Facebook will hire 10k new employees in an effort to build the metaverse | Hacker News Reader

Facebook will hire 10k new employees in an effort to build the metaverse

ctvnews.ca

19 pointsastlouis4444 comments

And they will fail. I read long ago that the book "Ready Player One" was given to all FB employees and it is therefore fair to say that the metaverse is inspired by that book. Looking at Facebook today and trying to map that into a VR world will be a universe carpet bombed with advertisement and sponsored content. The universe you as a user would roam in would be like living on the canvas of a instance in Internet Explorer that has all available toolbars installed.

It’s unfortunate that ready player one is the book people think of. Ready player one is just ripping off Otherland by Tad Williams and throwing in 80s nostalgia. It is a better dystopian novel I’d say.

I think a Facebook vr world is more likely to be the 2 minutes of hate from 1984, but all the time

Obligatory link to "Hyper Reality":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs

I thought Instagram had like 11 people? Whatsapp had like 47 right?

If you add Facebook and Messenger like 200 should do it.

This is an interesting point. The fact that they need 10k people to work on this makes them more like a government putting on a make work project than a company doing R&D. They'd be better off funding 1000 10-person startups working in VR, or just buying or copying one when / if it gets traction.

Related, I can see some appeal of getting to work at a small group doing development in a new area. It's got to be much harder to attract talent who know they are joining as a cog in a 10,000 person centrally planned effort

What's most wild about this is that they're doing this big of a hiring push for a new offering, in just one region of the world.

It's obvious Facebook sees the metaverse as the next big platform, and they want to own it the way Apple and Google own mobile today.

Now that I think about if, maybe this is just about buying some goodwill in europe by creating jobs?

Seems like a likely reason why they’re doing this, wasn’t the whistleblower supposed to testify in Europe? Convenient timing. They’re likely trying to bribe the EU here with the promise of jobs.

Nah, it's probably that now that they are allowing remote for almost all jobs, they now have a much bigger space for recruitment (lots of people in Europe don't want to move to London or Dublin).

> It's obvious Facebook sees the metaverse as the next big platform

I could see it- with business conferences and business travel, remote work etc. But I'd rather this go to Skype for business or zoom or linkedin etc or basically anyone else than Facebook.

Roblox could win this, they just need to double down.

They easily could, they just need to ship Roblox VR on the Oculus Quest and the upcoming Apple headset.

I'm not sure FB will let them ship that.. there might be enough demand though to force them. But it will drive Oculus demand thru the roof.. I'd buy at least 3.

Well in the 90s when the web was new, centralized players like AOL and Compuserve were where the users found an on-ramp to the Internet. I think of Facebook as the AOL of today's web, and they want to be the AOL of tomorrow's VR/AR mixed media metaverse. But hopefully the masses of users will grow past this next "AOL" and find their way to the VR/XR decentralized Web. This is yet to be determined...

Yah that has been my thinking on this too. The Metaverse is in its dialup modem stage of the comparison and things can still take a number of directions not all of which favor Facebook by a long shot. They are the ones investing heavily today (FBRL is already 10K people [1]) and that brings legitimacy to all of XR as more than just a gaming niche subculture. But, as any comment thread on this topic clearly shows, FB has sustained reputational damage that is not easy to overcome without some internal soul searching business model pivot. If they plan thier Metaverse as an Adtech engine extension of their existing business, then they can be AOL/Netscape - big names at the outset but not built to last long in the new space. Given the choice, people want some Digital Dignity/Data Sovereignty and other players will find a way to make it happen if FB won't.

[1] https://uploadvr.com/facebook-employees-2021/

A better question: could you find ten thousand qualified people in 2021 who really want to go through 4 rounds of interviews with a company that's quantitatively proven to promote human misery?

Of course they will. A lot of people will gladly accept FAANG salary and then bend backwards to rationalize it. Or they just simply don't care.

Four rounds of interviews is not a problem if you are good at what you are doing and only need to visit 2-3 companies to get the offer you want.

It only becomes a problem if you need to visit a lot of companies and I suspect that is where a lot of complaints come from.

The reason to interview a lot of companies at once is because of the competing offers. The candidate would have a huge raise by doing so. Certain companies would give out minimum offers most of the time unless they see the competing offers now, like Google/Microsoft.

Never had this happen to me and also they don't need more than one competing offer. Why would you need ten offers?

If you complain that companies waste your time then what is shopping for offers if not massive waste?

There are ways to check what you can earn at most large companies.

Just find the company you want to work for and focus getting as good impression as you can. It is likely going to yield better results than trying to optimize your effort to be as low as possible because you need to run so many concurrent processes.

Remember, one good offer is better than ten worse.

Yes, one competing offer is enough. Applying for more is just upping the chances. The competition is fierce and luck is also very important. It's good to have backup plans.

I have known a number of people that interviewed with FAANG companies simply to get salary negotiation leverage with no intention of ever working there on ethical grounds.

Wasting the time of several unethical companies while getting valuable interview experience is a win/win.

Well, I'd gladly be one of them.

I have a strong disagreement with the current HN hivemind over the "evil" of Facebook. I'd put them at equal levels of "evil" with the rest of the AANG.

