Possibly. I've had this conversation a few times and I find it mostly unresolveable.

There's no useful measure of FB's efficiency, what 10X more FB means... so we can't externally measure the claim. Whether or not someone agrees with me or you probably relates to what we think about work & efficiency broadly.

I think there are two parts, one which is resolvable and one which isn't.

FB doesn't "do that much more today than in 2012" - completely resolvable. I hear statements like this all the time. FB/Google/Amazon don't do more, they just do it bigger, or they just hire engs to keep them from the competition, etc. FB had 3000 employees total at IPO. I can easily name 10 brand new things launched/acquired since IPO that each have a massive user base and at least 1000 engineers on them now. I'm sure people could do the same for Google, Amazon, Apple.

The unresolvable part - are the 60K employees at FB today individually doing as much as the 3K employees were at IPO? Personally, I doubt it. The luxury of being big means you can try more ambitious stuff that may never launch, overbuild on infra and process, etc. The flipside is that niche features you've never heard of can drive millions in revenue bc of the scale of the userbase and business customers.

I disagree... "10 brand new things launched/acquired" is not a measurable quantity. You could tally up the employees that worked at these companies pre acquisition... but to total is a lot bigger.

There's also the fact that in software, you have something once you build it. Software is cumulative, so you'd expect it to grow as long as someone is working on it.

There are various points of evidence, but they're all arguable.

I think you just want to argue. Using IG as an example, if you think a completely separate app with a billion monthly active users isn’t doing anything more than FB did at IPO, you’re never going to be convinced. If you think selling the most popular VR headset and building the infra for a metaverse isn’t more than FB was doing at IPO, you’re never going to be convinced.

I mean there's also like the super not obvious stuff that comes with scale. Facebook wanted to hire me to join their team that does supply chain optimization to ensure that computers get to their datacenters fast enough. That's like a reasonable thing for them to have but it's totally removed from the product.

Good point, but is "supply chain optimization to ensure that computers get to their datacenters fast" a task that is not required at 2012 FB-scale, or is it an optimisation that FB just didn't have the scale for in 2012.

The former implies inefficiencies of scale. The latter implies efficiencies. I think both exist.

And yet Marketplace has amazingly poor UX and only has traction because it fills a niche of classifieds with RL identity.

To the larger points here, this illustrates another major failing of large organizations that achieve de facto monopoly status due to network effect: arrogance towards the users that made them so large in the first place.