How Facebook Ships Code

Hugh Pickens writes "The two largest teams at Facebook are Engineering and Ops, with roughly 400-500 team members each, together making up about 50% of the company. All engineers go through 4 to 6 week 'Boot Camp' training where they learn the Facebook system by fixing bugs. After boot camp, all engineers get access to the live DB and any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will so that engineers can modify specs mid-process, re-order work projects, and inject new feature ideas anytime. Then arguments about whether or not a feature idea is worth doing or not generally get resolved by spending a week implementing it and then testing it on a sample of users, e.g., 1% of Nevada users. 'All changes are reviewed by at least one person, and the system is easy for anyone else to look at and review your code even if you don't invite them to,' writes yeegay. 'It would take intentionally malicious behavior to get un-reviewed code in.' What is interesting for a company this size is that there is no official QA group at Facebook but almost every employee is dogfooding the product every day."

Comments

no process

[mortonda]

any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will

That explains a LOT...

Re:no process

[iluvcapra]

the culture of the company seems to be set so that *everyone* feels responsibility for the product

It's astonishing that they can keep such a process rolling with 500 engineers, let alone 200

product managers have a lot of independence and freedom. The key to being influential is to have really good relationships with engineering managers. Need to be technical enough not to suggest stupid ideas.

So basically, Facebook is run by an aggressive engineering culture based not on consensus or managerial decision making but by cliques and lobbying, where the worst thing someone can possibly do is suggest an idea that an engineer claims is "stupid" and doesn't give them opportunity for nerd glory. How much you want to bet that Zuckerberg sets the tone and decides that any modifications to the way the privacy settings are run is "stupid" and "boring."

Re:no process

[FuckingNickName]

Like Google, unlike Apple.

I don't mind a professional engineer for a boss, but any which displays the traits celebrated by xkcd would be absolutely unbearable.

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if there is some internal competition to see who can redesign the profile template the best....

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook is run by an aggressive engineering culture based not on consensus or managerial decision making but by cliques and lobbying

At any other company, that could be counter-productive. But considering that the tool they're building is basically the ideal tool for building your clique and growing your influence, it probably just adds to their "dogfooding."

Re:no process

[mark72005]

Never has been to the facingbook?

Jump in it!

Re:no process

[Unkyjar]

So you'd prefer your fictional engineers from Dilbert?

Re:no process

[ScentCone]

It's astonishing that they can keep such a process rolling with 500 engineers, let alone 200

I'm always curious about this expression, which - just like "I could care less" in place of "I could not care less" - is the opposite of what's meant. Surely, 200 would be astonishing, let alone 500.

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

>he's been modded down once
>(Score: -1)
>That means he started at 0
>LOLOLOLOLOLOLO

Re:no process

[Thelasko]

Actually, it sounds like a form of quality circle. Presumably, every piece of code interacts with at least one other piece of code. Each programmer is responsible for checking that the code he/she interfaces with behaves as expected. The same thing happens on assembly lines. If a component arrives and it doesn't look as expected, the assembler is expected to flag that component for review.

It also sounds like all changes are controlled by comparing them against some sort of metric when distributed to the sample audience. This is a classic continuous improvement method. If the new system does not outperform the old one, it doesn't get implemented.

Sincerely,
The Devil's Advocate

Re:no process

[somersault]

The engineers in Dilbert are fine, it's the managers you don't want.

Re:no process

[Hoi Polloi]

Facebook does have a formal QA group, it is called the user base.

Re:no process

[syousef]

any engineer can modify any part of Facebook's code base and check-in at-will

That explains a LOT...

Personal journal: This company trusts me with the code base. I don't know why. Dumb fucks!

Re:no process

[iluvcapra]

Something TFA doesn't talk about is how the engineers are organized -- surely there's a team that does memcache, a team that does database work (like those Cassandra guys), a team that does i18n, a team that does rendering, a team that specializes in Flash doodads, etc. It's hard to see how the engineers check each other without knowing where demarcations lie.

My issue wouldn't be with the quality of the code, it's how they decide what code to write in the first place. All of the Kaizen processes work great on an assembly line, but a feature request and a coworker evaluation aren't fender panels. They require someone in authority to tell you what you're trying to accomplish in the first place. The description of the way people decide what to add (basically shutting out the marketing people if they speak out too much) and how they discipline each other (too many blames in the SVN log and too many "public shamings" result in termination) speaks to a culture where new ideas and customer focus are almost stigmatized, and where the engineers don't try to evaluate each others ideas as much as they worry about getting voted off the island.

Re:no process

[CppDeveloper]

I would pass on Wally...

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

If the GP is astonished it takes only 200 or 500 staff to keep it going then yes you are right but if the GP is astonished that the process still works with that many staff then they are correct.

I too am surprised that a system can function with so many people. I expect it is a lot like Wikipedia's and cliques and internal fighting.

Re:no process

[tsm_sf]

Except that tasks become increasingly difficult the more nerds you throw at them, not less. 500 engineers makes a project harder than 200.

Re:no process

[timeOday]

It's astonishing that they can keep such a process rolling with 500 engineers, let alone 200

It is astonishing. I guess that's why nobody was doing it before, and they were able to get rich from a mere website in what seemed to be an already established niche.

Most of the comments here are looking at the process and predicting a result. That's backwards. We can see the result; the company is extremely successful. If that doesn't match your mental model of processes, maybe the mental model needs updating.

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

Haters Gunna Hate!

Re:no process

[entrigant]

No need to be curious. The GP is merely inept as is anyone who says "could care less"

Re:no process

[ScentCone]

Except that tasks become increasingly difficult the more nerds you throw at them, not less. 500 engineers makes a project harder than 200.

Which is exactly my point. It's amazing that the casual way they handle code could work with 200 programmers, let alone 500. See? "Let alone" means "never mind." As in, it's hard enough for 200, and 500 isn't even worth mentioning ... so, let it alone. And that's why I pointed out that the phrase was being used exactly backwards.

Re:no process

[serviscope_minor]

"I could care less" is a contraction of "As if I could care less", i.e. "I could not care less".

But it still sounds silly.

Re:no process

[catmistake]

based not on consensus or managerial decision making but by cliques and lobbying

I have worked, via contract, in at least a dozen medium to large sizes companies where this is the underlying mechanism. If you stick out in that you focus solely on the work and do not engage with the de facto clique leaders, who as often discuss droll subjects such as retiling their bathroom as often as they collectively decide how they want you to do their jobs for them, then absurd personal complaints will begin to stack up against you and you will be forced out of a job.

I used to flaunt my individuity, but since 9/11 I have been consciously conforming to old school business formality... never arrive late, never leave early, never get sick or take off, always dress nice, keep short hair, no superfluous non-work related conversations, never mentioning anything from my personal life, always ready with a polite smile and an enthusiasm for the work no matter how mundane it is... I've tried to embody what the ideal is for a person in my field. This doesn't work. One needs to become *good* friends with whomever that defacto leader is, who is as often as not NOT the management (but, indeed, through strength of personality has the manager under their thumb, and completely snowjobs the executives with an almost supernatural confidence).

If they like you, you win. And when you win, they like you. Otherwise... you are the first of any approaching cutbacks... you become the sacrifice that saves everyone elses jobs, the scapegoat for any complaints that come down from the executive levels.

The last 2 teams I worked with were more like a gang than a corporate division, whose self-preservation far outweights the work they are responsible for (My last contract ended abruptly when 3 of my counterparts in another building took heavy criticism for their laziness and distict lack of any work ethic... but because they were well liked, somehow I got the boot and the blame for their incompetance... without even remotely having anything to do with whatever incident occurred (never quite clear on exactly what it was... something to do with an assigned task that they kept passing between them and was never completed).

I hope someday my perserverance will pay off and I will be able to work not only with smart people (intelligence was rarely an issue), but educated and honest, and hopefully enlightened individuals that do not synthesize drama to manipulate perceptions such that those they like, towing the gang's loyalty, remain employed, while those that are effective, and thus throwing the curve, are terminated.

Re:no process

[scamper_22]

And what is wrong with that?

It's amazing to see people continuously insult those who are successful. As if their success is magical.
Maybe there is something to Zuckerberg's way to run a company?
Maybe the Steve Jobs perfectionist kingdom has something to do with Apple's success.

I don't work inside facebook... but maybe the way it is run does force people who have influence to have good relationships with engineers. I could easily write a snarky comment about ways of management where there is a disconnect between engineers and product management.

Quite frankly... if you can't get an engineer to not say your idea is 'stupid'... maybe it is you who doesn't have the ability to influence people. That is a skill needed in any kind of organization. Maybe Zukerberg believes those are the people... the ones who can build conses and influence... who are the ones who should rise up. Sounds perfectly plausible to me.

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm.... That sounds like something Hitler wold say.

Re:no process

[hansamurai]

But if you have the user base to get working results from "1% of Nevada users," why not take advantage of that?

Re:no process

[NoSig]

It doesn't just sound silly, it's a crime against intelligence is what it is. I doubt it's a contraction like you say since "as if I could care less" is not something I've ever heard, while "I couldn't care less" is. It's just a bunch of people who don't know what they are saying that cut out the "not" because they don't understand how the sentence is supposed to work. That's like contracting "I don't like Hitler" to "I like Hitler". I guess by your reckoning it would be like contracting "as if I like Hitler" to "I like Hitler" which is just as stupid, but I still think it's the former.

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

You joke or take the piss, but can you name another successful project on this scale, say 0.5 billion users, coders pretty much flying by the seat of their pants making the owners billions and staff millions?

Don't forget Google is losing a lots of staff to fartbook now. And it has to be more than dweeb virgins having access to millions of young females' details.

Re:no process

[multipartmixed]

I AM Wally, you insensitive clod!

Re:no process

[Kalriath]

No it's not. You can't make a contraction of a sentence by removing the operative words. In that sentence, removing "as if" changes the entire context and meaning of the sentence. You just cannot do it.

Re:no process

[jgagnon]

Once you try Wally, you'll never go back to mere mortals.

Re:no process

[LateArthurDent]

I would pass on Wally...

There are consistent references that Wally was a great engineer in his youth. Years of bad management has disillusioned him to the point where he realizes nothing he does really matters, so he might as well do nothing.

Basically, Wally is what Dilbert would end up being with 30 years of experience.

Re:no process

[neiras]

I hope someday my perserverance will pay off and I will be able to work not only with smart people (intelligence was rarely an issue), but educated and honest, and hopefully enlightened individuals that do not synthesize drama to manipulate perceptions such that those they like, towing the gang's loyalty, remain employed, while those that are effective, and thus throwing the curve, are terminated.

+5000. Wish I had mod points. I would hire you in a flash.