That and I'm personally invested in the metaverse. My whole life I've been wanting virtual worlds, inspired by the virtual-virtual worlds oft-portrayed by media. By some twist of fate, it seems that my generation might very well be the one to get that.

The virtual world you are envisioning and the one that will be built can be two very different things

The other AANG companies are equally terrible, I would agree. That doesn't make helping them make the world worse any more ethical.

Many maintain cognitive dissonance here I think because giving up Facebook products is easier than giving up AANG products.

Also do you really want -Facebook- to be in charge of the next generation of the internet? You can choose to use your capability to join others in building something open and decentralized instead, like the current internet.

I'd work for a company that had done bad stuff if I'm not contributing to it - even better if its providing an alternative path to profitability that may reduce reliance on their "dirty" money. This seems like a desperate ploy to find "another thing" for Facebook to escape their past/present - and they should move on from it.

Few companies are benevolent and have never done something wrong. Apple and the CSAM is only the latest bad story for them. Google and privacy and dragonfly. Amazon and warehouse workers. Facebook and... Facebook. Microsoft and antitrust/EEE.

Yes. And we should all stop writing code for any of those companies.

They will -always- do whatever the most profitable thing is, users be damned. They are machines that generate money.

The only internet services that ever have a chance of putting the best interests of users first are open source decentralized ones.

> we should all stop writing code for any of those companies.

> The only internet services that ever have a chance of putting the best interests of users first are open source decentralized ones.

This isn't really a practical advice. Most "open source decentralized [companies]" aren't profitable enough to pay a salary for all these engineers - even at a lower rate than they make.

Also, every company is a machine that generates money. That isn't inherently so bad we should abandon all businesses.

Of the companies I have interviewed at in the recent years, including a subset of FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Google), I think the Facebook process was the most humane. Besides a sprinkling of recruiter calls, the process consisted mostly of a 1 hour coding challenge while also talking on the phone, plus an "onsite" of 4 interviews. I say "onsite" because this was in COVID times, so it was still on video chat / coder pad.

Now Apple, yeah, that was like 5 rounds. I wrote about that previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26226809

I still agree that the Leetcode interview (and perhaps many interview types in general) promote human misery and does not really do that great of a job of selecting for people to do well at their jobs. Getting better at it involved repeated failing at it in painful ways and a little studying. Not to mention all the days off to spend a day writing on white boards. One more aside: don't make jokes about coding on a whiteboard or using whiteboard-based version control, as funny as these jokes are, you will just come off as arrogant.

Silicon Valley always has an answer to that problem: import the labor you want, give them the values you want them to have. If they don't like it, you can always send them back. Most quickly learn to value what they're told to value.

Sadly, for enough money, yes

Honestly, who cares about this nonsense? I'm an early adopter, I try everything new, but this is such a joke! Zuck is crazy and he assumes everybody is sick in the head like him!

> Zuck is crazy and he assumes everybody is sick in the head like him!

What an unnecessary and aggressive comment. Also, how is the meta verse indicative of someone being "sick in the head"?

Well, but he is! And whistleblowers showed the sociopath in him!

Plot twist - Zuckerberg whistleblows on himself to the entire human race for being an undercover alien/robot hybrid posing as a nerdy billionaire.

In addition of being a blatant sociopath behind a social (or, rather, sociopathic) network, he promotes a form of infantilism, which is a psychological disorder. Who in full mental health will want to be a childish avatar in a metaverse?!

> In addition of being a blatant sociopath

So I assume you spent 10+ years becoming a clinical psychologist/psychiatrist to allow you to make this judgement of someone you've never met?

I don't have to meet him - deeds speak louder than manipulative words. He is what I said and worse. I've been closely following him since the early days of Facebook and I can conclude that it needs a great level of mental perversion to invent or allow all the things happening at Facebook to go on!

When you use words like sociopath et Al in this kind of environment, you cheapen them such that they end up meaning very little.

Even without the whistleblowers, there were a bunch of studies of how damaging Instagram is for the teenage girls. He knows this, everybody knows this, and, he's not locked up for selling dope in a twisted modern way! Knowing that he is damaging the society and most vulnerable parts of it - the young people, and continuing to profit from this makes is much more than just a benign quiet sociopath. Not to mention all the hatred he helps organize and selectively censors the type of hatred misaligned with his own. It's about time to break down Facebook into pieces - the way regulators broke down at&t before!

> Even without the whistleblowers, there were a bunch of studies of how damaging Instagram is for the teenage girls.

Please read the damn study. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

Essentially, twice as many teenage girls said IG made them feel better as said it made them feel worse.

That doesn't suggest that IG is a large problem for teenage girls (note that this was also a very small sample, because it was qualititative research).

Like FB have done a bunch of things I don't agree with over the years, but reading the actual documents that the WSJ used for their files is revealing in terms of what they did and didn't include.

How does meta-verse differ from or is better than zoom-meeting?

They should just buy Manticore Games :)

Why would they? They already bought Crayta, which is a similar user generated content game creation building platform that's made in UE4. It does the exact same thing as Core Games does. See an article about that acquisition here:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/04/facebook-buys-studio-behin...

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