Facebook's Hiring Crisis: Engineers Are Turning Down Offers | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's Hiring Crisis: Engineers Are Turning Down Offers

protocol.com

53 pointsKarrot_Kream40 comments

I've always said I would never consider Facebook because almost everything they do is so out of line with my priorities (I do acknowledge their massive contribution to the broader machine learning research community).

But I wonder if it's now one of those "greedy when everyone is fearful" moments, when they've had so much bad press that they would actually have some good jobs to offer.

Personally, I bet the whole thing is overstated and they still have a big lineup of very well qualified candidates. I don't expect it is easy to get hired there. But as more people dump on them, trying to work there looks more and more attractive to me.

You don’t even have to go to Facebook to take advantage of that theory. Lots of people hate companies like oracle, and they are always hiring. I didn’t last very long there, but certainly was paid more than anywhere else at the time.

... they've had so much bad press that they would actually have some good jobs to offer.

Probably. But how it all shakes out will influence how much you want Facebook listed on your resume.

If we're in a world where people hiring are put off by experience as a developer at facebook, there are bigger problems. Facebook still has a reputation of hiring good people. It's only the very sensitive that would completely discard that because they dont like the mission of the company.

As I said, I don't identify with anything public facing that they do, and I wouldn't work there (other than to say it's more attractive as in my earlier comment), but I wouldn't consider their individual employees to have any different scruples than the broader workforce.

(I'm talking about technical roles, no idea about the rest)

I think I found the facebook employee :)

What companies are meeting hiring goals at the current moment? Demand is just so high.

Virtually every acquaintance I have ever met at any conference has hit me up on LinkedIn to ask if I might want to join them. My new boss has repeatedly asked me if I know anyone to join (and I haven't even started there yet). A friend had a terrible internship at a company as they were so short staffed (and this is a big, big corporation, not some podunk startup) that interns were roped into all sorts of work and on-call.

Correct. And, It’s a terrible time for a job search. Everyone, their mom and grandma- are out looking for a job

> It’s a terrible time for a job search

I can only disagree. I like where I'm at, but it's such a low bar to pull at, I have been. I have lots of opportunities to get offers and leverage my current or change. All remote, all within reasonably stable companies (although I also interview at companies I have no interest in joining).

> I like where I'm at, but it's such a low bar to pull at

Extremely subjective to your condition, can't be said that about wide demographic

Yep this isn't helping - where I work has lots of tech vacancies right now (plenty of people have left for presumably higher paying jobs) and a friend has offered me a job with him too.

> and on-call.

Every intern should shadow an on-call person for a day.

Tells you right away of the company has this Saas/Ops thing figured out.

Shadow is fine. Leaving them alone to do it for lack of staff is not.

Facebook pays extremely well, I mean like close to snd often over a million dollar for many L7/M2+ folks annually in total atm.

The way I see it is that the pay is so high because otherwise no-one would go work there. It's the ultimate ethics and moral test. So the company keeps aggregating certain types of people.

Meaning a lack of diversity from that aspect.

I canceled my full-loop, and am mad at myself in retrospect that I even started talking with recruiter in the first place. One of my less proud moments.

Facebook dont do diversity at all, at least not in the true meaning of the word:-

https://quillette.com/2021/07/21/silicon-valleys-cynical-tre...

Wow, I'd take any offer for that much.

Here in Europe our salaries are terribly low, Amazon pays half of what they pay in the US in general. Seems to be the same for Facebook, etc. too.

For example, I got an offer from Cambridge Analytica as a DS and it was only $76k USD gross p.a. in central London! And those are the ultimate bad guys, they could at least pay well!

This high salary is for people with a certain level inside, most people don't even reach L6 (which still has a high total comp of ~500k). It's often RSU packages and bonus that pushes the total annual compensation so high.

But for many tech companies its not unusual on west coast for a normal senior position to have a base of 200k, and then restricted stock units in a similar (maybe little lower) range every year. Plus you get a bonus payment of about 20% of your base salary (can be more or less based on performance). Stock doubled or tripled for msft, amzn, etc... in last two years.

That all makes things expensive, big gap between what people can afford, lots of homeless people,... and we engineers generally think we deserve being paid so much while the world around us goes down. Lol.

So going for jobs that pay even more, when most engineering jobs are already paying insanely well compared to average pushes the company in a certain direction character wise.

> the pay is so high because otherwise no-one would go work there

This is a meme; every other tech company that's remotely competitive in terms of compensation pays similarly at the corresponding levels (across the entire ladder). Even if you want to rule out every single social network and ad-tech company (which is also a meme, but for the sake of argument), you've got plenty of uncontroversial options like Netflix, Roblox, Doordash, Dropbox, Square, Snowflake, etc. Also a ton of late-stage pre-IPO startups (Stripe, Instacart, Databricks, etc.)

For me, joining Facebook is right up there with designing weapons of war as far as employer desirability goes.

I have far too much respect for the defense industry, and the massive moral debt the tech community owes it, to compare them with Facebook.

Google is next, reading some of the stuff that has been coming out.

why is this voted down?

[flagged]

LOL

Although Google does seem a lot better at the moment, I guess the entire ad industry needs a bit of a reality check.

Somewhat unrelated, yesterday on Netflix I started watching "the billion dollar code" - that story is eye opening.

good, people are finally getting the message to stop accepting leetcode style interviews.

Hopefully it's because they have morals and don't want to work for an immoral company (or any FAANG).

I concede that Apple is controversial, but what’s wrong with Netflix?

netflix wants you to be straightforward. it’s in their code. but, only when it fits their agenda. don’t tell them what you actually think or they might lose their mind.

Facebook is a no go for me mostly for not hiring in the Netherlands and also for being a s** company actively working to destroy society. They might have to solve both for me to go happily.

So when is John Carmack going to leave Facebook completely?

Sounds like they need to raise compensation offer amounts

They’re already on the top end of the distribution, you can see pretty accurate numbers on Levels.fyi

In my experience they could do better. Ex: TikTok, Snap, and Airbnb all make ~25% higher offers than FB for L5 and L6 engineers.

Wonder if that’s still true after snaps 30% drop

Probably, since offers are typically a dollar amount that converts to shares based on a trailing average price at hire.

At least snap doesn't do refresh grants the same way FB does, so you're compensation over the first three years will be equal/higher at FB.

> They’re already on the top end of the distribution, you can see pretty accurate numbers on Levels.fyi

Just how wide is this distribution? I'll look at levels.fyi but I've always found those surveys to be dubious. Also why is so bad for FB if engineers are turning down offers? That they stayed in the recruiting process long enough to get an offer indicates a basic willingness to work there, so declining the offer was simply a matter of some details not lining up.

I worked with a placement agency last time I was full time job hunting, and the agent urged me pretty hard to interview with FB but I refused. I ended up accepting an offer from a company that claimed to pay mid-market salaries with higher than average equity, and which didn't seem evil. I'd still never consider FB but I'm wondering how big the difference might have been. Wow.

It seems like the hiring market is simply exhausted in a lot of metros, e.g. SFO, SEA, NYC. Of course they can try to dramatically outbid competitors, but for a 70k-employee company, that's not really a sustainable strategy.

The concept of sacrifice nowadays is very different. "Sacrifice" is eating the opportunity cost of not working for a company with zero moral compass.

What used to be a baseline is now somehow pinnacle of moral strength.

"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country" is gone.

I turned down a 100k+ role at Facebook. I don’t regret the decision.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com