>Less top talent will want to be associated with facebook
How certain is this? Whether you like what Facebook does or not, you can't deny their engineering talent is top tier. I don't even use Facebook but I'd still want to work there just to work with the people there and the environment. Companies like Facebook and Google are pretty engineer friendly, more so than other companies. I don't think this event will be the tipping point for top talent to leave Facebook.
I was recently considering responding to the Facebook recruiter that keeps e-mailing me. Now I'm back to a definite no. These things start with people who are more on the fence.
If top talent working somewhere was enough to keep top talent from leaving, then no company that employed top talent would ever loose their position without missing payroll.
You have a valid point. Top talent existed in places like Silicon Graphics, Yahoo, etc. I guess you're right, the top probably got off the sinking ship long before the rest of the crew realized what was happening.
However, I still think this event is not "bad" enough for the crew to start fleeing. This is a bump in the road. People may hate Facebook but people sure do love Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus. Facebook has a pretty strong moat (for now at least).
'Top talent' generally have a lot of options, and there are plenty of companies in the Bay Area which have an engineer-friendly environment. Street-cred matters a lot more than you might think.
How certain was the same with Uber while they were going through the bulk of their issues? In a full employment market, not wanting to be associated with a company simply due to potential perception would be enough to have most candidates pass on an opportunity.
If Apple has top tier talent, why do they ship an OS with a huge security vulnerability? With a map framework that has memory leaks? With a messaging app that messes up the order of messages?
If Google has top tier talent, why did they create an OS that allowed a third party developer to siphon calls, contacts and messages?
If this is your argument, then no company has top talent.
"no company has top talent" is much closer to the truth than your implied assumption that even companies drenched in top talent must deliver shit products.
Well the better answer would be that top talent either work on ads or server side infrastructure. For client side its user device, battery, RAM and money and they could care less once they have thrown a free app in the face of users.
It takes some amazing engineering talent to build an app which drains your battery that slowly whilst uploading "everything" on your phone to Facebook's servers? :-)
Because swooping up all mobile audio and transmit it over would be a management decision, certainly not engineering.
This is what most likely drains the battery and your data plan.
You cannot explain this amount of drainage with CPU only.
Also swooping all kind of privacy data, like call logs, messages, contacts, calendar info is from management. Engineers really know better that this will be found out sooner and later, and then it's the end.
How certain is this? Whether you like what Facebook does or not, you can't deny their engineering talent is top tier. I don't even use Facebook but I'd still want to work there just to work with the people there and the environment. Companies like Facebook and Google are pretty engineer friendly, more so than other companies. I don't think this event will be the tipping point for top talent to leave Facebook.