In my experience, it's mostly shops hiring egotistical just-out-of-school or I-taught-myself-PHP-and-I-am-an-expert-now whiz kids that are the worst for this kind of crap. You don't want to work with hypercasual, caffeine-fueled web developers when you're providing for a family, for instance.

A few places get it right. I have been fortunate enough to hire my co-workers, and we do NOT put up with drama. Full stop. We have work to do, we get it done creatively and with plenty of debate when it's warranted, and then we go home and live life.

Re:no process

[Cwix]

You forgot the data mining team.

Re:no process

[jgagnon]

Oh the huge manatee?

Re:no process

[Cwix]

That explains it, your a facebook fanboi.

Look close boys and girls, this is what happens when you use facebook.

Re:no process

[serviscope_minor]

No it's not.. You can't make a contraction of a sentence by removing the operative words. In that sentence, removing "as if" changes the entire context and meaning of the sentence. You just cannot do it.

Yes it is. Apparently you can. Duh. Again, yes apparently you can. [cite: Bryson, B. "Mother Tongue: The English Language." William Morrow & Company, Inc.]

Re:no process

[serviscope_minor]

It doesn't just sound silly, it's a crime against intelligence is what it is.

Quite so.

I doubt it's a contraction like you say since "as if I could care less" is not something I've ever heard, while "I couldn't care less" is.

That doesn't mean it is the case.

It's just a bunch of people who don't know what they are saying that cut out the "not" because they don't understand how the sentence is supposed to work. T

Sure, some (most?) people seem to blindly copy it.

That's like contracting "I don't like Hitler" to "I like Hitler".

You seem to be arguing against my point that it is a silly contraction by agreeing that yes, it is very silly.

guess by your reckoning it would be like contracting "as if I like Hitler" to "I like Hitler" which is just as stupid, but I still think it's the former.

No. Citation provided [ Bryson B. "The Mother Tongue". William Morrow & Company, Inc].

Re:no process

[ScentCone]

"I could care less" is a contraction of "As if I could care less", i.e. "I could not care less".

No. People who say, "I could care less" are lazily not using one syllable. They hear (from people who use it correctly) the contraction, "I couldn't care less." And because so many people are idiots, they just utter a string of sounds that come across as roughly the same. The "nt" on the end, which gives the entire phrase its actual meaning, is left off because people are just being bad mimics, and not actually connecting words to the thoughts behind them.

Which is no surprise, since very few people actually think about what they say or hear.

Re:no process

[catmistake]

I would hire you in a flash

Are you hiring? I can't see any way to send you a private message through /., or I'd tell you at least where I live... well, I guess I can do that by saying CMU loves to interview me... 14+ interviews so far... no offers. CMU is not corporate, of course, but the individuals there are very bright, educated, motivated yet laid back and drama-free. My interviews with Google went swimmingly until the interview with the fellow that I was to replace... when he found out that I "did things" with my cell phone out of curiosity, he ended all hope of my ever getting another interview there, much less an offer. Prejudgements are the hobgoblin of little minds, I keep telling myself.

Re:no process

[Bing Tsher E]

i have never been a member of facebook.

you're an ignorant hypocrite.

cower in my shadow behind your chosen pseudonym some more, feeb.

you're completely pathetic.

Cool. That means Michael Kristopeit probably isn't taken at FaceBook and I should probably go sign it up.

Does anybody have suggestions for the Profile Photo?

Re:no process

[Fjandr]

Not a contraction, since the omission is not internal. More likely it was first used as a sarcastic play on the original phrase, and then the tone was dropped by imitators who understood the form but not the function.

Re:no process

[Fjandr]

That's a 'wholly-owned subsidiary' so that there's no conflict of interest. *wink*

Oh, wait, we're past the point where that sort of thing is hidden. Yup, forgot the data mining team...

Re:no process

[Kalriath]

Two problems with that. One: never, ever cite an American as an authority on the English language. That bastardised half-breed language is not English. Second: try not to cite books whose reviews are more than 50% statements to "take with a grain of salt" and "every other page contains a factual error".

Re:no process

[NoSig]

I could care less about your question. In fact, I think it's very interesting. Thank you.

Re:no process

[caution live frogs]

Not really. They've made it obvious over and over again that they really don't give a crap about the end users. If they did, there would be a simple way of offering feedback. Heck, even Microsoft has a simple, easy-to-find suggestion box on their site. Facebook tries damn hard NOT to allow you any chance to voice your opinion anywhere the people writing the code will see it.

Re:no process

[NoSig]

I don't get your reference to The Mother Tongue. There is only one hit for "I could care less" in that book on Google Books (page 11), and it does not seem relevant to this other than in pointing out that some people do use "I could care less" to mean the opposite of what they are saying. I don't actually even know what you are saying "no" to. I'm not arguing against it being silly, I'm saying that it's more than merely silly.

Re:no process

[tedgyz]

I would pass on Wally...

There are consistent references that Wally was a great engineer in his youth. Years of bad management has disillusioned him to the point where he realizes nothing he does really matters, so he might as well do nothing.

Basically, Wally is what Dilbert would end up being with 30 years of experience.

Welcome to my world. I have realized that all my hard work garners the same salary. In the end, the greatest beneficiaries are the PHB CEOs, CFOs, etc. I am a Wally too. I marvel at how institutionalized the PHB-effect has become. Nobody even calls them out any more. They are stupid, rich, and in charge.

Re:no process

[Cwix]

i will bring upon you the ultimate punishment for your transgression.

You'll go away and take the lulz with you?

You know you've got issues with the capitalization, but your punctuations isn't half bad.. good job!

Re:no process

[IAmGarethAdams]

That's a very insightful comment*

*contraction

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, I get you. No one else will.

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8vodr_dogs-pink-floyd_music

Re:no process

[Mike Buddha]

And what is wrong with that?

Where to begin... where to begin.

First, there are at least 5 different interfaces, none of which are consistent. There's the main web-based interface. There's a mobile web-based site. There's a touch web-based site. There's the Android app. There's the iOS app. There's a Blackberry app. I don't know how many other device specific interfaces there are, but they are legion.

Second, the data that is streamed to each of these interfaces is inconsistent, meaning if you log into the main web site, what you are displayed on your feed is going to be different than what you see on the mobile web site. And both of those may have data inconsistent with the phone app you're using.

Third, settings are different for each of the various interfaces you use. You may set a person to not show in your feed in the main site, and SURPRISE! they still show up on the touch web-site.

Fourth, the capabilities of each interface are vastly different. There are things that just can't be done from the multitude of cut rate interfaces that are available. You can't delete posts from some of the interfaces. You can't unfriend from some interfaces. You can't ignore friends from some interfaces.

Basically, the Facebooks is successful despite Zuckerberg, his MCF method of development, and his lack of vision, and his poor software design abilities. When something better comes along that works and doesn't give out everyone's personal information to anybody who floats through the transom, FB will be laying off half their staff, just like MySpace did.

Re:no process

[Mike Buddha]

Neat, my Slashdot number is a subset of yours!

Re:no process

[The_mad_linguist]

It doesn't just sound silly, it's a crime against intelligence is what it is. I doubt it's a contraction like you say since "as if I could care less" is not something I've ever heard, while "I couldn't care less" is. It's just a bunch of people who don't know what they are saying that cut out the "not" because they don't understand how the sentence is supposed to work.

Yes, because people never say something ironic when they want to deprecate something in English. There are no instances in the language whatsoever of people saying one thing and meaning the opposite of it for effect.

Re:no process

[mpeskett]

It took me a couple of repeats of looking between your 2 posts, trying to see where the number differed at all, before I realised that the name also didn't differ and that you'd replied to yourself.

Thought you needed to know this crucial information.

Re:no process

[grimdawg]

Wish I could mod this (-1 Butthurt).

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

....and the search for civilization continues

Re:no process

[NoSig]

Quite right, and in that sentiment I would like to add that that is obviously precisely what is going on when people say "I could care less".

Re:no process

[smart_ass]

So wish I had MOD points ... that made me laugh my ass off.

Re:no process

[tehcyder]

never, ever cite an American as an authority on the English language.

It's a circular thing. Saying "I could care less" is an Americanism, therefore American writers will defend it, however much other English speakers think it is ridiculous.

Re:no process

[somersault]

They are stupid, rich, and in charge

They might be stupid when it comes to technology, but to become rich and in charge seems like a smart choice to me.

Re:no process

[tehcyder]

Most of the comments here are looking at the process and predicting a result. That's backwards. We can see the result; the company is extremely successful. If that doesn't match your mental model of processes, maybe the mental model needs updating.

Even if the company is (arguably) successful, this still may be despite, rather than thanks to, their processes.

Re:no process

[IvoryRing]

As far as I can see, English is a 'bastardised half-breed language'; in some cases speakers of English are proud of this fact, in other cases they are embarrassed of it and in yet other cases they are ignorant of it.

If you wish to argue that 'American' (USian?) is a distinct language from English (even though speakers of 'American' when asked what language they speak will say 'English' - the simple solution to this of course is to say that the American word for American is 'English' and that American's don't know the word for what the rest of the world refers to as English), then who are you to say that the American idiom 'I could care less' is not the correct translation of the English phrase 'I couldn't care less'? Note the distinction between idiom and phrase.

Re:no process

[tehcyder]

Mod GP +1 high on something

Re:no process

[tehcyder]

I must have missed the news item where Facebook got an infusion of $500 billion in cash. It might at least go some way to explaining their bizaqrre over-valuation. Did some bank make a boo-boo on the number of zeros by a factor of 1,000?

Re:no process

[tehcyder]

You joke or take the piss, but can you name another successful project on this scale, say 0.5 billion users, coders pretty much flying by the seat of their pants making the owners billions and staff millions?

The fact that something makes a lot of money does not mean that it is good, otherwise Microsoft would be the best software company in the world.

Re:no process

[Mike Buddha]

I was talking about Scamper_22 and myself.My bad.

Re:no process

[Stiletto]

It's amazing to see people continuously insult those who are successful. As if their success is magical.

It's also amazing to see people continuously imagining a causal relationship between personal qualities and success.

Is a superstar stock picker really talented and hard-working, or was he simply the one (out of millions trying) who flipped a coin heads 20 times in a row?

Re:no process

[scamper_22]

umm. we're not talking about personalities... but ways of management here.

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

And as to the assertion that ironic phrases never enter common usage, I have but two words to say:

"Yeah, right."

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to flaunt my individuity, but since 9/11 I have been consciously conforming to old school business formality... never arrive late, never leave early, never get sick or take off, always dress nice, keep short hair, no superfluous non-work related conversations, never mentioning anything from my personal life, always ready with a polite smile and an enthusiasm for the work no matter how mundane it is... I've tried to embody what the ideal is for a person in my field.

