I just became aware of a computer science major from a solid university who just turned down an $82,000 starting salary at Microsoft with the potential of $50k in options over three years for a position at Facebook. Here is the rub – Facebook hasn’t made an offer yet.

Yes, this person would rather take an imaginary job in the worst economy of his lifetime instead of a real job – if the imaginary job of course is at the world’s leading social networking company.

Facebook is the “in” place to work and Google and other companies are losing talent to Facebook and other new startups at a fairly rapid clip.

This is one of the reasons why Google for its part has just approved a 10% raise and $1,000 bonus for all 23,000 of its workers. Tammy Wolf has more on this story at TMCnet.

Tech continues to be a very bright spot in our economy and just one of the reasons we should encourage students to focus more on their science and math skills.

Facebook is hiring and their personalized message to me on their careers website explains how I can work there and enjoy hearty world cuisine – apparently the way to an engineer’s career choice is through their stomach.