Facebook plans to grow headcount by as much as 50 percent amid a surplus of engineering talent, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg. “No one else has been hiring,” he said. “”It’s been a great environment for us because the economy has helped out.”

Facebook currently has 1,000 employees.

Zuckerberg said the company aims to eventually have 1 billion users, though he declined to give a time frame. He said he expects social networks to become as essential as Web browsers and operating systems.

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The path from engineering to marketing is usually not a straight line. Often there can be many stops along the way, as a product goes from idea to a spec to prototype release build, through the quality assurance process, and eventually general availability to the marketplace.

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For the first time in six years, enrollment in computer science programs in the United States increased last year, according to an annual report that tracks trends in the academic discipline.

The revival is significant, according to computer scientists and industry executives, who in the past have pointed to declining numbers of science and engineering students as a canary-in-a-coal-mine indicator warning about the nation’s weakening ability to compete in the global economy.

The number of majors and pre-majors in American computer science programs was up 6.2 percent from 2007, according to the Taulbee Survey, an annual survey conducted by the Computing Research Association following trends in student enrollment, degree production, employment and faculty salaries for computer science, computer engineering and schools of information in the United States and Canada.

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The following document is the actual text–carefully redacted–of a memo I wrote some time back after performing an IT project review. The project in question was a major IT re-engineering effort for a mission-critical system; it would eventually be canceled and the work products abandoned. The memo itself provides an interesting glimpse into just how a major IT project can go so far off the tracks that nothing useful is ever delivered.

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