WTF does 9/11 have to do with anything? Seriously. Also what is "individuity"?

Re:no process

[cavebison]

Heh, as a language fan, I must say this is very observant. Interesting.

Re:no process

[ScentCone]

And as to the assertion that ironic phrases never enter common usage, I have but two words to say:

"Yeah, right."

Nobody doubts that irony plays a role in common usage. The point is that there is no evidence whatsoever that the lazy use of "could care less" is meant as irony. It's just poor monkey-mouthing of something like the sounds and syllables used by people who actually say the thing that makes some sort of contextual sense.

I have yet - when asking a person who says "I could care less" just how much less they could care - ever seen a single person (out of many) do anything other than stop, stare blankly for a moment as they actually think for the first time about the words they just used, and say, "I meant, 'not', I guess."

Re:no process

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what you're talking about. I want to encourage you to give up hope that you will ever work in the corporate IT world with smart, educated, enlightened people. Just don't waste time hoping for something that doesn't exist. Rather, just try to take as much money out of each job as you can. It's about the money, nothing else. Save the joy of engineering stuff for your free time.

Facebook ships code?

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Then where can I get that shipped code?

Although, after reading that story, I don't think I want that code. It sounds like a textbook example of feature and focus creep.

Re:Facebook ships code?

[Noughmad]

No, you got it all wrong. The article is about cargo ships transporting facebooks that are doing the coding.

Re:Facebook ships code?

[surgen]

It sounds like a textbook example of feature and focus creep.

From using facebook it seems like they lack a real plan anyway. When they're not busy ripping of the hot new thing, feature creep is their roadmap.

Re:Facebook ships code?

[buglista]

Hah! says the guy posting on slashdot - you seen the codebase for this?

Why would Facebook need 500 engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like anything really changes on it.

Re:Why would Facebook need 500 engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are inventing new ways to harvest user's personal data;) Imagine an advertiser says we want our content to be shown
to a certain group of people (eg diabetic, employed with good insurance) then they'd need an engineer to write some code
to search thru comments to see about that.

Re:Why would Facebook need 500 engineers?

[sycodon]

I was wondering that myself.

How many engineers does Apple have working on OS X? Or Google on Android?

I don't see 500 engineers worth of results on FaceBook.

Re:Why would Facebook need 500 engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

They sound like an "agile" shop. You need that many engineers to create a herd that's large enough to avoid blame. That way if management decides to start firing people, they won't be able to figure out which one of them to blame. I think that's how "agile" methodologies remain entrenched for such a long period of time. I wonder how long it will take for management to realize that this isn't what real programmers look like, and this isn't what real programming looks like. It sounds like it would be impossible to take any pride in your work, or have any feeling of ownership (both in terms of responsibility AND recognition).

Re:Why would Facebook need 500 engineers?

[anyGould]

Heck, do you need to invent new ways to harvest data, when after your 4-6 weeks you get unfettered access to the entire database? Seems like a security/privacy nightmare (for us, anyway - FB doesn't seem to care.)

Re:Why would Facebook need 500 engineers?

[Panaflex]

Have you handled 300 million users lately? Just the backend storage scaling itself probably eats a hundred engineers... then there's the code performance engineering, php compiler and memcached wranglers... there's another 100 engineers. And of course there's the network engineers! And the Apache engineers(50) and the cable engineers, the customer support engineers... OH and the social engineers!!

That leaves about... (click click click...) 4 engineers to work on the interface code.

Re:Why would Facebook need 500 engineers?

[story645]

then they'd need an engineer to write some code to search thru comments to see about that.

Or they'd turn it into new profile fields.

Seriously though, it sounds like all the hot projects at facebook are geeky CS phd type projects rather than shinier ones, which reflects facebook's hiring practices-primarily phds, CS students from big name schools (which tend to favor theory) and former google people, which in itself is sort of interesting.

as a nerd

[circletimessquare]

i share the worry facebook represents in terms of privacy and the future of the internet with everyone else here

but at the same time, i get a warm feeling in my pants thinking about the programming and workings of an enterprise this big and powerful

and if you laugh at me for getting that warm feeling in my pants, you're clearly on the wrong website

Re:as a nerd

[FuckingNickName]

and if you laugh at me for getting that warm feeling in my pants, you're clearly on the wrong website

You are on the wrong web site. The nerd doesn't care about "an enterprise [...] big and powerful".

Re:as a nerd

[circletimessquare]

you're talking about the emo nerd, a subset of nerddom, not representational of all nerds

some nerds are more of the evil scientist variety. and while sharks with friggin laser beams on their heads are more their kind of psychosexual gratification, facebook is not bad either in terms of pants warming evil plots

Re:as a nerd

[ColdWetDog]

No the 'warm feeling in your pants' type nerd means the nursing aides are a little slow this morning.

Shuffleboard programming at 10:00 in the Big Room!

No access controls?

[choongiri]

After boot camp, all engineers get access to live DB

So anyone who's ever worked at FB as an engineer will have likely downloaded copies of all their friends' / family's / ex-girlfriends' inboxes, chat history, etc.

Not surprising really.

Re:No access controls?

[gorzek]

I could've sworn there was an article on /. some time ago that indicated Facebook employees had to justify accessing "personally interesting" information they didn't have legitimate access to through their FB profile, namely, the sorts of things you mentioned: inboxes of exes, family members, etc. There was a master password and all uses of it were recorded and audited so you had to explain yourself whenever you used it. My memory might be a little fuzzy but it seemed that FB employees didn't have unmonitored access to all data on the site.

Re:No access controls?

[Anonymous Coward]

select * from database_table - "I was doing load testing."

Re:No access controls?

[Eponymous Coward]

No access controls doesn't mean no oversight.

Re:No access controls?

[Chris Mattern]

Um, yes, it does. Access control is not just denial, it's also logging. If you don't have any idea who's accessing what, you can't possibly have any oversight.

Re:No access controls?

[travdaddy]

Here it is: http://slashdot.org/story/10/01/21/179242/Facebook-Master-Password-Was-Chuck-Norris. How much they enforced that policy seems sketchy.

Re:No access controls?

[autocracy]

Permissions are distinctly different from logs. Both are "controls" in the audit sense of the word, but this is not a case of access control.

Re:No access controls?

[scorp1us]

What you thought you had privacy on facebook?

Your best bet is to be uninteresting, which for the /. crowd is quiet easy.

Re:No access controls?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Don't you think Facebook has an auditing system in place to keep that sort of thing from happening?

2) Do you really think so lowly of people that you believe that literally *every last* Facebook programmer will turn into a creep and a stalker and quite possibly a criminal, for no other reason than that they can?

Re:No access controls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhhh. Quiet easy.

Re:No access controls?

[patniemeyer]

So anyone who's ever worked at FB as an engineer will have likely downloaded copies of all their friends' / family's / ex-girlfriends' inboxes, chat history, etc.

It just struck me as funny that all of that sounds really ominous and important to somebody who's maybe 20 years old... and when you get a bit older, married, and have kids it all just sounds so stupid :) OMG, my chat logs!

I'm not trying to be a bastard... its seriously just making me laugh right now at all the dumb stuff I used to worry about :)

Facebook doesn't play hardball with change control

Pat

Re:No access controls?

[choongiri]

I was pointing out that people accessing stuff they shouldn't likely happens more if there are no access restrictions. I'm not at all worried about *my* chat history, I know better than to say something I wouldn't say on a crowded bus. I'm 30 and married. Good jab though. Right, the lawn, sorry, I'm leaving ;)

Re:No access controls?

[tehcyder]

1) no

2) yes

Re:No access controls?

[bckrispi]

It just struck me as funny that all of that sounds really ominous and important to somebody who's maybe 20 years old... and when you get a bit older, married, and have kids it all just sounds so stupid :) OMG, my chat logs!

Unless you're the obsessive, jealous husband who has to keep track of his wife 24 hours a day. Or if you're going through a divorce...

Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

Once and for all, programmers are not Engineers.

Programmers can not be held liable, have no professional license, no government accountable body, no code of ethics, no liability insurance, or other measures in place to directly protect the public.

Think about it.

If facebook was staffed by real engineers, a privacy breach would cost the engineer his/her license, and they could be personally sued, as well.

But then again, anyone in the good old US of A is an engineer. From the sanitation engineer who picks up my trash, to the beverage refreshment engineer who makes my coffee at Starbucks.

Engineer is just another cheap title, like CEO/CFO/CIO/CTO, etc, free to be used by anyone.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[FuckingNickName]

Careful now. Some of the dot-bomb programmers have managed to hang onto their employment and they regard their wage as proof of competence.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Careful now. Some of the dot-bomb programmers have managed to hang onto their employment and they regard their wage as proof of competence."

So do the CEO's of the banks you bailed out. See what happens when there is no oversight?

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[morgan_greywolf]

Not all engineers are licensed. Civil engineers are usually licensed. Mechanical engineers and electrical engineers are usually not licensed. Similarly, there is no licensure for system engineers. There are "certifications" but these are essentially meaningless.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

But then again, anyone in the good old US of A is an engineer. From the sanitation engineer who picks up my trash, to the beverage refreshment engineer who makes my coffee at Starbucks.

Engineer is just another cheap title, like CEO/CFO/CIO/CTO, etc, free to be used by anyone.

As one of slashdot's many Comment Moderation Engineers, I believe you bring up a good point - henceforth Anonymous Coward shall be known as Anonymous Engineer.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point. But here in the great white north, to call yourself an engineers, means you hold a license.

If you provide any sort of services to the public, you must be licensed.

Since facebook provides services to and for the public, if their simple programmers want to be called engineers, they should be licensed.

Mechanical and Electrical engineers are usually licensed if they want to provide services to the public, ie: building inspections, maintenance, etc.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Lumpy]

And the industry likes it that way.

Why? it keeps programmers as a dime-a-dozen level. If we were actually real Software Engineers, than we would be getting engineer pay, the managers cant force us to ship it if it compiles as engineering allows you to tell management to STFU if it's unsafe.

Corporations worked hard to make sure that programming and IT would be a factory level job.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Volvogga]

We have a code of ethics... the ACM writes them. I suppose it isn't really mandatory that we belong and therefor adhere to them, but I was taught to fall back on them for ethical issues.

http://www.acm.org/about/code-of-ethics

The code is pretty much common sense. If you want a funny and kinda sad read, find the real estate code of ethics. They have to outline every evil, dirty little trick ever pulled and explicitly say not to do it.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[DarthVain]

Ya well I knew a "DBA" that was responsible for a MS Access DB. Not actually even creating it... just running it. Yes one. Couldn't even script, hired consultants for that. Seriously. Made more money than me.

