New chapter in Facebook

Why Facebook?

I got couple offers late last year as I felt bored in Microsoft. At the end, my decision really narrowed down to 2 companies: Google and Facebook. Financially, Google’s offer is more attractive since everybody knows FB is still a bit behind on Ads revenue. Techinically, Google is also a better place for learning state-of-art technology. Google is still years ahead on infrastructure and some product initiatives.

What really pushes me to make the decision is the potentially big product impact. I think Facebook is still in the very early stage of it’s social graph monetization. It’s still majorly text-based articles/news. Historically, TV(graphical) ads outgrew Print ads. I would imagine similar pattern happen in both Google and Facebook but Facebook has bigger chance here as text will still be the primary search interface in the coming years given current NLP technology. While, Facebook’s photo sharing and posts could play a very interesting role here. When I see my friends new gadgets, I would be interested in learning more and potentially buy that because it’s vetted by my friends :)

On the other hand, the eng team is still very small compared with it’s market valuation. It’s still only have less than 2k engineers working on so many product features now. When it comes to individual impact, it will bring more feeling of accomplishment. One metrics I looked at when I made decision is revenue per employee. Facebook is near 2 million, which reflects how efficient/nimble and high margin the business Facebook is in.

How’s everything so far?

It’s been couple weeks since I started. I am happy about everything (honey moon period). We started from Bootcamp, in which you will have a mentor to help you to identify team fit during this period. Bootcamper can pick up interesting tasks from different teams and assess team fitness. For example, I’m now taking tasks from search team, entities ranking team and public content ranking team because I’m very interested in building machine learning based product.

So far, everything looks great. I can sure I will learn and grow a lot along the way.