Why Would A Top Talent Developer Join Facebook Now?
So… I keep hearing how all the top talent in Silicon Valley wants to join Facebook… but why? I can’t think of a single reason why they would; and I can think of a whole bunch of reasons why they wouldn’t. For example…
- Coding social networking software is pretty tedious - it’s essentially nothing but bog standard database-driven web-site CRUD code. That wasn’t interesting in 1997 (although at least web-site CRUD was vaguely new then). It’s still not interesting in 2007. Yawn.
- Doesn’t Facebook use PHP? If you thought coding standard database-driven web-sites was tedious, having to code them using PHP is enough to make you go jump off a bridge.
- The Facebook management team has chosen to go for an artificial, massively over-the-top $15B valuation in their advertising strategic alliance with Microsoft. They could have done the same deal, and had Microsoft not take any equity all, so not inflating the company valuation. So, if you join now, any stock options you get are likely never going to be worth anything… and even if they give you stock instead of options, there’s still no upside.
What are on offer, then, seem to be pretty dull programming jobs that won’t make the new joiners rich. Why would top talent go for those kind of opportunities? I don’t get it…
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