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Before FB came into picture, Google, Apple and other big techs colluded to artificially keep the pay low [1]. Every dev with a massive TC needs to thank FB everyday for refusing to become part of the cabal.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-settlement-i...

It's amusing that one of the concerns is Google employees leaving or potential candidates not applying at all because they'd rather "get rich by having a popular fb app." Just what happened to Facebook as a platform, were they just completely superseded by smartphone apps?

Incidentally, the decline of their platform is one of the reasons why I believe it is unlikely there will ever be a serious Meta third party App Store competitor on iOS- Facebook isn't very good at managing a developer community.

I think devs were more cognizant of the platform risk on FB, and the developer experience was absolutely pants. I dreaded every moment working within their platform, maybe it's different now. As well FB apps were necessarily less interesting, because they were so tightly integrated into FB it limited the potential experiences.

It just wasn't worth it when a developer could reach people on FB with ads instead, and point to their mobile app, where you can attempt to fully capture the value of the customer rather than just rent them from FB. Forgive me for the business speak there, I'm no longer in that space thank the stars.

Facebook pretty much gutted their API after privacy issues surfaced, predictable that people would stop building apps on their "platform"
They decided to dodge the spammy app problem by limiting the capabilities of apps until all kinds of apps, spammy or not, stopped being profitable, and then people stopped writing them. Seems to have worked for them.
Decline happened when FB started suppressing messages from apps on the feed and started prioritising news links and later images and videos. It also coincided with decline of flash, so a lot of apps like Farmville were re-built in HTML5 or as a native mobile app. These apps then used FB as an auth mechanism. The changes in FB APIs didn't help either.
Twitter envy was the cause of a lot of bad business decisions for Facebook.

They were really jealous of twitter being the source of “trending” topics on news broadcasts and wanted that role, so they boosted links and news articles rather than updates from friends, they even experimented with making all posts public.

It’s like they don’t know that their strength was that you could connect with people you know and care about, but they wanted to be another “shouting in the wind” platform.

> started prioritising news links

It probably helped their short term metrics but it really seems like this decision was terrible in the long term.

I and a lot of people I know began to disengage when Facebook mostly became people I didn’t know so well posting political crap.

They discovered it was more profitable and less hassle to focus on selling ads than trying to be a 'social OS'
The highlights from the 2021 F8 conference look- riveting

https://about.fb.com/news/2021/06/f8-refresh-developer-confe...

When I joined in 2011 the core infrastructure staff was so heavily ex-Google that the build files were valid Blaze.

There are a lot of factors that went into FB’s meteoric rise in the 2006-2014 range, but I think more than anything it was Sheryl telling the wage cartel that they could get fucked.

High-end Google hackers could walk across the street and TCO 2-5x more with negligible increase in risk.

>There are a lot of factors that went into FB’s meteoric rise in the 2006-2014 range

The main factor was MySpace being a mess, something like Twitter is today but nobody bothered to get it right except Zuckerberg.

What does "rainy weather and a few GPS misalignments" mean?
> a few GPS misalignments

I'm dating myself here, but back in the day, there used to be a weekly(?) strategy review that Google execs did, called a "GPS review" - I think it stood for Google Product Strategy review.

My guess is that a few 'misalignments' (exec speak for a review that went poorly) might make some key employees unhappy (e.g. their projects might get canceled) and that they might leave.

I think this should not be over-read. I believe that that's a form of sarcasm / ironical phrase, meaning _few minor incidents plus some planned retirements_ . As of he's implying that the employees tend to get overworried/annoyed easily for any minor incident.

Sorry I don't speak English natively (and to make things worst, I'm Italian!!) and I'm not sure I was able to express my thoughts in a comprehensible way! Please feel free to rephrase if you can do it better then me! Thanks! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I would posit rainy weather means some lower performance quarters in terms of stock price or performance in some way and GPS misalignments are strategic missteps with the overall direction of the company.
I would understand that some employees are not following the exact path that they wish.
After this Google started giving $1K in cash every christmas and one year gave everybody at the company a 10% bonus. Those times are gone.
And in 2009 they gave everyone a phone (Nexus One or G1, I don't remember) for Christmas instead of a $1K cash bonus... and then that one guy complained loudly (on eng.misc?) that he didn't need a phone and didn't want this phone, and the phone would impact his taxes even though he never asked for it, and complained that the phone was a terrible gift and even worse than a gift, and people told him to just donate it to his damn family and he would yell "but I'm still responsible for the taxes on this thing!" even though it was clearly explained that he wasn't. Over ten years later, I'm still shaking my head at how a few extremely toxic people could so effectively poison the culture and good spirits of thousands of employees.
the first time it was a G1, that would have been my first year so I think it was 2008. That wasn't the best phone (although I loved the keyboard). I ported a physics engine to it, and it ran, but the phone got very hot very quickly. The next year was the nexus one, the excitement was palpable. The nexus one was truly sexy at the time, definitely the first android phone that I loved.

