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New Facebook Engineering campus

facebook.com

31 pointszacharytamas16 comments

moments like these are when big companies are most vulnerable to competitors. Facebook will be focused on expanding their campus to foster creativity and in the meanwhile creativity will foster elsewhere. But good for Facebook. Though in this part of town the Apple campus is still clearly boss.

Indeed, the Silicon Valley new building curse is well-known: http://news.cnet.com/Can-Google-beat-the-new-office-curse/21...

Also: a "paradise workspace" with open seating? Bleah.

Open seating can either be a paradise workplace or a horrible nightmare. It depends on the nature of the work and the disposition of the people around you.

One of my very favorite work environments was in a tightly packed open seating area.

The danger in building a beautiful campus is that you attract people who like beautiful campuses.

Why is this a danger?

Indeed. Being in a nice campus can make a huge difference for morale. In some corporations the engineering offices look like crap while the executive offices are beautiful. Based just on that you can tell that the corporation doesn't really give a crap about its engineers. I'd rather not work in a corporation who thinks that their engineers are not important enough to give them a beautiful working environment.

I once worked at a company (a software company, even) where the developer's office were behind a very long dark hallway filled with multiple years of accumulated garbage. There was an open desk with a peekaboo view of Puget Sound, but I wasn't allowed to sit there because someone with seniority might want to sit there, even though the more senior person didn't want to move.

Hell yeah, I'll take a beautiful campus if you'll give me one.

I'd hardly consider basically a big warehouse/hangar full of mobile desks and some kitchens to be extravagant. It seems like the lowest cost way to warehouse lots of engineers in an open plan environment, which Facebook for some reason really likes.

Zuck will have fun explaining to the shareholders why they are spending money on this and not trying to get back to their IPO stock price.

Keeping his engineers happy and hopefully more productive would be a step in the right direction of that goal.

That's true and most if not all programmers know that. Shareholders are a different story.

They might look at this as frivolous waste of money that should rather go towards "restoring" Facebook's image that has declined in the past months.

I think this is fantastic and I look forward to seeing the outcome of this, secretly envying the employees from my cubicle :)

Facebook started at $38. It is at $19.41 right now, If I was a Facebook shareholder I would be very worried that half my investment is gone, and that said FB engineers and early inverters had just cashed out after the latest lockup expired. It is a publicly traded company now, and like any CEO Zuck's job is to make money.

> Zuck will have fun explaining to the shareholders why they are spending money on this and not trying to get back to their IPO stock price.

Zuck has 57% of the voting rights so listening to shareholders is a courtesy on his part.

Facebook's new engineering campus is a judgement call. To argue that he's wrong, you basically have to argue that you're better at making that sort of decision than he is.

Where's the evidence for that claim?

Zuck has to listen to the market. If the market is dumping his stock like after the recent lock-up expired then there's a problem.

Why exactly? He presumably has enough money cashed out that even if FB went bankrupt he'd be OK. And he controls the voting shares, so if that's what he wants, then that's what would happen.

Dual class share structure means that Zuck doesn't have to bother explaining anything.

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