Also I have known people that called themselves CEO or CFO, etc... but were basically a one man show working from home.

Titles are cheap. I always wanted to put "Supreme Overlord" as a title on a resume just as a joke. It has about as much meaning as some of the crap I have seen other people use.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[trollertron3000]

Cool story bro

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[MichaelKristopeit403]

you are exactly what you call yourself: NOTHING

cower some more, feeb. deny the existence of software engineers as you have denied your own identity.

you're completely pathetic.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Mentally_Overclocked]

I have a degree from a university in electrical engineering. I work as an electrical engineer and I consider myself one. I am not licensed as a professional engineer (PE) and have little interest in obtaining that license at this point as the type of work simply doesn't appeal to me.

As you suggest, those PEs do put their license on the line when they sign a document. From my understanding, companies that have resident PEs will only have a few and have other non-licensed engineers do the less expensive work.

If it is a product it will usually need to meet expectations set by a different regulatory body (ETL, UL, FCC, whatever). If it is a building, power related, whatever, then it requires the review of a PE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Engineer

I'm not really sure how they would regulate Facebook with their data ... I've never dealt with something like that.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[ScentCone]

Engineer is just another cheap title, like CEO/CFO/CIO/CTO, etc, free to be used by anyone.

No, this is not true. There is a big difference between being the employee of a company and being an officer of the company. Those "O" titles actually mean something. Doesn't mean that the people who are officers of the company are the right people for those roles, but there's real baggage that comes with those titles, including a higher standard for the consequences of entering into contracts, obligating the company to act or pay bills, etc.Being an "O" also makes you more of a law suit magnet.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

Once and for all, programmers are not Engineers.

Like a typical engineer, you don't understand english.

Some of them are licensed, professional engineers, even if it isn't a job requirement.

What you mean is that computer programming isn't a field that is restricted by law to licensed, professional engineers.

Many licensed, professional engineers work outside the fields that are restricted by law to licensed, professional engineers.

Programmers can not be held liable,

Of course they can, just like anyone else who fucks up. It depending on the contract, terms of sale, applicable law and what kind of mood the judge/jury are in.

Oh, you mean responsible to a professional body? Licensed, professional engineers wouldn't be responsible either for computer programming.

Computer programming isn't one of the things that is reserved to licensed, professional engineers.

If facebook was staffed by real engineers, a privacy breach would cost the engineer his/her license, and they could be personally sued, as well.

No, you first have to pass a law restricting computer programming to licensed, professional engineers. Then the licensing body would have to investigate and determine if the engineer's fuckup was sufficient to warrant disciplinary action, and then determine what the appropriate reprimand would be.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

In Ontario it is the same way except if you start calling them Professional Engineers. That title is actually controlled by legislation. So now you just just put blinders on for anything that doesn't include Professional. Unfortunately if the writer doesn't know this importance it could be dropped in the summarizing.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Eponymous Coward]

Lots of people call themselves engineers. The meaning of the word is changing.

I think Professional Engineer might imply licensing. In fields like software where licensing and insurance isn't even an option, nobody could say they were mislead by the title of "Software Engineer".

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[francium de neobie]

A C-Suite executive is not legally liable to pay the company's bills (in case the company itself runs out of money) - you're looking at the Board of Directors there. But yes, being close to the power center, or being the power center yourself, does entail legal responsibilities.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[discord5]

Engineer is just another cheap title, like CEO/CFO/CIO/CTO, etc, free to be used by anyone.

I resent that remark! My lawyers will be in touch!

Cordially yours,
discord23
Chieft Toilet Officer
Executive Sanitation Engineer
Craptastic Inc

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[mini me]

Engineer is defined as someone who designs, builds, and maintains.

It has nothing to do with licensing, government accountability, code of ethics, accreditation, or anything else.

It is not a cheap title, it is a description of the job. When they say Facebook engineer, we get a sense of what those employees are required to do; which extends beyond the role of just programming.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[russotto]

Once and for all, programmers are not Engineers.

In the narrow sense of holding a P.E. (Professional Engineering) license or equivalent, no. But the P.E. does not define the engineer, no matter how many holders of such licenses think it does.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[kevinNCSU]

Once and for all, programmers are not Engineers.

Programmers can not be held liable, have no professional license, no government accountable body, no code of ethics, no liability insurance, or other measures in place to directly protect the public.

Think about it.

Professional Engineer != Engineer

Unless of course you wish to make the argument that making say, a space shuttle, doesn't require any "real" engineers or didn't you know that aerospace engineering is largely unregulated with no professional license, no government accountable body, no code of ethics, no liability insurance or other measures in place to directly protect the public from the individual engineer rather than the company or organization? The same thing with the majority of mechanical engineers, as cars don't require professional engineers because they are under interstate commerce and it's the State's that license professional engineers. Really it seems your only view of engineering here is people that make buildings and bridges. Exciting, glad you loved your statics and materials science course so much. The rest of us "engineers" in the later half of the 20th century are going to go over here and keep building spaceships, cars, missiles and airplanes and you know what? We're even going to put SOFTWARE in them and we're going to do it ALL without a professional license from the great state of *insert your local jurisdiction here which doesn't govern space, the sky, or even interstate roads*

Believe it or not, the profession of engineering existed long before jurisdictions realized they could make money by charging people fees for professional licensing to "protect the public" while at the same time protecting local jobs by making it harder for out-of-state engineers to do work there unless they go through the local licensing process.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Americano]

"Pretty much common sense" means that a lot of it is a vague set of "principles" that members of the ACM are expected to abide by, and which many of them ignore when it doesn't match their interpretation of "common sense." And let's be quite honest - there's probably about... five... people on Slashdot who feel themselves bound by section 1.5 of the ACM COE:

1.5 Honor property rights, including copyrights and patent.
Violation of copyrights, patents, trade secrets and the terms of license agreements is prohibited by law in most circumstances. Even when software is not so protected, such violations are contrary to professional behavior. Copies of software should be made only with proper authorization. Unauthorized duplication of materials must not be condoned.

How seriously can you take a Code of Ethics when one of it's "General Moral Imperatives" is something that is laughingly ignored by huge portions of the "Software Engineering" profession? You chortle at the NAR code of ethics, but it's a very specific, very clear listing of standards and practices expected of a Realtor, and the penalty for violating them is the loss of your license to practice as a Realtor. If they stripped every programmer who ever violated the clause above of his ability to write code, there'd be very few programmers left in existence.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[UnknowingFool]

Um, there is a license for engineers of all disciplines. It's called the Professional Engineer license. You are correct in that some engineers do not require it, but that does not make it meaningless. For the most part, any engineer whose work involves construction usually requires a PE as you have to certify that construction has been checked for certain guidelines. For example if you are a Chemical Engineer overseeing the daily operation of a distillation unit, you don't need it to do your job. If you are the Chemical Engineer building or physically modifying a distillation unit, you'll need it.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[WWE-TicK]

A person is an engineer because of what he does, not because some piece of paper says he is.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[quacking duck]

Perhaps in the US, but as a post above mentioned, in Canada they're extremely strict about use of the word "engineer", enough that they actually took on Microsoft and prevented them from cavalierly using the term engineer in their MCSE and similar programs, i.e. you can say you're an MCSE, but you're legally not allowed to call yourself a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer... minor distinction perhaps, but so goes the law and licensing of the term.

Engineering university programs must be accredited in order for graduates to have a B.Eng (bachelor of engineering), and each type (electrical, systems, civil, etc) is accredited separately. The iron ring is also exclusive to Canadian engineering university graduates, and can't be worn by engineers who graduated in a different country.

I'm a Canadian engineer, but not Professional--ie I don't pay dues nor have I taken the licensing test.

Engineering isn't the only field where terms and titles are strictly enforced--after all, only a select group can call themselves doctors, or lawyers.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[number11]

Titles are cheap. I always wanted to put "Supreme Overlord" as a title on a resume just as a joke. It has about as much meaning as some of the crap I have seen other people use.

I once ran a business where I had to fill out government forms daily. For a while, I put down a different title pretty much every day. Czar. Supreme Commander. Misanthrope. Peon in Charge of Forms. Chief Forms Officer. Prince (Second Class). Grand Panjandrum. Acting Queen. Whatever. Of course, it was a pretty safe bet that no one ever actually read the forms.

Eventually I started running out of ideas, and the game lost its fun. I think I was just "Employee" after that.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[dashslotter]

Well then, I guess I'm just not an engineer. Not by your definition, anyway. Never mind that I hold an engineering degree. Nor that I graduated top of the class at a prestigious university. Nor that if you have a PC, firmware that I designed and wrote is probably running on it. No, you've defined what an engineer is. I guess I'll have to accept it.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[morgan_greywolf]

The "certifications" I refer to aren't related to "professional engineer". What mean when I say "electrical engineers are not usually licensed" is just that; I worked for a major aerospace company that employed tons of electrical and mechanical engineers, virtually none of which were Professional Engineers.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Eponymous Coward]

Actually, there are quite a few places in the US that do the iron ring ceremony. And the rings I've seen are stainless steel. Do they still have iron rings?

Terms and titles aren't strictly enforced at all in the US or Canada. I can go online and buy a PhD in History this afternoon and start calling myself doctor. It's just not from an accredited institution. If you look on Canadian job sites, there are plenty of "software engineer" listings and from what I could see, all use "engineer" incorrectly. Wikipedia has an interesting article on the situation.

If you are right, there are an awful lot of "drain doctors" (700,000 according to Google) who are in trouble.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Eponymous Coward]

I hadn't heard about the MCSE ruling, so I looked it up:
http://www.microsoft.com/canada/learning/QuebecMCSE/default.mspx

Microsoft says Quebec is the only province where you can't use the term "engineer". They continue to use it in other provinces and in Quebec, they use MCSE but recommend not expanding the acronym. Pretty funny.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Mentally_Overclocked]

The iron ring? I believe http://www.order-of-the-engineer.org/ these guys provide one with membership. They recruited membership at my first university.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[wastedlife]

So Canadian laws apply to job titles of employees of a US company? Sure, there are protected titles here for certain things like Medical Doctors, but "engineer" is not one of them so it is free for the taking.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Seismologist]

Professional Engineers (P.E.) is a trademark in the US much like a PhD, MD, JD, etc. To attain the tittle of a P.E. (disclaimer, I have a P.E. in WA and a P.Eng. in Canada) an individual must meet a certain set of education, and vocational (job) experience requirements and take a notationally administered exam to prove competency in his/her field of expertise. An additional ethics exam is administered by each State. My state offers many types of professional licenses.

