I realize that Facebook gets enormous amounts of traffic, and so requires the resources for scaling/high availability and all that. But how in the world have they gone through most of $500 million? What the hell are they doing over there?
That's sort of what I'm getting at. Why do they need so many resources? I mean, looking at the software and its requirements, I don't see the necessity.
Yeah. And Google has done the exact same thing. They're just fortunate that their business model is so much better that it can support their massively inflated head count. At least with Google it kind of makes sense in an evil way: hire every programmer who could be a serious competitor.
Difference being that Google recognizes that one of their strongest growth areas is capitalizing on innovative ideas. Gmail, Apps, Gtalk, Chrome... all innovations that build the company.
I'm not sure what facebook has done, or whether this should really be what the focus on, to be honest.
Perhaps also with some empire-building thrown in? Maybe everyone wants a promotion in recognition of their great work, so they need to hire new employees to work under them. I have seen hiring decisions made for that reason before.
The hard part is molding the social behavior into something that adds a lot of value to the users and eventually to Facebook shareholders. How hard is that?
I remember a thread here in HN asking how much time would you need to build a site like Hacker News. Lots of people said something like "a week, top". pg said something like "one year".
It's always been interesting to hear people's responses to "how long do you think it would take to duplicate Facebook?" In general, the more experience/knowledge the person has, the longer they think it would take...
I bet their revenue projections were based upon insane levels of growth (internal and external). Even if the economy was in better shape it would have been hard to reach profitability.
