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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

Facebook stopped being a /cool/ company to work for about 4 years ago.

How can they expect to attract the best when they’re so lacking in corporate ethics? Don’t say it’s the almighty dollar because anyone with the chops to make $200k/yr from Facebook could start their own SaaS and make $400k/yr without too much effort. So what’s left to be proud of about working at FB? You don’t even get a private office anymore.

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> anyone with the chops to make $200k/yr from Facebook could start their own SaaS and make $400k/yr without too much effort.

Or, I mean, they could start their own SaaS that for any one of a thousand reasons ends up making them $0k/yr.

That is the rub of it. Making software and selling it are different skill sets. Not everyone has both. Selling things about getting others to think your incentive is good enough. Not everyone has that skill set.

Please tell me more about these SaaS ideas that will make me 400k/year.

This sounds naive. I've been involved with several early stage SaaS companies. You'd be surprised how difficult it is to make any real money from it. Even if the business has good margins, the growth is often so slow, you'd do better getting a regular job and investing on the side.

I was with you until the third sentence. The better argument is that talented developers can get jobs at companies with similarly great engineering culture and good compensation but with better corporate ethics than Facebook's.

And, for all that money, they can't seem to keep any of the features working.

Their biz model and revenue aren't based on user features working. The priority is on keeping what we can't see working. Most everything else is window dressing.

Put another way, the engineering heavy-weights work on the important stuff. Interns and such gets the rest.

> anyone with the chops to make $200k/yr from Facebook could start their own SaaS and make $400k/yr without too much effort.

I'm sure some can.

But "coding well enough to get a job at Facebook" and "being able to sell something to someone willing to pay for it" are two completely different set of skills.

Some people have both. Most do not.

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