Under the "Engineer" category the following P.E. licenses are given:

Agricultural

Architectural

Chemical

Civil: Construction

Civil: Geotechnical

Civil: Structural

Civil: Transportation

Civil: Water Resources and Environmental

Control Systems

Electrical and Computer: Computer Engineering

Electrical and Computer: Electrical and Electronics

Electrical and Computer: Power

Environmental

Fire Protection

Industrial

Mechanical: HVAC and Refrigeration

Mechanical: Mechanical Systems and Materials

Mechanical: Thermal and Fluids Systems

Metallurgical and Materials

Mining and Mineral Processing

Naval Architecture and Marine

Nuclear

Petroleum

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[pthreadunixman]

My personal favorite is "Sales Engineer".

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[I8TheWorm]

Not to mention much larger targets of lawsuits.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

The iron ring is also exclusive to Canadian engineering university graduates, and can't be worn by engineers who graduated in a different country.

And it takes an Canadian engineer to call a steel ring an iron ring. The ring is made of steel, so call it a steel ring.

Otherwise make the ring from cast iron, pig iron, wrought iron...

Engineering isn't the only field where terms and titles are strictly enforced--after all, only a select group can call themselves doctors, or lawyers.

Yes and no. Since you brought up the Canadian "iron" ring, here is an example from Ontario. The title of Dr. is only legally reserved in a health care setting. For example, a professor of microbiology with a PhD might often go by Dr. so-and-so. But if they are called in to a hospital to talk to a patient, they can't call themselves Dr. so-and-so.

In Ontario, outside of a few reserved cases, anyone can call themselves Dr. because it has no meaning.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

The "certifications" I refer to aren't related to "professional engineer". What mean when I say "electrical engineers are not usually licensed" is just that; I worked for a major aerospace company that employed tons of electrical and mechanical engineers, virtually none of which were Professional Engineers.

The one whose signature was on the designs was a PE, guaranteed. I've worked in plenty of places where non-PEs did most of the work, but they were not allowed to sign off on their designs. Somebody else, who was licensed, had to go over what they did. If something went wrong, it was his ass on the line. The official name for everybody else is EIT, or "Engineer in Training." If they decide never to take the PE exam and get licensed, it's their decision to remain perpetual apprentices, but that means they are not engineers. That might not hamper them in any way, but if you want to argue the semantics of it, they're not engineers.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[mijelh]

if their simple programmers want to be called engineers

Of course! Civil engineers are inherently superior to *simple* programmers!
Look, I could not care less if we are called engineers or not. I never spent a minute on that stupid debate, and not planning on doing it now, but let me clarify something for you: our profession is anything but simple.
Software engineers/programmers/alchemists or whatever you want to call them created some of the most complex systems of the history of humankind, which you seem unable to understand.

Sure, you click-and-dragged some pictures into power point and created a presentation once, how hard is that? because that's basically what programmers do: click-and-dragging a "add friend" button, then a "i like it" button..... and facebook's done!! isn't it?

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[mijelh]

But if by engineer we mean "someone who is licenced", then we will need a new word for what engineering used to mean:
"The person who applies scientific and mathematic principles to design or develop structures, machines, apparatus, or manufacturing processes "
(of course there are many definitions, but this is the one I found most useful)
Or if you are arguing that only *Professional* Engineer might imply liscencing... then what am I? an amateur Engineer? I am not, because I get paid for my work (an therefore I am a professional), but still it would be cool because that way I could compete in the Summer Engineering Olympics.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[trawg]

The title "Engineer" is a actually an accredited title here in Australia - you have to do an actual engineering degree to go around and call yourself an engineer and there are strict rules about it.

http://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/about-us/program-accreditation/program-accreditation_home.cfm

So I sort of agree with the GP, in that the title 'engineer' has been somewhat usurped by programmers that call themselves 'software engineers' and the various other things that get prepended to it - there's a qualitative difference here between a "software engineer" - that is, someone who went to university and did an engineering degree and studied software within that degree - and someone who either went to uni and did an IT degree, even if they studied something called "software engineering" as a subject/discipline.

(The mate that told me about all this did electrical engineering at uni, and is now a software engineer at a railway company - it is policy at his company to only hire actual engineers for programming positions as they feel the processes behind non-engineering software development education are not sufficient to ensure trains are not whapping into each other all the time.)

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[mini me]

What do you call someone who is performing acts as defined by the english word engineer, but without accreditation?

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Jaime2]

It has been decided by the courts in 48 states that the term "Engineer" refers to someone who holds the title of "Professional Engineer" from that state's licensure board. However, the entire country has decided to ignore it entirely. It's essentially a massive example of civil disobedience.

So, legally, if you aren't licensed then you aren't an engineer. In reality, the term engineer has very little specific meaning outside of construction projects.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Jaime2]

Except most US states are now on the road to licensing Professional Engineers in Software Engineering. As soon as the first person earns a PE in Software, there will be confusion.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

You may consider yourself an electrical engineer, but you can not advertise your services to the public as such.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Your.Master]

Mine is made of iron. I have two iron rings and a steel ring: I inherited rings from my grandpa and earned on on my own. I prefer wearing my grandpa's iron ring because it's the most comfortable.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[trawg]

Well, that obviously ultimately depends on what definition of the word "engineer" you are using, at which point this gets into even more a semantics debate than it is already :)

But, to answer your question, within our company I refer to people that are writing code as "programmers" (or "developers") (not software engineers), and I refer to our network/operations guys as "system/network admins" (not network engineers), and the guys that write for us as "writers/editors", not "content engineers".

It's the same thing with the title 'doctor' (again, here in Australia). It's even stricter here about when you can use the term 'Doctor' (and I suspect these rules will become tightened even more in the wake of the gradual destruction of pseudo-medicines like homeopathy and chiropractic).

(I enjoy the debate about the appropriateness of using the 'doctor' word regularly with my siblings: one is an actual medical doctor, and the other a PhD student. :)

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Eponymous Coward]

Software Engineer is an already established term. They need to come up with a new title.

I wonder if train drivers got all pissed off when other people started calling themselves engineers.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Your.Master]

Nothing stops anybody from wearing an iron ring, but the original intention was for it to be exclusively Canadian but it's a cool custom so others have copied it to some extent.

FWIW, the various US versions' rings, obligations, and rituals are all different from the original (the ritual is semi-secret).

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

When they say Facebook engineer

Saying someone is a Facebook engineer sounds as hilarious as saying someone is a Lego engineer. I imply that an Lego engineer is someone that builds stuff from Lego for a living - which is hilarious.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[DarthVain]

Peon in Charge of Forms

Would also be a lot of fun on a resume! Funny in a sort of self deprecating kind of way. Surely a fresh perspective from all the rosy aggrandizing that usually accompanies a resume self description...

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a stupidly long response about this engineer versus 'title here' but there is a very distinct difference between an engineer and a programmer/designer/technician. And for those people who think licensing and regulations get in the way of the "free market" or whatever b.s. that is, just take a look at the buildings built in Haiti or India. The market sure maintained a good quality there didn't it? And complaining that licensing is a recent invention only to make money or stifle growth is also ridiculous (see emergency health care example above). If you think that quality has decreased since licensing or regulation was introduced in "x" engineering industry, please let me know. There are certain issues with every licensing system but they are far outweighed by the quality levels they provide.

But maybe your title is "sales engineer" at a shoe store and you like it better than salesperson.

Re:Programmers != Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a big difference between being the employee of a company and being an officer of the company.

woooosh!

Now we know!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we know how/why there have been such privacy issues if there is no formal process to determine what features should be included or not!

Fake

[MBCook]

It's too bad much of the article is wrong.

Re:Fake

[FuckingNickName]

Great, a series of statements about Facebook by some people not speaking on behalf of Facebook corrected by one person claiming to be from Facebook but not speaking on behalf of Facebook. Who knew Facebook engineers and fanboys were as capricious and unwilling to understand boundaries as the users?

Re:Fake

[trollertron3000]

Sir the post you cite actually confirms a lot of this is true. Such as the lack of QA. They are all encouraged to test and then report any bug in a new internal version? Is that supposed to be sufficient?

Just more proof that Facebook really doesn't care about anything except driving eyeballs to ads. I bet _that_ system is NASA engineered.

Re:Fake

[Locke2005]

But... what possibly incentive could a blogger have for just making shit up? I thought bloggers were supposed to be the epitome of responsible journalism.

Re:Fake

[Anonymous Coward]

Except when it's not. Take this with a grain of salt, but having been to Facebook a number of times (free food!) and having friends who work there, this is basically the process they described to me.

Hmm, how to prove I've been there? Well first of all, after you leave they let you stick your guest pass sticker to a giant ball of such stickers that was about 15 pounds or so last I was there (and a bit bigger than a basketball). When you walk in through the front doors of the office, marketing is on your left, there are a few sets of desks on your right, and about 200 feet in there's a coffee/cereal/candy station on your right. Past that there's a set of meeting rooms to your left, and another right takes you to the cafeteria. Maybe this is in a book or video or something, but yeah, that's what I remember. HTH.

Re:Fake

[blai]

As a co-op student, I confirm this mostly true.

At facebook, you learn nothing but bad practices.

Re:Fake

[cavebison]

Thanks for that.

I'm going to quote-mine the Facebook employee saying 'We absolutely do not believe "most engineers are capable of writing bug-free code"' when meeting with clients. :)

what this means is...

[FuckingNickName]

...that they have very poor/disorganised engineering practice, and they're trying to sell a bug in their methodology as a feature. It's like when Google suddenly fluffs something up with your search results momentarily, and you think "huh, that's weird," but actually they're just testing (or think they're testing... in reality, they're just annoying you).

Since there's nothing technically interesting or requiring resilience about anything Facebook has to offer, they can get away with it.

Re:what this means is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just out of curiosity, what have you done that you're so eager to poopoo everything all over this story? You must have worked on something amazing to be in such a position.

Re:what this means is...

[FuckingNickName]

What's the name of the fallacy in which secunda requires prima to reveal that prima is Gandhi before prima may criticise Mussolini?

Re:what this means is...

[Americano]

I do believe we're looking at an ad hominem fallacy!

"Your point about Facebook's sloppy engineering practices is false because YOU never did anything important[1] like writing the code to Facebook."

[1] for some definitions of 'important'.

I'd also like to submit a fallacy of my own: "Facebook is very popular, therefore Facebook's engineering practices MUST be excellent." Fifty million Elvis fans can't be wrong, can they?

Re:what this means is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tu quoque.

Re:what this means is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, just trying to figure out if you had any clue what your were talking about, or just pulling stuff from your ass.

Guess which answer you just gave?

Re:what this means is...

[wild_berry]

I don't know if there are domain experts or a client-base whose desires a traditional engineering effort can be aimed at. So the internal crowd get to be the client-base and to provide feature requests or feature enhancements themselves.

