All these Brilliant People at Facebook Make Me Sad
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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.
I asked if he wanted any apps or movies. He said those would be nice, but he needed email and Facebook.
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.
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.
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.
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?).
Facebook has an order of magnitude less than just about any other similarly sized organization. It's bigger than Wikipedia, though.
* Made up number.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
'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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Running trading algorithms would be pretty pants, but managing risk is not quite so ignoble.
What?
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"
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
(But it's not a new trend, TV or advertising or law or finance are/were similar in that respect.)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gotta love how inconsistent that thing is.
HipHop, have you tried it? I think that technology only works for them.
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)
MongoDB lacks that flexibility, but I like it too, for other reasons.
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.”
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.
That's why the article is important, a lot of minds are spending time in lower priority items from a humanistic point of view.
If you really feel so strongly about it why not set up a fund that attempt to fund exactly those 3 areas.
Talent has nothing to do with it.
http://www.akvo.org/rsr/projects/healthcare/?page=1
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hot tip: whenever anybody writes "I am in no way suggesting <X>", the chance that they are suggesting <X> approaches 100%.
I doubt it...
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).
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]
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...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 look forward to checking out your library of articles that you have authored.
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.
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.
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.
> Facebook doesn’t provide me with anything useful.
.aptureTMMShare a:first-child {
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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 just seems that what they're doing is not that hard, compared to what people do in other engineering disciplines.
http://hueniverse.com.nyud.net/2010/11/all-these-brilliant-p...
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.
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.
Relying on strangers for information while deriding one's peers as a source of information doesn't strike me as a wise course of action.
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
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.
robotics robotics robotics
space exploration
deep sea exploration
longevity research
...
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. :)
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.
On the other hand, there's twitter. Now that's a company that could use a few good engineers to stop the embarrassing downtimes.
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.
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.
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..
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.
Warmed over AOL training wheel walled garden bullcrap is not cutting edge. Whoop De Dooo, its got an API.
Sorry but I left AOL years ago, and guess what, no one cool ever worked for AOL or Farcebook.
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.
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.
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?