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Comment by ktamura | Hacker News Reader

In 2007, I was just graduating from Stanford and vividly remember how my classmates perceived Facebook: they pretty much echoed Swisher's sentiment in the article. With the exception of a couple of really smart folks who wanted to "own" a significant part of yet-to-be-built Facebook, the most accomplished CS grads were joining Google in droves (Google was hot and on a hiring binge). Problems are Google seemed grander and more challenging and less toy-ish.

Microsoft was another popular destination at Stanford at the time. If Facebook was toy-ish and Google was cool, Microsoft was "respected". Many deemed Microsoft to be the McKinsey of tech: spend a couple of years there, build their resume and join or start a start-up. I even knew someone who took a job at Yahoo! over one at Facebook (Needless to say, most everyone who had offers from either Google or Microsoft chose them over Facebook).

Hindsight is 20/20 =)

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Someone once told me that he joined Facebook before it surpassed MySpace. Had he stayed and waited for his stocks to vest, he would make serious bank. Like, life changing amount of money. Instead, he joined another company before any of it vested and well...

Hindsight is 20/20 but missing out on that would haunt me.

Every other day there's a stock somewhere around the world going up 1000%, because of a miraculous biomedical or geological discovery, or invention, and life changing amounts of money could be missed by not borrowing a personal loan from the bank and putting it all on that stock. If someone had the foresight to know what was going to happen, they would make bank, and occasionally someone did.

Everyday we're missing out.

If your friend stayed and Facebook had fallen through and your friend missed three pay checks it would haunt him against working at startups too...

> life changing amounts of money could be missed by not borrowing a personal loan from the bank and putting it all on that stock

But this is different from already being employed at that company and not seeing the potential.

In 2007 (purely by chance, I had followed the VPEng from the previous company) I was working on a Facebook application at a startup. In contrast to your experience, I recall being impressed by the quality of their engineering, rapidity with which bugs were fixed, their approach to developer support and rate at which the service scaled and added features. We were dealing with all the major "social" platforms as application developers at the time (MySpace, FB, Google, Hi5, Bebo). Facebook were by far the most impressive. Ever since I've chuckled when I hear about how Facebook is a toy and Zuck can't code...

In 2005 I was just graduating from CMU. I remember when Facebook came to campus. They picked a large lecture hall to pitch their job openings. I want to say Facebook was way less than 100 employees at the time. In the lecture hall (which probably sat 100) there were about 20 people. I already had a nice full-time offer lined up - and remember thinking - why would I ever want to work for a company whose users "poke" other users. What value is there in that? #doh

A lot of folks have pretty good foresight, too.

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