I can't work out if that's a good thing. Perhaps they'll be doomed like Sun to have a closed culture (as Valerie Aurora pointed out http://blog.valerieaurora.org/2010/02/13/sleeping-with-the-enemy/) which will only scratch the itches that people within Facebook need for Facebook. On the other hand, they've built a substantial internal culture which mimics a successful free software culture.

Tired of it all

[Anonymous Coward]

Way too many Facebook stories today. I wish that website would disappear. Just walk anywhere in public for 15 minutes and count how many times you hear a reference to this website. Sometimes the count reaches double digits. It is ridiculous. You would think there was nothing else in the world that mattered. People are boring *yawn*

down the road

[jsnipy]

I can see the social network equivalent to SOX or HIPAA coming down the road :/

Re:down the road

[BitZtream]

You may want to look at what those acronyms mean, what they do, and why they exist.

SOX already covers Facebook and every other company in the USA.

HIPPA is more appropriate to what you mean, but the meat of it probably does things that you had no clue, I'll give you a hint, privacy is a tiny portion of it really.

Re:down the road

[guyfawkes-11-5]

SOX does not apply to Facebook, at least now today. It is for publicly held companies only, and thus applies to only a small portion of all businesses in the US.

Re:down the road

[JonySuede]

Could this explain why Goldman do not want to have Facebook stocks in the US.

Re:down the road

[jsnipy]

I know what they mean, it was meant in analogy, not literal. Is facebook public yet?

Re:down the road

[guyfawkes-11-5]

Its for a different reason; GS created a vehicle with exactly 499 investors to specifically skirt a rules that requires any company with more than 500 investors to be publicly traded. The SEC woke up for once in their lives and started poking around, rather than taking the heat, GS created the vehicle overseas, and only offered it to non US clients. Shady and circumspect to say the least. Heres more info: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/goldman-limits-facebook-investment-to-foreign-clients/

Re:down the road

[jmauro]

The 500 investor rules are not a requirement to be publically traded. A company can have 5000 investors and be traded on the private market.

The issue is with 500 investors the company must file 10K and 10Q reports to the SEC in either GAAP or IFSR format and have them audited by an outside party as if they were a publically traded company. It's the reporting that Facebook is trying to avoid; why they're trying to avoid it I have no idea.

The 500 limit also applies only to Facebook and not to the investment vehicle.

Re:down the road

[Dhalka226]

GS created a vehicle with exactly 499 investors

Actually it's worse than that. GS is ONE investor. They can sell stakes in that investment to 499 people or 4.9 million people and it doesn't change anything for Facebook.

Whether it's ultimately legal or not is questionable; that it is an attempt to circumvent the law, however, is undeniable.

Intentionally malicious code, eh?

[noidentity]

It would take intentionally malicious behavior to get un-reviewed code in.

But will they catch unintentionally malicious behavior that gets un-reviewed code in?

Re:Intentionally malicious code, eh?

[meloneg]

It would take intentionally malicious behavior to get un-reviewed code in.

But will they catch unintentionally malicious behavior that gets un-reviewed code in?

One of you doesn't understand the meaning of one of those words. I'm just not sure which, or which.

Re:Intentionally malicious code, eh?

[noidentity]

I guess I was too subtle. Yes, I was commenting on the redundancy of intentionally malicious. Maybe that guy thinks that malicious simply means harmful. The great watering down of language continues... :(

Re:Intentionally malicious code, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's good QA thinking! I likey it.

Buh buh buh ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This one time, at Facebook camp ...

Facebook = change on the fly for no reason

[Anonymous Coward]

You just have to play with their annoying product for a little while and you see all the constant and apparently not thought out changes. I stopped using facebook years ago because the interface kept changing. I wrote some scripts to do some basic stuff and they kept breaking because of the constantly changing interface. Changes that just made no sense. One day a button would be there the next day gone. A week later it would come back. I don't see how people tolerate that. I guess they are so self absorbed that they don't even notice the changes.

Good Plan

[fiendo]

Because fortunately there is no history of humanity ever acting with intentional malice. #phew

It's a component system

[Animats]

Bear in mind how Facebook works internally. It's a large number of programs intercommunicating through a remote procedure call system. There's no one big "build". The interfaces between programs are well defined, and changing out programs individually is normal.

"dogfooding"?

[Tetsujin]

Yeah, I had to look it up. Never heard of the term "dogfooding" before.

It seems a silly word choice, since in context it carries no more meaning than the rather more conventional word "using".

Re:"dogfooding"?

[Urban Garlic]

The choosing is weirding, you're right, but as long as the meaning is clearing, it's not really probleming.

Re:"dogfooding"?

[Esteanil]

Yeah, I had to look it up. Never heard of the term "dogfooding" before.

It seems a silly word choice, since in context it carries no more meaning than the rather more conventional word "using".

Well, it could be worse...

"In 2009, the new CIO of Microsoft, Tony Scott, argued that the phrase "dogfooding" was unappealing and should be replaced by "icecreaming", with the aim of developing products as "ice cream that our customers want to consume"

Icecreaming, you screaming...

Re:"dogfooding"?

[pwagland]

If you really had to look it up, the least you could do is provide the link

That said, assuming that you are a software engineer, you really should have come across that term before, it's been around for 20 years, and in common use for at least ten.

Re:"dogfooding"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The context is "eating one's own dogfood", and it's rather known...

Re:"dogfooding"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please go back to the literary sewer you came from.

Re:"dogfooding"?

[Locke2005]

The usual expression is "eating their own dog food". I've never heard it referred to as "dogfooding" either.

Re:"dogfooding"?

[jeffreyc]

I first heard the term from the book "Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg. If you think about it though, it makes sense. It's where you eat the food (test/use the product) that you're about to serve to the dogs (users). It's supposed to give the connotation that your product is still in an untested (crappy) phase.

Re:"dogfooding"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I second this statement.

Re:"dogfooding"?

[Tetsujin]

That said, assuming that you are a software engineer, you really should have come across that term before, it's been around for 20 years, and in common use for at least ten.

Believe it or not, there are programming jobs out there that don't immerse the programmer in trendy or otherwise retarded terminology. I'm happy to work in an environment that allows me to focus on coding rather than development methodologies.

Re:"dogfooding"?

[sootman]

Google shows about 30k results for 'dogfooding'. Not common, but not unheard of either. Popular among people who verb nouns. :-)

Re:"dogfooding"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Verbing weirds things.

Engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just laughing (sadly) that web developers are considered engineers.

But hey, they call garbage collectors "Sanitation engineers" so why not Javascript and PHP coders...

Re:Engineers?

[Unkyjar]

I've never heard anyone call a garbage collector a sanitation engineer, though I have heard them called sanitation workers.

Re:Engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just took a fat shit, come over here and lick my asshole clean.

Re:Engineers?

[mini me]

Engineer is defined as: A person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or public works.

A web developer is someone who designs, builds, or maintains software.

I suppose you could argue that software is not an engine, machine, or public work. However, the first half of the definition is quite applicable.

Re:Engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need an Asshole Engineer?

Re:Engineers?

[Americano]

Wait, the language you write code in dictates whether or not you're an engineer?

And here I thought that engineering was the application of science and math to the creation of practical solutions for societal problems and needs.

But I guess what I learned is wrong, and "engineer" comes from the Latin root word that means "knows how to program in C++".

Re:Engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any other kind?

Re:Engineers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither. Software dweebs are NOT engineers, NONE. You DO NOT get to decide that, the society in which you live does, IT decides who gets to use the title of engineer. Sorry, a massage therapist is not a doctor, and someone who uses the tools that engineers create is not an engineer.

Re:Engineers?

[Man On Pink Corner]

Translation: "After racking up $60,000 in student loans, this piece of paper on my wall had better damned well mean something. And it does. Right? Right...?"

Re:Engineers?

[Americano]

So your objection is about the lack of a professional licensing process and body providing oversight?

That's a fair objection, perhaps you should try stating it as such.

You know, rather than taking swipes at people because of the programming language they're using, which just makes you look like a fucking retard.

Re:Engineers?

[Albatrosses]

Only if you're properly registered with your provincial Engineering professional association. In Canada, anyway.

So how then......

[Lumpy]

Does idiotic ideas like sharing my private info with any random app that is easily setup to be malicious get through?

Why dont they have a checks and balances with the executives that should be smacked hared in the head for their bad ideas?

Same old tune

[trollertron3000]

We get to read this story every few years. Some company makes a popular product and all of a sudden they are the authority on development. News flash guys, enterprise software wasn't just invented and we've been rolling out features to millions of people for years. In environments where any discrepancy can lead to serious legal repercussions. So just for a second, hear us out. We know what we're doing and we don't need to reinvent it every few years because the guys from Facebook, Basecamp, Hacker news, or any other place said we're doing it wrong. Our bottom line and years of quality deliveries say we're doing it right. What do these guys have besides a history of rolling out mistakes? Their value is based on hype, not their code quality. Some of us don't have the luxury to make huge mistakes and have our customers be okay with it.

Re:Same old tune

[Anrego]

huge mistakes and have our customers be okay with it.

Amen! The amount of process and loopholes you have to go through to get code A into production system B tends to be directly proportional to the size of the shit storm which would result in said code being defective.

Facebook gets to be dynamic and "just do it live"-y because even if the whole site goes down it's not a huge deal.. much less some small feature.

That's not to say that some places don't have too much process or a large abundance of useless process.. but it's quite obvious to most people that the amount of process you have for a website (a popular website.. but still just a website) vs say a chunk of medical kit or a large scale order management system is going to be different.. and the same work approach is not going to be valid for both.

Re:Same old tune

[excelsior_gr]

Bill, is that you?

Re:Same old tune

[trollertron3000]

Yeah it's funny, someone above posted that we're not engineers. I think some of the guys I know some guys that would disagree. When you shoot a multi-million dollar satellite into space everything better work. When you control the cooling in a nuclear reactor you better get it right. When you right the software for the controls of a locomotive, again, you have to get it right. These situations and more demand a level of quality that simply "eating your own dogfood" can't meet. If that's not engineering then what is?

It's all about return on investment. If your business cannot suffer a failure then you should focus on QA heavily. If it can take a huge outage or failure and keep on trucking, because people get your service for free, well then a huge QA department might not be money well spent. It's a decision that management needs to make, but one size never fits all and hearing how it works in one situation is anecdotal at best.

Re:Same old tune

[trollertron3000]

Jesus, please forgive me for the insane amount of grammatical and spelling errors. And yes I write software.. Thank God for compilers.

Re:Same old tune

[trollertron3000]

No, it's Ballmer on the mizic over hizere YEAAAAAH.

