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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

#41

Post by billjings »

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.

I mean, they chose to invest in making this an open source project. And now it's been forked, which requires them to either forego community contribution, or migrate.

Remind me again what the win was here? It seems like they would have been better off not open sourcing it in the first place.

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

#42

Post by eru »

benreesman wrote: post #25
kmonsen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook/Meta does not have owners, so any two people in the company can land a change.

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…

If I remember right, Google also had a mechanism for pushing something through outside of normal review. But it was something more disciplined than just faking a review by putting your co-workers name in a reviewed-by field.

Because it was more disciplined, those commits could be automatically marked for later review.

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

#43

Post by nl »

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.

Often (usually?) it's not about money though.

Say you work at FB on unannounced project X. You want to integrate with open source component Y, from a FB open source project but you have questions about the right way to do it, and how to get needed features into the open source project.

You can't discuss this in public channels, and all the maintainers are right there available to you internally. So what do you do?

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

#45

Post by benreesman »

danbrooks wrote: post #38
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe you cannot force push anymore.

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

That is probably for the best.

In the bad/fun old days of extremely small on-call loop, a less clear/organized escalation chain, and fairly "roll your own" per-team tooling, once in a blue moon a whole business unit would be down because 10k machines were crash-looping and you just needed `if (NULL == ptr) return;` on like one line to end the carnage. There are exceptions to every rule I suppose.

But in 7 years at FB I think I force slammed someone else as reviewer with merely their verbal approval in the middle of the night 2 or 3 times, and never after like, 2015.

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

#46

Post by haimez »

nineinchnick wrote: post #2

I love seeing there are people dedicated to keeping open-source projects like Trino alive, ready to make some hard decisions.

I’m personally pretty curious to see what those contribution statistics look like if you exclude starburst employees.

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

#47

Post by bitsondatadev »

37 wrote: post #44
x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually one of their customers.

So it's not data collection (similar to Google Analytics), just the query part?

It’s a query engine that can talk to multiple databases and run join queries across tables from multiple sources. It also runs as a faster alternative to Hive.

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

#48

Post by avalys »

kmonsen wrote: post #19
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…

Facebook/Meta does not have owners, so any two people in the company can land a change.

For a long time, it was worse than that - once a change was "accepted", you could amend the commit with changes to literally any other file in the entire monorepo, and land it without any further review.

They finally added a "final review" step to ensure that someone eventually takes a look at these changes after the initial accept, but that still occurs several days after the commit.

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

#49

Post by toast0 »

avalys wrote: post #48
kmonsen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook/Meta does not have owners, so any two people in the company can land a change.

For a long time, it was worse than that - once a change was "accepted", you could amend the commit with changes to literally any other file in the entire monorepo, and land it without any further review. They finally added a "final review" step to ensure that someone eventually takes a look at these changes after the initial accept, but that still occurs several days after the commit.

Can you still add

Reviewed-by: yourself

in the commit message to skip review? That was my favorite one.

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

#50

Post by x3n0ph3n3 »

37 wrote: post #44
x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually one of their customers.

So it's not data collection (similar to Google Analytics), just the query part?

We use it to query data across multiple data sources, e.g. Elasticsearch, AWS Redshift, and S3.
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