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Meta developer tools: Working at scale

engineering.fb.com

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Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#141

Post by nudgeee »

ben_w wrote: post #134
rangledangle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No company I've worked at after FB/Meta ships or works even at a non-eng level with the same velocity. I always attributed that to their internal tools, since most of the other companies seem to be using the same crap. Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. And don't get me started on the how good the task tool is compared to literally any other ticketing system out there. Everything is behind th…

> No company I've worked at after FB/Meta ships or works even at a non-eng level with the same velocity. This is a curious thing to see. As a mere user , and speaking purely about FB not any other Meta IP… Other than unbreaking things that break when the OS and browsers change under you, has Facebook shipped even one thing in the last five years? Don't get me wrong, I know it takes a lot of effort to stand still — fo…

I don’t work for Meta, but you can see their product announcements here: https://about.fb.com/news/category/product-news/

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#142

Post by rangledangle »

ben_w wrote: post #134
rangledangle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No company I've worked at after FB/Meta ships or works even at a non-eng level with the same velocity. I always attributed that to their internal tools, since most of the other companies seem to be using the same crap. Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. And don't get me started on the how good the task tool is compared to literally any other ticketing system out there. Everything is behind th…

> No company I've worked at after FB/Meta ships or works even at a non-eng level with the same velocity. This is a curious thing to see. As a mere user , and speaking purely about FB not any other Meta IP… Other than unbreaking things that break when the OS and browsers change under you, has Facebook shipped even one thing in the last five years? Don't get me wrong, I know it takes a lot of effort to stand still — fo…

Most of the open source Ai things are Meta. React, GraphQL, pytorch, rocksdb, docusaurus, prophet, a whole ton of internal tools that aren’t public knowledge. Full disclosure I haven’t worked there since 2019 though, so not sure since then.

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#143

Post by stavrianos »

dnissley wrote: post #127
giraffe_lady wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"

"driving helps a ton of people get around, but sometimes people drive drunk and kill other people, so it's definitely unforgivingly bad"

The problem with facebook isn't that individual users sometimes do bad things on it's platform.

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#144

Post by rangledangle »

KaiserPro wrote: post #73
castlecrasher2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. As someone who vastly prefers Slack over all its competitors, I'm very interested in hearing how Meta's compares. What makes it better than Slack for you?

As a chat system workplace is inferior to slack. Discovery and organisation of chats are hard, especially group chats that would normally be a channel. However the combination of the "newsgroup" and chat makes it kinda better than slack on it's own. Would I use workplace at a new startup? probably not. I would use slack though.

Yea, it could be that FBs internal tooling connected to workchat is what made it so great. I think channels are a nasty way to handle topics of conversation compared to posts on a forum type place. Leaning into searchability and all that was great.

I’ve seen sub 500 employee companies and Slack kicks ass, but it seems once it goes over 1k it’s like glhf managing channels and bots.

Butterfly bot integration to workplace was really something.

Workplace def overkill sub ~ 600 users though.

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#145

Post by rangledangle »

dnissley wrote: post #126
castlecrasher2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. As someone who vastly prefers Slack over all its competitors, I'm very interested in hearing how Meta's compares. What makes it better than Slack for you?

Don't believe the hype -- I think workchat probably beats slack for speed in the web client, but the desktop/android clients which I use regularly are truly sluggish and constantly refusing to load new messages if I'm not constantly using them, forcing me to restart them in order to do so.

Oh yea, web comparison for sure, but I also don’t see a difference between slack desktop and web. They’re both electron clients though iirc, the desktop client just wasn’t given much attention because web worked great.

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#146

Post by rangledangle »

changoplatanero wrote: post #86
castlecrasher2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. As someone who vastly prefers Slack over all its competitors, I'm very interested in hearing how Meta's compares. What makes it better than Slack for you?

I also think meta's workchat was better than slack. Maybe its because at my new company slack has to play the role of both workplace and workchat whereas at meta they have two separate things for that.

Moving to a company using a hodgepodge of constantly rotating SaaS tools has been hell. I’m always thinking to myself “why can’t they just do this?”. I think I’ve been both spoiled and broken permanently.

On the other hand, building all these connections between the disparate apps is basically my job, so it’s got its positives.

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#147

Post by shepherdjerred »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #80
phyrex wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also doing a lot of good. It's in the nature of any broadcasting and communications platform

"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"

As much as I dislike Meta, this is a very unfair comparison.

Facebook has done a lot of harm to the world, but it also has done plenty of good.

Aside from that, your analogy is incredibly weird. Do people drive drunk to... work? Who does that?

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#148

Post by shepherdjerred »

yodsanklai wrote: post #103
yawnxyz wrote: post #12

This kind of stuff puts me off from wanting to work at FB. If I got really good at working with these tools (or fell in love with this tooling), I wouldn't really be able to go back to working "in the real world"

> If I got really good at working with these tools (or fell in love with this tooling), I wouldn't really be able to go back to working "in the real world" SWEs need to learn new tools all the time. This shouldn't be a concern. Besides, it's not like "the real world" only use a single tool. Each company has their own tweaks, even those using open source stuff.

Big tech has _way_ better tools than what most companies use. At Amazon so many concerns were taken care of for you like:

* How do I setup a new project? * How do I build code? * How do I pull internal dependencies? * How do I publish artifacts?

Every company makes a horrible copy of these systems with off-the-shelf tools. At Amazon there were certainly flaws in the internal tools, but overall it was much better than the "real world".

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#149

Post by rangledangle »

steve1977 wrote: post #94
rangledangle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No company I've worked at after FB/Meta ships or works even at a non-eng level with the same velocity. I always attributed that to their internal tools, since most of the other companies seem to be using the same crap. Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. And don't get me started on the how good the task tool is compared to literally any other ticketing system out there. Everything is behind th…

For me as a customer/user, Facebook seems to be the same since 5 or more years. So that velocity doesn’t translate to user experience unfortunately.

Yea I was on the internal side, not outward facing production apps. They have and are building their own versions of ENTIRE companies for internal use. It’s a marvel to see. But the blue app? I can’t speak to that one on the internal side, but I’d agree with you there as a customer.

Re: Meta developer tools: Working at scale

#150

Post by rangledangle »

throwaways885 wrote: post #128
rangledangle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No company I've worked at after FB/Meta ships or works even at a non-eng level with the same velocity. I always attributed that to their internal tools, since most of the other companies seem to be using the same crap. Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. And don't get me started on the how good the task tool is compared to literally any other ticketing system out there. Everything is behind th…

Anyone who's used both, how does it compare to Google's internal tooling?

I’ve got coworkers who went back and forth. Their thoughts were (in 2019) that Facebook had cooler things going on, but less mature. Nicer to use, but less stable in some cases.

I personally loved things breaking at times. The monorepo and all the tools were so open that enabled me to follow along and try my own fixes in some cases (sometimes being the one to fix it!).

At that point in my career, that kind of exposure was like a rocket ship for personal growth. Others shared similar sentiments.

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