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> But I've been seeing responses to people working FB have been horrible since for a while now.

This might be more indicative of your bubble than anything.

Facebook isn’t having a hard time hiring, despite whatever the headlines are trying to imply. There will always be a steady stream of applicants for high paying FAANG jobs.

Being able to choose exactly which ultra-high-paying tech job you take or being able to walk away from one of those highly paid jobs is a massive privilege that not everybody shares.

Exactly this. It is fascinating to see this bubble on HN, when on the outside I know there are tons of friends and acquaintances who are happy to get a call from recruiters, happy to land a job and happy to work there.

The name of this bubble is salty delusion/denial - hn is exactly where you would find people that have tried to get hired at FB and have failed.

HN is exactly where you would find both types of people: the ones who got hired as the one who failed.

Not sure why you tried to take a jab with the community here that way, sounds pretty salty for an unknown reason.

Curious if you'd contradict recent coverage corroborating reports that FB isn't hitting hiring targets? https://www.protocol.com/workplace/facebook-docs-hiring-recr...

Hiring engineering talent is hard across the board. I can guarantee you that FB isn't the only one who isn't hitting hiring targets.

This strikes me as true. I have never worked for a fast-growing company that was able to hit their hiring target, Facebook included.

From the article:

> Facebook's hiring problems are far from unique. Tech industry surveys indicate that talent shortages and hiring difficulties for engineers and developers are among the biggest concerns for companies right now, and the labor market has grown exceedingly tight across almost every sector in the United States over the last year.

It's possible that Facebook is doing worse than other tech companies, but the article doesn't go into that.

> This might be more indicative of your bubble than anything.

Sure. But this bubble that I was in since for a long time had been OK with JOB positions and talking about a career in FB before. So if there is anything else, that itself shows that "my bubble" stopped preferring FB. Shouldn't that itself mean there is a reduction in people choosing FB? :)

And I am coming across this online and elsewhere too. So my bubble is not the only one with this feelings for sure.

Anecdotally, just last week I've seen someone I know on senior (IC) level actually amplify their transition to Facebook on LinkedIn ("so happy to have worked in X, so happy to join Y, blah blah"), and another former coworker messaged me about their team in FB that they joined in the past year. Also I get much more Amazon/Google/random startup recruiting than FB, so they don't seem desperate.

I had a couple friends who joined FB 5-7 years ago and reported horrible WLB, so I was avoiding it, but if the trend you are describing is correct (and that person from last week claimed WLB was fine), maybe I should consider it some day.

I think there's nothing really wrong with the company, and I would view a somewhat lower level of "caring about social issues"/"wokeness" per-employee to be a small positive :)

> amplify their transition to Facebook on LinkedIn

That’s just humble bragging on LinkedIn. It’s so common on that platform to humble brag everything that I wouldn’t read too much into that one.

Twitter is just as dangerous as Facebook as far as I can tell. So much outrage that’s spilled into riots and bloodshed has been fomented on there in broad daylight with little repercussion. Do you judge people who work at Twitter too?

Yup. I also judge people who use Twitter but I doubt that will go over well here.

Not everyone who uses Twitter uses it to connect to extreme political personalities. Plenty use it to keep connected to smart people in tech and elsewhere.

Twitter is not The Internet for a massive population of the globe; facebook is. If you doubt this, keep it in mind that "internet.org" redirects to FB.

Facebook's biggest problem in the next few years is going to be that it will struggle to attract new talent. Simply put if you're a senior SWE, even the possibility of FB putting a stain on your resume is going to drive you away, because there are so many other options out there. It's not worth the risk of always having to explain your time there because everyone has an opinion on the company these days. It's not that Facebook isn't a great place to work, it probably is. It's the fact that if you're at the level where you can get hired by Facebook, there are many many other options to reach for and the vast majority of people at that level are just going to reach for those other companies that are just as prestigious but carry none of the stigma.

On the other hand, I would personally find some sanctimonious interviewer asking me to defend my previous employment history from a perceived position of moral superiority a great screening tool for companies I would never want to work for.

Is it really a screening tool for the company? It more likely just says something about that particular interviewer. It's not like a company has a policy of telling interviewers to scrutinize past job appointments. That can be done by the recruiter if desired.

So I'm an engineer at my org. I'd never want to work for Facebook. If I'm interviewing you then yes I will ask you why you chose to work there when by definition you had other options.

Do you expect to have to justify your employment history for the rest of your life? Can you imagine some reasons why someone would work for FB that have no value judgment besides being different from your view of the world?

There seem to be a few assumptions you're making in the post above about someone you've never met and only know based on their current/former employer.

If you are asking that question, you already expect a certain answer to fit your beliefs and values. Therefore you are already biased and belong nowhere near a fair interviewing process.

As someone who worked for Blizzard 20 years ago, and is already cooking up "excuses" to offer interviewers like you...

I hope your candidate in this example is able to part the conference room blinds, and point out his better-than-yours car, house, or helicopter that he took to your job site. And then just drop a microphone on the way to the next interview.

:)

If it's a moral issue with a company you've worked for, you won't get the chance to defend yourself in front of a sanctimonious interviewer; you'll get screened before that point.

Good. Less of my time wasted.

This is a huge possibility. They are already struggling. The reality is I don't see Zuck backtracking on anything. Meta and the new tech coming around it is a good example of it. They are actually looking into doubling down on surveillance and being invasive.So them struggling should be a good point. Or a good thinng IMHO.

They could use AI to tackle this in the future now that we have Copilot of the sorts. It would be interesting to see how the cope up with it.

Facebook may be a dying company, slowly slowly slowly on the IBM timescale.

Facebook is definitely on the downslide. They staved off facebook's slide by successfully picking the next social network in instagram, but now that is probably going to lose its shine. If Tiktok is the next #1... That can't be easily acquired due to Chinese ownership...

They'll try the "metaverse" but man that is a big leap, and they are already poisoning their metaverse with stupid things like "must have a facebook account" which signals they are doomed to failure.

Facebook knows this. It's why they changed their name. Maybe the recruiting struggles signaled the death of the "Facebook" brand.

I'm sorry to break your fantasy, but FB is nowhere close to dying like IBM by pretty much any metric you can choose (apart from perception by random folks on the internet which frankly does not count for much).

$FB is up like 30% YTD? So by any reasonable standard on any reasonable timeframe, the smart money says it isn’t “dying.”

FB might have some negatives to society as a whole but there are also some positives (besides being able to talk to your family).

The ad product has enabled a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. I really can't understate how pivotal facebook has been -> because they know so much about you the targeting can be REALLY REALLY effective. For many products the traditional competitors like google can't even come close.

Being an e-commercialist+advertiser may make me biased but I've grown to love Zuck much more than I would've previously been comfortable with.