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Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

trino.io

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Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#31

Post by bitsondatadev »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #28
billjings wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at FB, too, and I can confirm you speak the truth. This process is problematic, though. The "special case" is the standard process at FB: to make external contributors second class citizens. They have their reasons, but doing this pushes the locus of discussion and action to the place where work happens fastest: inside the company. That means that the interests of FB engineers drive the project; in other wor…

It might not be pound foolish to the company. Their primary goal is making money not fostering open source.

That’s exactly the point of the post too. Sometimes business and open source align and other times they do not. Trino was created as the project and community the puts community and individuals that contribute as the owners.

It’s not bad or evil or wrong that Facebook does this…it just is.

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#33

Post by biztos »

bitsondatadev wrote: post #30
biztos wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had heard of Presto, vaguely, but not Trino. It's certainly an interesting choice of name! Should you say "TRY-no" to rhyme with Rhino or "TREE-no" to rhyme with Arduino? I would do the latter, but I'm a debauched expat. My guess is that half the people in America will do the former. Because I overthink this stuff I had to go see what's on trino.com and it's an impressively old-school unfinished personal website.

The latter tree-no like neutrino and the website is https://trino.io lol.

I knew that was the website, because I RTFA, but when I see they don't have the .com I always wonder why, what's there, is there another Trino making drone-bombs for the Ministry of Offense, or is it maybe some dude who likes to play the Ukulele, also a word with varying pronunciation? Oo or You?

So we have one vote for tree-no, it's a start! With me, that's two!

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#34

Post by natebc »

billjings wrote: post #23
radicality wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent many years at FB, but no longer there, but that doesn’t even sound like a ‘special case’? Every engineer at Fb has access to pretty much all the code, and after an internal code review for your code change, you can get it committed to the internal repos. For open source things, something syncs the external and internal changes ocassionaly I think. I imagine the problem here was that now external people can’t…

I worked at FB, too, and I can confirm you speak the truth. This process is problematic, though. The "special case" is the standard process at FB: to make external contributors second class citizens. They have their reasons, but doing this pushes the locus of discussion and action to the place where work happens fastest: inside the company. That means that the interests of FB engineers drive the project; in other wor…

> They have their reasons, but doing this pushes the locus of discussion and action to the place where work happens fastest: inside the company. That means that the interests of FB engineers drive the project; in other words, not open.

As an outsider and frequent consumer of some high profile open source projects 'owned' by Big Tech Companies I get the feeling that this same thing happens everywhere.

It probably does make good business sense but from out here it's a little odd.

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#35

Post by biztos »

dan-robertson wrote: post #24
biztos wrote: post #21

> Engineers at these highly competitive companies must create memorable work, or they will not get the promotions they deserve. If everybody gets promoted because of "memorable" work, maybe nobody actually deserves the promotions, and they're just handed out at the whim of whoever remembers your work?

I think memorable just means that there is some artefact of the work, eg some thing in the user interface or some committed code or report or whatever.

My issue was with "deserve." But yeah, I get that sometimes you've got to burn to shine.

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#36

Post by bitsondatadev »

difflens wrote: post #29

Maybe I'm just being cynical here, but did leaving Meta facilitate the creation of Starburst enterprise based on open source Trino?

Starburst employee here so take my view for what it’s worth. A few points:

Starburst spun out from some contributors working on Teradata’s Presto distro in 2017.

The Presto creators left Facebook in late 2018 and worked on building the new community and fork for most of 2019. They joined Starburst around a year later.

I asked these same questions in my last company and it seems like nothing was correlated between starburst and the new fork. After talking with Martin T. (One of the creators of Presto) about it and a few other long time contributors and my concerns went away.

I ultimately started to contribute to Trino and over the years I’ve only seen a community dedicated to making a successful query engine. You can see that by the activity and growth of the project.

Feel free to remain a skeptic but the best way to know is joint the community and make your own assumptions. :)

https://trino.io/slack.html

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#37

Post by zip1234 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #7

"Feedback from these engineers ultimately culminated in the managers making the decision to give automatic contributor rights to any Facebook engineer working on Presto, so that these engineers could move faster." I'm confused -- does Facebook not have similar code review infrastructure as Google, etc. That is: nothing -- I mean nothing -- gets "contributed" at Google without it going through code review. Were FB eng…

As far as I know nobody can just make changes unilaterally without another engineer's approval.

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#38

Post by danbrooks »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #26
benreesman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And one engineer can (or could in 2018) put the unix name of the person sitting next to them in the "Reviewed By:" field and force push something, but it isn't/wasn't The Done Thing outside of the most extreme 3am SEV-0 scenarios. Any two people are in a less-extreme but similar boat: if someone puts up a bad diff and someone without a stake in the code accepts it, they had better hope to hell nothing goes wrong. SEV…

I believe you cannot force push anymore.

Agree. Wasn’t aware of force push (2021-2022).

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#39

Post by langsoul-com »

biztos wrote: post #21

> Engineers at these highly competitive companies must create memorable work, or they will not get the promotions they deserve. If everybody gets promoted because of "memorable" work, maybe nobody actually deserves the promotions, and they're just handed out at the whim of whoever remembers your work?

More like if it isn't documented, then it doesn't exist type deal.

Pretty common in companies these days, I suppose big companies just turn it up to 11.

Re: Leaving Facebook/Meta was the best thing we could do for the community

#40

Post by langsoul-com »

Same problem occurs for consulting companies as well. You may get a big company, but they would exhaust all your time and attention, demanding changes that only benefit them.

Although, in this case it was code changes and features that only suited Fb

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