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You should look into some of the statements they’ve made in the past about this. React is its own island and Facebook used to spend a lot of time finding and onboarding engineers, but due to React’s popularity no longer do. It’s the main driver behind their investment.

I don’t think this is accurate. The main driver behind investment in React is that a lot of business critical stuff is built on it. The main driver behind investment in open source is because the team cared about sharing what we learned with the industry.

React is a significant driver for Facebook UIE recruiting. It may not be the motivation of those on the team, but it’s still the largest business benefit, which is what Mikeal was referencing. I have definitely heard that statement said both internally and externally.

My impression from the past conversations I’ve heard about with the leadership (eg during the patents controversy) is that they see this benefit as marginal. It may have grown since but it’s nowhere compared to the value of the stuff built with it.

I’m not saying it’s not valuable. It’s just not the “main” driver for investing in React. It wasn’t a driver at all when investment started. And there’s plenty of FB orgs that would never trade “easier to hire people” for all the hassle that comes with an open source project.

Orgs isn’t comparable because UIE is an entire role. Recruiting is extremely painful for any large company, especially one involved in controversy. The pain you go through with open source is significant but in the broader business it is fairly insignificant.

Time spent working on OS concerns is time not spent doing something else. This is the argument teams successfully use to keep projects closed. The same is true for the React team. If you’re saying our work is valuable to FB, it’s not insignificant how we spend our time.

This conversation is a bit weird to me because I distinctly remember when we had to scramble these talking points (“hey, we can hire people easier”) along other 50 reasons because leadership didn’t believe it was worth the hassle. And now you’re saying it was the main driver.