As for that Googler- well, there were always a bunch of people there who had some or another circumstance that made them incompatible with the larger Google culture.

> I'm still shaking my head at how a few extremely toxic people could so effectively poison the culture and good spirits of thousands of employees.

But I'm assuming he did great at the whiteboard interview! Being sarcastic but I've always been surprised how some really terrible personalities are hired because they aced the tech quizzes.

The $1K christmas bonus started no later than 2002.

You say those times are gone, but have you seen what FAANG pays people now?

Yeah, back in the 2000s or even early 2010s a $1K+ employee holiday bonus would be a "holy shit!" event that would make the news. Doing so today, even after adjusting for inflation, would be met with "yeah, whatever" by everyone, including new grads.
I remember. Didn't they hand out cash? And there was concern around having that much cash at HQ. What a time.
Google gave out a $1600 cash bonus to all full-time employees at the end of 2021.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-promises-employees-16...

That was pay, not literal "cash" like the $1000 was.
Wasn't the year of the surprise 10% only because the unlawful collusion between Google, Apple, and others was on the brink of becoming public?
After this Google realised they would need to compete with Facebook on compensation and today employees at either company are paid a lot more than equivalent employees 15 years ago.
That's when the cash bonus ended, not started.
Yes, and, inspired by that, Alphabet tried to introduce its own problem: Google+.
Should have bought WhatsApp, and fitted it with Gmail search features.
If they had done this no one would be using WhatsApp today. Google has shown they don’t understand and can’t get chat right.
Nope, WhatsApp works just on phone number, not an email. It would have given them perpetual anxiety.

So they would have made WhatsApp work only with “Gmail” addresses instead - with Google Login and in a Chrome Desktop app only (of course) - and they’d have then shut it down after few years. Or people might have stopped using it before the shutdown.

Then just kill it after a few years
> Finally, we (or basically I) have not done a good enough job of high rewards for high performance.

15 years later, this is still a widespread problem everywhere. People don't capture the full value of their labor (which makes a sort of sense, given imperfect information and how risk is allocated), which leads to people not being incentivized to increase the value of their labor.

We've all heard stories about people being extra efficient and getting rewarded with raised expectations and maybe a paltry raise. If people were really incentivized to do their best work, I imagine we'd get a better world.

> which makes a sort of sense, given imperfect information and how risk is allocated

This doesn't just make a sort of sense to me, it makes perfect sense.

People trade their labor at a lower rate for higher stability (less risk). The people who start companies, find capital, and distribute that capital in ways that increase the value of the company have taken on more risk (how significant varies case-by-case and usually is a natural market cap ceiling to the total value the owners can extract ahead of employees).

If the company I work at gives me shares in that company, I want the company to pay less for my labor (and everyone's) if my belief is that collectively all employees output will accelerate my own wealth creation when I sell my shares in the company. The share becomes a transitive store of value I believe my own labor alone will never be able to keep up with, and I want to make sure the value it's accumulating is not diminished because the company is paying out the full capital value of everyone's labor. Then there would be very little incentive for me to take the shares in the first place, and, honestly, very little incentive for anyone to start a company (why take on that risk if there's no payout in excess of just joining another company?).

> People don't capture the full value of their labor

Why would you expect people to capture the full value of their labor?

Imagine you operate a business. You do the math and determine that hiring a new employee will cost you $100K/year, but it will bring in $100K/year of revenue. In other words, the employee would capture the full value that they create (assuming nothing goes wrong).

Do you hire that employee? Of course not. It doesn't make any business sense. It's more work for you, more risk for the company, and most importantly it provide $0 financial value to the company. It's an easy no.

Now if you can hire someone for $100K and their addition will bring in $150K, that's a different story.

You can't expect to capture the full value of your labor as an employee. However, you're also free from capturing the full value of the losses you might create. If you fail to ship your objectives or you accidentally drop the main DB and cost the company $100K, you don't receive a bill for the negative value you created. You get to keep your paychecks.

> which leads to people not being incentivized to increase the value of their labor.

This doesn't make sense at all. People increase the value of their labor all the time because it leads to more and better opportunities and gives more leverage in future negotiations.

You don't have to capture the "full value" of your labor to have an incentive to improve.

