Eric Eldon posted earlier tonight that Jeff Hammerbacher, the person behind the “Data” team at Facebook will be jumping ship. Jeff Hammerbacher was also at Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg. Why is Jeff leaving? Eric and everybody else appear to have no idea but there is speculation behind the departure. One reason that Eric Eldon suggests is that the new ex-Google executives have created tension among the upper ranks at Facebook who were all developers.

Sheryl Sandberg and Elliot Schrange, both have no development experience and since the two joined, there has been two executives to already leave the company. Aside from that, there are no details really about why Jeff has jumped ship but Facebook has confirmed that it’s happening. Perhaps we will see an official statement from Facebook tomorrow. There are also theories that some employees think Facebook has peaked and given the company’s loose stock option policy, they are free to go at will.

Whatever the reason for the exit, it is definitely interesting to see so many high-level employees leaving the company.