*mumbles* Hand me that chair please. *mumbles*

Re:Same old tune

[hsmith]

Yawn. Some of us find it fascinating how one of the largest websites on the internet does its business day in and day out. It escapes me how people can't find it interesting. They are dealing with a shit ton of data and do it pretty well.

Re:Same old tune

[trollertron3000]

Fair enough. I did come off rather preachy. They're in a very interesting situation and I can relate to that. I just wanted to rant a little on why we need to be prudent when it comes to software development techniques.

Re:Same old tune

[Stiletto]

Facebook gets to be dynamic and "just do it live"-y because even if the whole site goes down it's not a huge deal.. much less some small feature.

Uhh, according to the leaked financials (if you believe them), if their site goes down, they're losing approx. $50k in revenue an hour. That's not a huge deal?

Re:Same old tune

[Anrego]

Compared to the cost of solid dev processes, QA, and formal testing.. not even close. And that's not even getting into the turn around time for new features.

The other key here is that they don't really lose the money, they just don't make it. Compare this to avionics, medical, or military.. where a screw up can kill someone/derail a project/terminate a contract and put entire offices of people out of work. This is where you see the serious QA and code signing and multiple levels of review and testing.

This explains bizarre feature regressions

[Y-Crate]

I know they're always looking to "streamline" Facebook, but sometimes really obviously good features vanish without explanation and leave users scratching their heads. These decisions would make more sense if you could see some way that FB was making life easier for advertisers or something, but often, the feature regressions are just nonsensical to the extreme.

A few:

- Facebook got rid of statuses. The one e-crack feature they're best known for. Gone with the new profile. Now they're just wall posts to yourself that quickly fall down the page. *facepalm*

- Photos are now uploaded in descending order. It used to be that a group of images would be uploaded like this: beachtrip-1.jpg, beachtrip-2.jpg... and so on. Now it reverses the order of an uploaded album. The last photos taken are displayed first. Posting vacation pics? Well your friends get to see the day you left and work their way back to the day you arrived.

- The "Reverse Photo Order" option was removed when the above "feature" was introduced. You can drag around photos to manually reorder them, but every photo that you mouse-over jumps out of the way and moves to different rows. It's a UI disaster.

- A few months ago I started seeing tagged photos of friends despite the fact they were in private albums of people I'm not friends with who also happen to have locked-down profiles where you can't see anything at all unless you add them.

Re:This explains bizarre feature regressions

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Facebook didn't get rid of statuses. They're not "gone". Maybe you need to understand how your news feed works.

2. How do you know albums of people you're not friends with were private and not set for "friend of a friend"?

Gotta love irresponsible speculation passed off as fact. So they changed the way photos are re-organized...hardly this "bizarre" incident as you put it.

Re:This explains bizarre feature regressions

[Thelasko]

I remember being able to add a class schedule to my profile, and then being able to look up other people in my class on Facebook. It seems this feature is now gone, or perhaps it's just unavailable to me since I'm no longer enrolled in school.

Re:This explains bizarre feature regressions

[oracleguy01]

They got rid of that feature years ago, not long before they opened it up to everyone if I remember right.

Re:This explains bizarre feature regressions

[Y-Crate]

Status updates are effectively gone. They are no longer stuck to the top of your profile and get buried in your own news feed. Sure, they still show up in the main news feed where it may or may not be seen thanks to the amount of info being dumped on the page, but it seems pretty nonsensical to have someone go to your profile and not be able to see your status at a glance.

As for photos, let me break this down.

When...

...I go to the profile of a person I'm not friends with on FB and discover the entire thing is locked down. I cannot see anything at all beyond their profile photo.

...I click on "Photos" and get a blank page with the "LOL, you don't have permission to see any of the photos this user has uploaded" message.

...I cannot see anything in the album my friend is tagged in except for the photos they're tagged in.

Then I'm going to assume that yes, Facebook has allowed me limited access to private data that I should not have access to. If someone I'm not friends with sets an album privacy to "Friends of Friends" then I can cycle through the entire album. This is a security breach.

Re:This explains bizarre feature regressions

[Y-Crate]

I remember being able to add a class schedule to my profile, and then being able to look up other people in my class on Facebook. It seems this feature is now gone, or perhaps it's just unavailable to me since I'm no longer enrolled in school.

They decided to make it an application, not an integrated part of Facebook. Which was beyond stupid, as it required everyone in your classes to use the same courses application. And there seemed to be about a dozen or more.

Re:This explains bizarre feature regressions

[trancemission]

The more page you have to navigate to another page the better for facebook - ie more ads shown.....

Re:This explains bizarre feature regressions

[story645]

They're bringing it back, sort of. You can add classes to the info section of your school, but I doubt many people will use it the way it's implemented.

The Cheetah and the Elephant

[eldavojohn]

This is still a learning process as they're one of the biggest guys out there usage-wise. It's hard to tell what's real and what's fake but I reviewed Beautiful Data for Slashdot a while ago and am reminded of a chapter by Jeff Hammerbacher about Facebook's database in the early days. Maybe the culture is still a little bit like those early days with the database where they spend more time constantly addressing data issues and trying to step up to the next <prefix>abyte? You can go ahead and presume all you want but I'm going to guess the developers are pretty busy dealing with some serious scaling issues. Past performance of the website reinforces this and, let's face it, the "chat" feature was and always will be a nightmare to use.

At a staff of 200, I would also wager that new features take a back seat and would propose that this is why we see Facebook's "upgrades" as being almost purely cosmetic (i.e. layout, markup, etc.).

Amazing

[aaaaaaargh!]

I'm amazed that "Facebook" needs about 1000 engineers for their site. I'd have thought that a team of 3-4 engineers could achieve the same effect. Honestly, I'm not joking. Then again, I haven't looked at their site for more than a year and no longer have an account, so perhaps its by now powered by rocket science.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for commenting.

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

"Based on old, irrelevant information from a year ago, and with my opinion which means nothing because I don't have a god damn clue, I'm surprised Facebook needs engineers!"

Re:Amazing

[neoform]

Scaling a site to be the 2nd most popular site on the web is no small feat. I would imagine a good number of people on their tech team are designated to managing the load.

Re:Amazing

[mini me]

I seriously have my doubts that 3-4 engineers could completely redesign the website every six months on top of regular maintenance.

Re:Amazing

[KiloByte]

Remember that these are not Googlers. While Google picks the cream of the crop, Facebook uses a horde of PHP monkeys.

Re:Amazing

[MorpheousMarty]

It takes 3 or 4 engineers to clone what Facebook has. It takes 1000 to develop all the functionality it and leave enough flexibility for future changes. To quote the best line from the social network: "we don't know what it is yet."

Re:Amazing

[MooseMuffin]

Back in 09, Blizzard said their programming team for WoW's engine, gameplay, tools, servers and UI was 32 people total.

http://wow.joystiq.com/photos/adgc09-the-universe-behind-world-of-warcraft/#2296009

Re:Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on TFS and what I've seen of FB feature malleability, I can believe it. On any given day it must take 700 of them to fix the unintended consequences of what the other 300 introduced the day before, and any of them could be in either group from one day to the next.

- T

Two obvious thoughts...

[ArtFart]

First, this certainly explains Facebook's "glitch-of-the-hour" syndrome. Second, let's all pray that these folks never get to work on anything related to avionics, life support or nuclear power plants.

Of course they have no QA...

[RJHelms]

It's easy not to have QA when your users aren't paying you.

Google's in the same boat - the websites aren't the product, the end users are. When your website is your product this crap won't fly.

Re:Of course they have no QA...

[Hobbes_2100]

Much like in politics (paid by the people at uneven intervals -- more regularly by "interests" -- and definitely no QA) and the media.

Ken Thompson code

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Ken Thompson got annoyed that Unix users would call him up or email him complaining about bugs, but would refuse to give him root access to their systems to snoop around. So he added a seemingly innocuous chunk of code to the Unix source, that would be transformed by the C compiler into a backdoor for him. Then when folks called up to complain, he would instruct them to recompile the kernel, and presto, he could get in to debug.

When describing this years later, he quipped something like, "Never trust or hire a guy like me."

So the summary says, "All changes are reviewed by at least one person, and the system is easy for anyone else to look at and review your code even if you don't invite them to"

So folks can review the code . . . can they understand what it really does?

Re:Ken Thompson code

[RJHelms]

Did he actually do this? I've read a paper he wrote about this, but got the impression it was a proof of concept for hiding a backdoor in the compiler, not something that actually shipped.

If I'm wrong I'd be interested to read more.

Re:Ken Thompson code

[jomama717]

I had the same thought as RJHelms below - the paper (PDF) is great, but I do think it was meant only as a proof of concept/warning. I guess this is how rumors get started...

"Compnay"

[Bourdain]

What is interesting for a compnay this size is that there is no official QA group at Facebook

I guess slashdot is also missing a bit of QA :)

Not that surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't that surprising if you're trying to figure out how Facebook works by looking at it from the outside. Facebook has always looked like a mangled mish-mash of features. Things get implemented pretty much a random with no apparent regard for an overarching design or vision. Facebook looks like one gigantic hack. Turns out, it is.

Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Chemisor]

An engineer is a professional practitioner of engineering, concerned with applying scientific knowledge, mathematics, economics and ingenuity to develop solutions to meet economic and societal needs. Engineers design structures, machines and systems while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, safety and cost. The word engineer is derived from the Latin root ingenium, meaning "cleverness" -Wikipedia

Nowhere does this mention licensing of any kind. Licenses and liability to lawsuits are a recent invention and are little more than unnecessary government intervention in the free market for the purpose of restricting the supply of engineers. This sort of guild mentality has always been detrimental to the economy by forcing people to pay for something they don't necessarily want. It would have been much better if all this licensing nonsense disappeared and we could rely on the traditional reputation system that the free market uses to maintain quality.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Americano]

Okay, thought exercise:

You're walking down the street, and somebody walks up with a knife and demands your wallet. In the ensuing scuffle, you end up stabbed 3 times in the chest. Nothing instantly fatal, but your lungs are now filling with blood.

A passer-by calls an ambulance for you, and once you're loaded in and ready to go, the EMT pulls out a list of all the people who practice medicine in the area and says, "which doctor do you want to have care for you?"

You weakly point at one of the names on the list, J. R. McAllister III, and say "That guy has a reputable-sounding name, and he has a 4 star rating."

The ambulance delivers you to Mr. McAllister's door. Mr. McAllister looks at your wounds, shrugs, and says, "I just have no idea what to do here. I just deal in herbal remedies and acupuncture most of the time."

You die.

Still think that professional licensing is completely stupid, and a "traditional reputation system" is better? Or is there some room for professional licensing that guarantees a minimum standard of competency and training before someone can call themselves a "doctor" or an "engineer"?

