Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Facebook Ships Code

framethink.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 116 posts

Re: How Facebook Ships Code

#91

Post by tfb »

its_so_on wrote: post #34

This is the real Facebook secret sauce in convenient flowchart form: What's the most evil thing we can think of doing? V Candidate ------->^ V (yes) ^ Is it legal? ^ V (yes/no) ^ Can we get away with it? (abs. not)--->^ V (yes/maybe/prob. not) ^ Keep shipping! ^ V ^ Did we get in trouble for it? (no) ^ V (yes) V ^ Claim it was a mistake! V ^ V V ^ Still in trouble? (no)-> Keep feature->^ V (kind of) ^ Being sued for…

Sadly, that flowchart has some truth to it.

I asked this in another (semi-dead) thread and it didn't get a response, so I'll ask again as I couldn't find any information on it. Was any legal action taken against facebook in the recent e-mail hijacking fiasco? I think there should be, since e-mail has pretty much replaced snail mail in terms of business communications, which directly affects the livelihood of many people. Companies like facebook with so much power at their fingertips should not be able to get away with doing things like altering millions of people's address books for their own selfish reasons.

Re: How Facebook Ships Code

#92

Post by SatvikBeri »

damoncali wrote: post #90
chris_wot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were Zuckerberg, I'd be terrified of slipping into a premature complacency or a heavyweight process that prevents change. He just listed Facebook on NASDAQ - cant think of a single business decision that would do more to cause this result than that!

To be fair, he really had little choice.

Exactly. Companies are legally required to go public if they have >500 shareholders, which Facebook has had for a while due to investors + stock options.

Re: How Facebook Ships Code

#93

Post by accountoftheday »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #92
damoncali wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, he really had little choice.

Exactly. Companies are legally required to go public if they have >500 shareholders, which Facebook has had for a while due to investors + stock options.

Wrong. You can stay private with >500 shareholders, you just have reporting requirements matching those of a public company.

Re: How Facebook Ships Code

#94

Post by gouranga »

gouranga wrote: post #70
its_so_on wrote: post #34

This is the real Facebook secret sauce in convenient flowchart form: What's the most evil thing we can think of doing? V Candidate ------->^ V (yes) ^ Is it legal? ^ V (yes/no) ^ Can we get away with it? (abs. not)--->^ V (yes/maybe/prob. not) ^ Keep shipping! ^ V ^ Did we get in trouble for it? (no) ^ V (yes) V ^ Claim it was a mistake! V ^ V V ^ Still in trouble? (no)-> Keep feature->^ V (kind of) ^ Being sued for…

That's great - thanks for posting it :)

If you're going to down vote, please at least say why...

Re: How Facebook Ships Code

#95

Post by lmm »

Silhouette wrote: post #10

Am I the only person who thinks this whole approach is broken? We have seen the rise of "devops" recently, and big name web companies like Facebook and Google seem to be very proud of how engineer-led they are, how empowered their developers are, how their product managers don't have much real authority, how they push code to production ten minutes before it's even written, and so on. From the outside, I see systems…

>And I see huge brands whose egotistical staff don't realise that they are successful despite evidently not bothering with either real product management or robust testing, not because of these things

Citation needed. The massive public success of these companies would argue against you, as would my personal experience working with and without traditional project management.

Re: How Facebook Ships Code

#96

Post by bajsejohannes »

gouranga wrote: post #94
gouranga wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great - thanks for posting it :)

If you're going to down vote, please at least say why...

Comments on HN tends to be voted down if they are not substantial. To quote http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html: Does your comment teach us anything?

That page also says that a simple thanks may be acceptable, but the consensus seems to be that those comments are superfluous as well.

Re: How Facebook Ships Code

#97

Post by krosaen »

""" Engineers responsible for testing, bug fixes, and post-launch maintenance of their own work. there are some unit-testing and integration-testing frameworks available, but only sporadically used. """

Sounds like a lot of code debt accumulating that could bite them hard down the road - it's one thing to write and manually verify bug free code, it's another for a different engineer to make sure he/she doesn't break that code inadvertently a year later when the original author has moved on to another project or company. I'm not talking about 100% test coverage; if the smoke test for a feature breaking is someone noticing while playing with the site, in the long run it strikes me as a much less efficient way to verify and fix regressions than using an automated test suite. Writing good tests is hard, but keeping a product bug free as more and more functionality accumulates without automated test suites is even harder in my experience.

Re: How Facebook Ships Code

#98

Post by Daniel_Newby »

alttab wrote: post #54
yawgmoth wrote: post #43

I like the idea of encouraging a high-performance culture, but I don't think the 'perform or die' atmosphere would be healthy for many engineers. I know, idolizing 'rockstar programmers' is a sort of new hotness and I understand that a company like Facebook wants to have super-talented developers, but developers grow and learn new tricks as they mature, and they might take more than six months to do so.

True - but those engineers don't work at Facebook. This isn't no-child left behind. This isn't hand-hold time. This is the most expensive and expansive internet application in the world. If they need time to ramp up, they can do it on someone else's product and come to Facebook when they're ready.

"This is the most expensive and expansive internet application in the world."

Facebook uses chat/pictures to sell ads and cheesy games.

Their entire value proposition comes from surfing a wave of attention. What they need are scruffy surfer dudes who keep an eye on the weather, show up at the likeliest beaches, and never stop riding the waves. Anyone with a modicum of skill who keeps paddling out to try again can make a real contribution.

What they do not need are rockstars, certified supergeniuses, arrogant hotshots, etc. You can't buy or impress your way to the big waves, you have to ride there.

If you try to keep winning by being awesome, you will wipe out. For example, Netscape, AOL, Alta Vista, Geocities, MySpace, and many others.

Re: How Facebook Ships Code

#99

Post by snowwrestler »

accountoftheday wrote: post #93
SatvikBeri wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Companies are legally required to go public if they have >500 shareholders, which Facebook has had for a while due to investors + stock options.

Wrong. You can stay private with >500 shareholders, you just have reporting requirements matching those of a public company.

It's the reporting requirements that create the risk of stifling bureaucracy.

By listing on NASDAQ, Facebook at least gains some capital in return for this reporting.

Re: How Facebook Ships Code

#100

Post by mgkimsal »

tedunangst wrote: post #89
mgkimsal wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A system I work on has grown a lot over the last few years (data for 2000 users is now data for 50,000, rules have been added, etc). Example story: We had an issue that was only coming up on production. I could not reproduce it in a dev environment. Worse, we didn't even notice it for a long time because it was a nightly job, and people were not reporting an absence of their notifications. (nightly job to email repor…

Adding on top of that was my own dynamic language background not mapping well to the JVM - one bad address in the middle of a loop doesn't just get skipped and logged, but the entire process now stops. Makes me wonder what dynamic language you're used to. An uncaught exception in both python and ruby aborts the program, not just the tiny inner loop that happens to be running.

Primarily PHP, although I seem to remember classic ASP VBScript not dying if you passed a bad email to CDO (but that's been a long time, so i might not remember that correctly).

PHP would not throw an exception if the mail function got a bad email address. well, using some mailing libraries might, but the core mailing function (basically just a wrapper for sendmail/postfix CLI stuff) wouldn't.

Post reply on HN