about them". The two are very similar.
Post reply on HN