Facebook to Expand Staff by 50 Percent, who says its recession ?

In an interview with Bloomberg, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to expand its staff by 50 percent this year. Nobody else is hiring, Zuckerberg claims, so there’s a surplus of engineers on the market, and Facebook has big plans ahead, which will require some fresh blood.

“The thing I want to remind people of is we’re way closer to the beginning than the end,” he said. That may very well be true, but one has to remember that a lot of the money at Facebook’s disposal doesn’t come from revenue, it comes from investments. And Facebook had already spent a tidy sum this year on its FriendFeed acquisition.

Facebook has big expectations for this year’s revenue. Board member Marc Andreessen said the revenue for 2009 should reach $500 million; COO Sheryl Sandberg said it should grow 70 percent compared to 2008. Since Facebook’s financials aren’t public, we can’t be sure what the numbers for 2008 really were (Facebook’s own projections from January 2008. were at 300 – 350 million dollars).

There’s one area where Facebook has no problems: growth. We’ve been following it closely, and it’s been phenomenal; even after surpassing MySpace in pretty much all aspects (traffic, number of users, time spent on site), it hasn’t stalled for a second.

Zuckerberg claims the company’s goal is to have a billion users; in July, we reported that Facebook has added 50 million new users in only 30 months. It doesn’t feel like a recession year at Facebook, but to justify the planned staff expansion, Facebook will also have to hit its revenue targets; otherwise it’ll have to turn to investors for another cash injection.

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Google, Facebook Battle For Computer Science Grads. Salaries Soar.

Google and Facebook are fighting hard to hire this years crop of computer science graduates, we’ve heard, and ground zero is Stanford. Most of the class of 2008 already have job offers even though graduation is months away.

Last year, salaries of up to $70,000 were common for the best students. This year, Facebook is said to be offering $92,000, and Google has increased some offers to $95,000 to get their share of graduates. Students with a Masters degree in Computer Science are being offered as much as $130,000 for associate product manager jobs at Google.

Apparently the popular Facebook Applications class is getting a lot of attention from other startups, too. Slide and RockYou are both recruiting hard. One source says that RockYou is approaching students and telling them they aren’t hiring them, they’re “acquiring” their “companies” and will let them continue to work on their applications after graduation. That is, of course, some serious smoke blowing - any code they’ve been working on in the class is likely to be shelved by RockYou. Still, it’s a great way to recruit by making these students feel like they’re entering into some kind of an M&A transaction.

Something tells me the Pitzer students who’ve enrolled in the Learning From YouTube class aren’t getting the same types of offers.

Source: TechCrunch.com