Ask HN: What is so special in working for Facebook? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is so special in working for Facebook?

31 pointsgsivil33 comments

Why so many good programmers like to work for Facebook? What is the really rewarding thing for working in Facebook?

I'm sure any pre-IPO stock issued to their employees, while not being a really rewarding thing right now, is going to pay off big in a relatively short timeframe... see: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/01/google-making-extraordinary...

How does the stock thing work? Is it given to all engineers? It seems to be just Silicon Valley companies who give away stock/options as a matter of course, so I'm a little mystified.

The two startups I worked in so far (Incorporated in the US, working in India), have offered me stock options, so its certainly not a "Valley only" thing.

I've had people try to offer me stock options in the kind of companies that would never go public too. It's a very popular option for shady businesspeople with M.B.A.'s.

A company doesn't have to go public to make money on your options. A profitable company pays dividends with their profits, and the options, when exercised, give you a share of those profits. Might not be a jackpot (and few are), but an extra $30k a year, every year, is nothing to blow off.

One company I am familiar with is a private company that will never go public. They give stock to their employees, and in fact, 100% of their stock is owned by employees (down from 49.9999%, when 50.0001% was owned by the founder). They have zero outside investors. The value of the stock is set by some sort of auditing firm, but there's no actual market valuation.

If this doesn't sound questionable enough, keep in mind that this is the only retirement plan they offer to employees and that upon leaving the company employees are required to sell back their shares.

Maybe it's totally legit, but it always struck me as very, very questionable.

At this point in the game, can any new employee expect to get options that are not insanely diluted?

I guess if you're a Lars Rasmussen-class talent you're going to get some special class of stock to entice you to come over, but what about the rest of the new hires?

Dilution doesn't really apply to these employees. They don't care about their amount of ownership in the company. All that matters is how much stock they get and what they expect the stock to be worth at IPO. If they've received 10,000 shares and the IPO is at $100, then they're millionaires by the end of that day (on paper, at least).

...at the end of the employee lockout period, you mean. =)

By most estimates there are 300 million shares of Facebook generated in various capital rounds and whatnot. From my experience, if you're coming into the game this late you'll make some money with an IPO but only the founding members and VC groups will make fuck-you levels of wealth on the offering.

"at the end of the employee lockout period"

That's why I said it's on paper.

These employees have the opportunity to possibly make 10 to 20 years of their current salary in a day. Most people don't need more of an incentive than that.

It's rewarding when your work is used by 500 million people.

Yeah... but does any of that work benefit man-kind at all? More than 500 million people also use a toilet every day. So what? 500 million people and the most interesting thing on it is a "virtual farm". That's just plain ridiculous.

Bad example. Without toilets our cities would be disease ridden, awful places. You're obviously trolling, but I just thought I'd point that out. :)

Blue Man Group put it best:

> Right now, there is a virtually invisible network which links together millions of people who would otherwise be completely isolated from each other. This exciting technology has grown to become an incredibly complex web of connections that is so large and difficult to track that it would be practically impossible to estimate its total size. And even though most of us live alone, in urban isolation, this system represents one of the few ways all of our lives are intertwined. This system is: modern plumbing.

the dude who made the toilet would be like shit yeah i made the toilet.

Facebook lets my disabled mother stay in touch with the members of her extended family, who otherwise would only be available at get togethers that she is not always well enough to travel to. It is the most important non medical technology in her life after the Wii. (Her doctors want to give Nintendo a medal, because that is amazing for rehabilitation.)

In the latest issue of Forbes Bill Gates said that he believes the toilet industry could be the next big boom, right now all of NA uses an old system with many design flaws.

That's all.

True about the Gates comment, which I didn't think at the time.

I wasn't trolling. I think the value of social lies with "peer production" which is a more evolved form of crowd-sourcing. Try and imagine a more sophisticated and brilliant Wikipedia.

Jeff Bezos is one of the funders of Kleiner Perkins new "sFund". I liked his comment at the announcement about using social to solve real problems like genetic engineering and climate change.

His example is a bit trollish but his point is valid. The amount of people who use something doesn't make it valuable. The only reason I would take a job at Facebook would be because it's pre-IPO and because you'd get to tackle some pretty unique technical issues (scaling/social graph).

How do you define value then? Is something only really valuable if it, say, saves lives?

Ask Facebook users how many of them would be fine with paying a dollar every month to use it if its easy to make the payment. You will get a good idea of its value.

The commonsense oracle agrees:

http://commonsenseoracle.com/2010/10/the-value-of-facebook-i...

In not any particular order,

1. Good quality true "Web scale" work.

2. Top benefits (and I suppose a decent paycheck too).

3. Smart peers.

4. Realistic chances of hitting the IPO/Acquisition jackpot through equity.

Whats not so great at working there?

#4 doesn't really apply so much to newer employees. granted I don't know this for a fact, but at this point I'd be surprised if your average software engineer gets jackpot-level equity.

If I may start from your good points: 1.) In a network of 500 million users already are the scaling problems still open? I would suspect that the biggest scaling problems appeared much earlier. If somebody knows what are the scaling problems that such an enormous networks faces would be very interesting.

2.) I would guess that top programmers can have top benefits in several companies. Even less excellent programmers could get a decent paycheck in many places

3.) I am not familiar with the demographics of facebook but my gut feeling is that most of the programmers are in their early twenties or mid-twenties. This was also my impression during one of the job fairs that I have attended.

cont 3.) I am not so sure what type of mentoring somebody could get there

Definitely extremely smart peers

At the same time it seems that top programmers are moving to Facebook. Do they see something in the potential of the company that I fail to see. I guess the possibility of huge financial success besides the "stockmarket" value that is already established they foresee something else.

I like their philosophy that you can make changes and push them often so that you do see immediate gratification that your work means something. A typical non-startup developer's work could take years before it ever hit a desktop.

While the stock options that others mention is a motivator, typically companies use options to buy down your salary. You would make $120k, but, we're going to give you $90k + $30k in options that could be worth more than $30k in a few years. Pre dot-bomb, extremely greedy employees would work for a .com, trade huge amounts of salary for options and live frugally until the IPO. I can think of one guy that worked for Real Networks for a few years that took 66% of his pay in options which were underwater when his options matured.

Options are a payment type and are a gamble on the employee's part. The employer believes that shared ownership will also motivate employees, which makes those options worth more.

They're dealing with very interesting scalability/complexity problems, and they're currently pre-IPO.

It's not for the money - any of the talented folks could go work at a hedge fund and make 10x. The secret sauce is that it's a fun culture, great product, and the company has huge potential to innovate into new areas. And you get fed.

There's a potential with Facebook that isn't there with many other companies. It has an enormous social graph but hasn't found a way to fully unlock its value. The challenge is to help find Facebook's business-model and technical equivalent of Adwords, if such a thing exists.

Thrill of a start-up but with the "security" of some serious investment and traction. It's the wild-west and they encourage experimenting by hiring the smartest people they can find. 15-20 years ago you might have asked the same thing about Microsoft.

Run a few basic, even worst case, valuation scenarios and I think you'll answer that question for yourself.

You get to tell your friends you work at Facebook and they get to be like oh sweet and they say what are you working on and you get to say oh the billing platform for virtual goods and they get to say like whoa that is so exciting!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com