This particular number counts monthly active users. Your friends with three accounts would have to be active on the site at least once a month in each account for them to be counted in this total.
I can't and won't say anything about Google, but I will say that your implication that we Facebook employees are greedy, un-hacker-like and unable to get into Google is inaccurate and unfair.
I can't argue on any objective basis on the financial motivation point. (How would I measure that? How did -you- measure that?) I will say that in my experience my coworkers are primarily motivated by the ability to have a outsized impact and the ability to work with great independence.
Facebook has a crazy-passionate hacker culture. Tons of engineers have really neat side projects, and plenty of these ship. Every six weeks or so we have (voluntary) all night hackathons, where there is plenty of food and drink, and the agreed task is simply to build something cool not related to our usual work.
Finally, P(Could work at Google | Works at Facebook) is really high. As evidenced by a recent news article, hundreds of Facebook people are actually Google alumni. I know many of my coworkers turned down Google offers to come here, and it's practically routine for new grad hires to have a Google offer as leverage in coming to FB.
I'm going to work at Facebook soon, and I'm paying very close attention to what's going on. I'm looking forward to seeing the other side of the story as it were.
Raymond Chen (the author of this article), Larry Osterman and others have been writing great historical MS stuff for years. There's lots of great stuff if you've got the time to read it.
I'm not sure that the brand awareness of these cases is related to the company naming. For example, I think Bingo Card Creator is well-known mostly because everyone here loves patio11.
I think by and large we agree: It's wrong to expect memorized answers or to ask questions that are so narrow that they only test whether a candidate spent time studying. I'd even go so far as to say that algorithmic questions are probably not good indicators for skill at many kinds of work we would call "programming"---i.e. Programming skill is more heterogeneous than many interviewers admit. We shouldn't expect a jQuery wiz to nail low-level data structure questions, and we shouldn't expect a bit-twiddling video codec developer to really grok method chaining in 30 minutes.
The trouble with "Be reasonable" is that's it's the advice equivalent of a tautology. Of course we should be reasonable when interviewing. But I don't think there's widespread agreement about how to operationalize that. I'd be curious for more detail about how you would do it---you seem to have strong, well-informed feelings on this issue.
To my knowledge, there's basically no publicly-available research on tech interview factors and how they correlate with on-the-job performance. The good big employers do this research internally and keep it to themselves. The rest of us are stuck with assumptions, intuitions, logic and argument. So unfortunately I don't think we'll be able to get the debate into the realm of interpreting real data anytime soon.
It's a good idea, and I think it would make an excellent supplement to current interview practices. There would be some difficult logistical issues: Unfamiliar dev environment, etc. It wouldn't replace whiteboard coding, since you lose the ability to test for culture fit, give hints, examine thought process, ask about small decisions, get a gut check and other aspects of whiteboard coding that have nothing to do with the specific question asked.
Some companies ask for a small code sample "that you're proud of" in advance of onsite interviews, I think that's another good practice.
"Gets-things-done" people prepare for technical interviews, such that they don't flub simple questions. The danger for the employer is that lots of Computer Science PhDs end up not writing much code during their research, and may not be a good fit at many tech employers.
"Interview for Smart and Gets Things Done" is an accurate explanatory abstraction over what good interviewers do, but it's not prescriptive enough to tell people what questions to ask and how to judge the results.
That's disingenuous. When they say "no built-in functions", they really only mean "don't use a library function that makes this task trivial." Which eliminates 'strlen' in C, 'length' in Haskell, 'len' in Python, etc.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/authentication/