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Apr 28, 2006 04:09 PM
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Where did Tom's boys go? A reader at MIT says MySpace is a no-show (despite a Wednesday tip), but Facebook's shopping for CS majors.
So, no sign of MySpace on campus this week. But the entire CS department job email list just got a recruiting email from Facebook. It's got a bunch of the same stats you already knew, but maybe some new ones too.
They mention, among other things, that that they plan to start doing "ad targeting, personalization, recommendation systems, and general data analysis." Hmm...
After the jump, Facebook's pitch to MIT students.
Facebook is the 7th most trafficked site in the US. They are a privately held company located in downtown Palo Alto near Stanford.
The environment is very fast-paced. New code is released every night. This is a huge difference from most companies where code is developed and tested for months or years before release.
There are lots of applications of:
Distributed systems - Most software needs to scale across hundreds of servers. Systems need to detect failures and work around them.
Machine learning - Facebook has over 7 million members, 60% of whom visit the site every day and over 90% of whom visit every month. The dataset is highly structured, and has applications for ad targeting, personalization, recommendation systems, and general data analysis.
Algorithms and optimization - With huge datasets (e.g. 7+ million active members with an average of 140 friends each), and hundreds of millions of page loads per day, efficiency starts to matter.
One measure of the impact you'll have is what they call the engineering leverage ratio: the number of page views the site gets every month divided by the number of engineers who build it. Facebook currently sends 9 billion pages per month with only 30 engineers, giving a ratio of 300 million page views per engineer. Google, on the other hand, has thousands of engineers and about the same number of page views as Facebook.
Facebook photos, created by just one engineer and one interaction designer over a couple of months this fall, already gets more traffic than any other photo site (e.g. webshots, yahoo photos, flickr). Over a million photos are uploaded every day.
Salary is competitive for silicon valley, and comes with stock options that have a good chance of being worth a lot of money in the future.
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