> People don't capture the full value of their labor (which makes a sort of sense, given imperfect information and how risk is allocated),

I think it is primarily due to de-risking. You agree with your employer that the biggest percentage of your income will be fixed and independent of how much value the company produced (be it profits or share appreciation or whatever). This makes sense because your life has high fixed costs, and your cash-flow cannot allow for years when you make zero (or even a negative amount), even if in the next one you would make 5 times your current salary.

> which leads to people not being incentivized to increase the value of their labor.

Don't think this is necessarily true. I would love to walk into an apple orchard now and spend an hour picking if I could keep 25% of the apples.

> If people were really incentivized to do their best work, I imagine we'd get a better world.

Assuming wages are a function of the free market. And the less mobile people are, the less job-applicants exist, and the higher wages need to be to poach. Incentivizing for good work might have diminishing returns after a certain point.

Is it actually a problem everywhere? I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not written about much on HN, but my guess is that at least some of the big tech companies will sometimes do large off-cycle performance bonuses. It may depend a lot on the work though, e.g. doing the thing the company actually cares about vs what they say they want or needing to fight one’s case a lot, or needing to have product focused improvements rather than some equivalent savings from efficiency.
This is the entire foundation of capitalism. The idea is that people who own capital only reward other people for their time who help add to their capital. If companies distributed all of the gains in terms of stock awards to employees, you will see very different asset distribution in our society.
> People don't capture the full value of their labor

If it does it's no longer capitalism.

That part about "a social networking bubble of imitations and tag alongs" is ironic, given Google's numerous failed attempts to tag along on the social networking bubble.
What this email doesn't say is that Google's solution for fixing retention problems was to reach out to Apple and many other large tech employers and sign illegal agreements to not hire each other's employees.

The subject of this email (Facebook) famously declined to participate however.

Then for years Google denied wrongdoing but said they couldn't address it because it was in active litigation.

Finally, the whole thing got settled (slap on the wrist but something at least), so Google employees could finally get an answer in the weekly all-hands (TGIF).

Laszlo Bock was their head of people at the time, and claimed that Google still did nothing wrong, and that they only settled because they were caught up in the whole thing with other companies like Adobe who did do something wrong. He said they did nothing wrong because they only stopped outbound recruiting towards employees at those companies, which had no effect, and still accepted inbound applications.

This raises the obvious question - if outbound recruiting had no effect, why was Google so eager to put at end to it? And how could Google act like they were caught up it the crossfire when it was specifically emails by Sergey Brin that provided the strongest evidence of illegal collusions?

It blew my mind how Google insists they hire "the world's smartest people" but then can have executives on stage spin narratives with ridiculous holes in it and expect those smart people to believe it rather than have their intelligence insulted.

But sadly, most Google employees did seem to buy it. There's a strong cult of indoctrination, starting with calling yourself a Googler and wearing the stupid hat, that Google execs just had a halo effect. I think between 2010 and now that halo effect has massively worn off, especially with all the dirty details about misbehavior from Sergey Brin, Vic Gundtora, and Andy Rubin.

Nonetheless, it served as strong evidence as to how even really smart people can get caught up in cult-like communities. The "founder worship", the indoctrination into company culture, all of that is super common in Silicon Valley tech companies and for an obvious reason - it works.

If you got an offer from Facebook they would beat it. I did this in 2012 and instantly had 10x the RSUs. Some Googlers thought it was immoral to do this. It was at this time that comp for engineers radically changed.
Google isn't nearly as nice of a place to work at as people make it out to be.

As an example they will finally increase vacation from 15days to 20days on April 1st this year.

The media reports this as "on top of already lavish perks Googlers are now getting 20 days of PTO a year!".

Gee whiz amazing. An increase from 15 days of PTO. If only we didn't much more than that in my much lower quality of life home country as a standard for tech workers.

And sorry if this sounds a bit spoilt. I should be grateful to work at a large megacorp in this economy right? It's just that Google isn't any better in terms of working conditions than any other big tech company. In fact in general it's a little bit worse yet there's propaganda movies (The Internship) about how great it is to work at Google.

It's a job. No one else seems to want to acknowledge it.

>and many other large tech employers and sign illegal agreements to not hire each other's employees.

I don't remember reading about any formally signed agreements. Executives aren't going to create an incriminating paper trail like that. Instead, it was some complaints in emails and an implied understanding. E.g. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt emails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...

You have both the direction and timeline backwards. It was Apple who reached out to Google, and it happened in 2005, two years before this [1].

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2014-03-24-emails-reveal-that-steve...