What are they doing over there all day?

January 30, 2012 10:18 AM

What do Facebook employees do?

More specifically what is the approximate breakdown of ~3,000 employees?

Is it safe to assume that the vast majority of them work sales of some sort? Wikipedia says "Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising,[65] and therefore Facebook serves only advertisements that exist in Microsoft's advertisement inventory." What does that mean, is Facebook not out selling adverting themselves?

posted by bytewrite to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Their job offering page gives some good hints. Lots of tech people, lots of sales and marketing. A large number of Job X in Country Y positions, and considering how many countries there are, that adds up fast.
posted by smackfu at 10:29 AM on January 30

The 'Microsoft is Facebook's exclusive partner for serving banner advertising' is wrong. Looks like that wording is from this press release from 2006 (but much has changed since then).

Most ads get sold and served via a self service tool. There are some premium ads (like on the homepage) that still get sold via salespeople working with agencies and advertisers. I believe the only thing Microsoft still does is sell text links on the search results page.

I'd imagine that its probably broken down 50/50 on web development/product people and ad sales/ad ops. In fact, if you take a look at the linkedin page here 41% are in R&D, 31% in 'general and administrative, 25% in sales and marketing, 3% in sales and leadership.
posted by jourman2 at 11:08 AM on January 30 [1 favorite]

Facebook has attempted to maintain a ratio of approximately one software engineer per one million users.
posted by awesomebrad at 1:16 PM on January 30

A lot of developers, software engineers, and ad sales staff. I actually interviewed to be their deals editor awhile back, so there are definitely a variety of roles.
posted by lunalaguna at 5:10 PM on January 30

This researcher at Facebook happens to be an acquaintance of mine.
posted by naoko at 8:57 PM on January 30