Facebook Continues to Hire, While Keeping Costs at Bay

Facebook is expanding its employee base, but not by as much as you might have read, says a NY Times blog.

Facebook has hired more than 200 new employees in 2009. That makes about 1,200 employees in total, but it plans on growing that this year.

But in a recent interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Bloomberg News, Zuckerberg said the company is planning on hiring a whole lot more employees—with a caveat on costs.

“Facebook Inc. may expand its staff by 40 percent to 50 percent this year as it benefits from a surplus of engineers amid the recession, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said.”No one else has been hiring,” Zuckerberg, 25, said in an interview. “It’s been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out.”The world’s most popular social-networking Website, which has 1,000 employees, will build its work force at a slower pace than typical startups, Zuckerberg said.“

Expansion of 40 to 50 percent is still expansion, but it’s in line with keeping costs contained compared with companies that have grown as much as Facebook—like Google. From the NY Times blog, which received some clarification of hiring plans from Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu:

““If anything, we’re being more careful about growth,” Mr. Yu said. Many companies of Facebook’s size and age double in size each year, he said, but Facebook is making a conscious effort to avoid expanding that quickly and plans to grow at less than half that rate.Of course, hiring freezes and layoffs are the norm these days, and growing at up to 50 percent in a recession is more than many companies can do. But Facebook is armed with a $200 million investment that Digital Sky Technologies made in March, bringing the total amount the company has raised to about $600 million.“

While neither of these interviews details the type of jobs Facebook is hiring, I took a close look at the company’s job board back in March to try to get an understanding of where the company might be heading.

The verdict? A ton of operational, IT infrastructure and programming positions, as well as plenty of site reliability, MySQL dbas and technical project managers. The thing that stuck out to me the most was the insane security job posting for a “Machine Learning/Fraud Modeling Expert.”

Read the blog for the details on that position, and others.