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Stormalong]

I never liked that Dr. Stupid.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[quacking duck]

Right, because we want merely "reputable" firms building and signing off on bridges that go through heating and cooling stresses, not to mention tons of traffic every day. Codes and standards are completely against the free market and should be gotten rid of, absolutely.

Tell you what, *you* move to a place where bridge and building standards don't exist, and the building is designed and built by the "free market," I'll happily live in and drive on structures and works that have some semblance of enforced quality standards.

No, they're not perfect, and failures occur even when a licensed professional engineer signs off on it, but imagine how much worse it would be if they were more lax.

And in case you forgot, the "free market" is what gave us the recent wave of lead-painted toys and melamine-contaminated milk. The capitalists in China were more than happy (at first) to skimp on actual product, and the capitalists in the west didn't care because they were paying less for it, and neither side had regulations (or they weren't enforced, generating free-market-like conditions where anything goes if you can get away with it) to prevent them from doing so until kids started getting sick and dying.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[bberens]

There is but one certification process for doctors as far as most of America is concerned, which ones take my health insurance. Other than that, I don't know and/or care. If I'm having an emergency I will only be taken to a hospital that I theoretically trust to have chosen talented workers. I honestly have never seen or asked to see any doctor's certifications of any sort. I typically find doctors to be a nuisance that I have to go through to get the same Z-pack I get every year around the same time of year when I get a sinus infection.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[bberens]

Yes, buildings built to spec, by the lowest bidder.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Americano]

Because for them to call themselves "doctors" and be hired by a hospital in that capacity (or practice medicine in their own practice) they must be certified and licensed to practice medicine.

The GGP poster was suggesting we do away with "licensing nonsense," and rely on a market-based "reputation system" for professions.

The reason you don't have to "know and/or care," is precisely because of those licensing requirements. I assure you, if we did away with things like professional licensing requirements and medical boards, you would certainly need to know, and you would care very much about what sort of certifications the man or woman about to perform emergency thoracic surgery on you possesses.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[mini me]

Professional licensing can still remain in a free market. I imagine people would flock to those who are licensed, but it should be the consumer's choice.

I recall a story on this very site from a few years ago about a very talented and successful lawyer who was punished for practising without having passed the bar. Why should I be prevented from hiring the services of a really good lawyer just because he is not properly accredited?

Pretending to be accredited when you are not is fraud, but as long as no false claims are being made, what is the harm in letting the free market decide? If people really value accreditation, those who are not will be out of business quickly.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Americano]

Professional licensing can still remain in a free market.

But that's not what the post I initially responded to suggested. The suggestion was - and I quote - "It would have been much better if all this licensing nonsense disappeared and we could rely on the traditional reputation system that the free market uses to maintain quality."

There's a difference between "no legislatively-mandated licensing requirement" and "no licensing requirements at all."

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[mini me]

If only there was an edit button. You are right that licensing was the wrong term to use here. The spirit of what I was trying to convey is that accreditation can be used as one way to build your reputation.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Chemisor]

> the EMT pulls out a list of all the people who practice medicine in the area and says, "which doctor do you want to have care for you?"

The way this used to work, before the AMA put a stranglehold on doctor supply around 1910, was that you already had a family doctor you went to for your health problems. You would have seen him previously for simpler things since you were a baby and have had reasonable knowledge of his level of skill and areas of expertise. These days, of course, doctors are rare and therefore expensive, so people can't afford to have a family doctor and you no longer have any idea how well this system used to work. But even now, I would HIGHLY recommend you find a competent doctor BEFORE you have an emergency. When you are bleeding your life away, it is already too late to make a choice.

> The ambulance delivers you to Mr. McAllister's door. Mr. McAllister looks at your wounds, shrugs, and says,
> "I just have no idea what to do here. I just deal in herbal remedies and acupuncture most of the time."

The EMTs in the ambulance should have a pretty good idea which doctors in the area are incapable of doing surgery. This specialization of doctors, incidentally, is also a recent phenomenon. Any doctor knew how to sew up a stab wound before all this licensing nonsense got started. These days, if you aren't licensed to practice in a certain area, you are legally forbidden to do it. So even if your Mr.McAllister knew how to treat your stab wound, the law prevented him from mentioning it, and so you died.

> Or is there some room for professional licensing that guarantees a minimum standard
> of competency and training before someone can call themselves a "doctor" or an "engineer"?

Your minimum standard of competency is not my minimum standard of competence. You believe you can trust the AMA to set good standards. I don't know why you do that. Maybe you are just naturally gullible. Personally, I think all doctors around here are total quacks sold out to big pharma and are in business solely to push drugs on people. You can not escape having to make the decision about a doctor's competence. If you try to let other people make this decision for you, you will always get screwed because their interests are not your interests. The whole point of the free market system is to avoid having other people's opinions imposed on you. Personal freedom is about being free to make your own choices, whether in health care or any other area.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Chemisor]

> Tell you what, *you* move to a place where bridge and building standards don't exist, and the building
> is designed and built by the "free market," I'll happily live in and drive on structures and works that
> have some semblance of enforced quality standards.

The free market does not forbid building codes. It only forbids them being imposed on you by force. A community can get together and agree on a set of building codes, and as a member of this community you would have a say in it. When moving to a new town, you will be able to choose whether the community you are entering has acceptable codes. These days we call these "homeowner associations" and CC&Rs. The problem with the current system is that the standards are imposed on every community nationwide and nobody gets a say in what they are or to choose between more than one.

> And in case you forgot, the "free market" is what gave us the recent wave of lead-painted toys and melamine-contaminated milk.

The problem is once again the lack of a reputation system. A reputable company wants to keep customers happy because they would otherwise go elsewhere. A company wants to keep customers because it wants to stay in business for a long time. Once it makes melamine milk, nobody will buy its products any more and it will go bankrupt. Today there are government regulations on quality so you do not pay attention to brands and just buy whatever is cheapest, so if you happened to drink melamine milk, it is your own fault for buying from a disreputable source. You thought you could let other people make the decision about what is safe or good or worth the price, and you got exactly what you deserved. The free market requires you to think, because it is you, the consumer, who determines whether a product is any good. You do that because you are the only one qualified to do so. Central planners have long had the arrogance to think they know what is best for everybody, and failed every damn time, because they do not. You are the only one who knows what is good for you, and you are the only one who has the right to make choices for yourself. This is what we call economic freedom.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Americano]

A community can get together and agree on a set of building codes, and as a member of this community you would have a say in it.

Who do you trust more to create a building code outlining a minimum set of standards and practices for construction? The people who live in your apartment building? Or a group of people who build apartment buildings by trade?

Who do you trust more to define standards of care for medical professionals? The people who live in your apartment building? Or a group of doctors and nurses who have studied the outcomes of hundreds of cases?

There is such a thing as professional expertise. It is called "expertise" because it is not something that the average person has. It is, in fact, an "above average" understanding of a particular topic or area of study, which then qualifies the person who possesses it to issue a much more authoritative statement about that particular topic or area of study.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Americano]

These days, of course, doctors are rare and therefore expensive, so people can't afford to have a family doctor and you no longer have any idea how well this system used to work.

These are known as General Practitioners, or Primary Care Physicians, and suggesting that nobody has them or can afford them is just patently false. And for the record, I've had exactly 3 primary care physicians in my life: the first I moved away from after college, the second retired, and the third is the one I see currently. How did I choose them? Well the first was a choice made by my parents; The second was based on... wait for it... recommendations. The third was based on... wait for it... recommendations from the second! The key thing is, along with those recommendations, I knew that there was a certain minimum level of capability each doctor had to have in order to hang a shingle and practice medicine. Beyond that minimum, I was able to make choices based on the recommendations of family, friends, and co-workers. It's amazing how a reputation-based system can coexist with minimum licensing standards!

Any doctor who has an MD and has passed their boards today can sew up a stab wound, I'm not sure what your point is there. They all receive a minimum level of training, and that minimum level of training DOES include a surgical rotation and an internal medicine rotation in medical school. They're called clerkships, or clinical rotations. These are enough that - at a bare minimum, the doctor can certainly keep you going until you can receive more appropriate care from a specialist after being transported to them.

The EMTs in the ambulance should have a pretty good idea which doctors in the area are incapable of doing surgery.

Oh no, that would never do - then they're imposing THEIR choices on ME. That's not freedom!

But you're definitely right though - I'd rather have a couple of EMTs who are probably 2-year community-college graduates deciding on an appropriate standard of care for me, rather than a group licensed physicians who have been through medical school and internships and passed their licensing boards. That makes MUCH more sense than having a minimum standard of education, training and licensing that ANYBODY must pass in order to be a physician, guaranteeing a minimum standard of quality in the care you receive.

You believe you can trust the AMA to set good standards. I don't know why you do that.

I'll turn that around: You believe you can trust a bunch of people with zero medical expertise in your community to set standards for medical practices and care. I don't know why you do that. Maybe you're just naturally foolish.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Chemisor]

> Who do you trust more to create a building code outlining a minimum set of standards and practices for
> construction? The people who live in your apartment building? Or a group of people who build apartment
> buildings by trade?

It is not a matter of trust. It is a matter of being able to choose your own standards instead of having standards imposed on you. Yes, building contractors are more qualified to determine what is safe to build, but they are not qualified to choose what you want to build. If you are unsure what is safe and want what is safe, by all means, pay a contractor to tell you what is safe. Or, you might care more about "cheap" than about "safe", and that must be your personal choice. If you are willing to take risks, you must not be forbidden to do so because you must be the owner of your person. The free market is not going to protect you from yourself or from your own bad decisions because that would be immoral. It would be imposing choices upon you as if you were a child. Those who wish to live under a free market system want to be adults and to take responsibility for their own actions and to have the freedom to take that responsibity and to choose those actions.

Re:Licensed engineers != Engineers

[Chemisor]

>> You believe you can trust the AMA to set good standards. I don't know why you do that.
> I'll turn that around: You believe you can trust a bunch of people with zero medical expertise in your community
> to set standards for medical practices and care. I don't know why you do that. Maybe you're just naturally foolish.

You might be ok with the government imposing trust in itself on you at the point of a gun, but I am not. I want to make my own decisions about what is acceptable, I do not want those decisions forced on me by armed thugs. And yes, I may even end up trusting someone who has little medical expertise and make a mistake; that is my right. I do not want the nanny state to protect me from making bad decisions, making mistakes, or screwing up in whatever manner, even if that gets me killed. It's the true meaning of freedom.

That said, nothing stops you from finding your own medical experts and getting their opinion on doctors in the area. If you want "medical expertise", nobody should be able to stop you from finding it, just as they should not be able to stop me from not wanting it.

>> The EMTs in the ambulance should have a pretty good idea which doctors in the area are incapable of doing surgery.
> Oh no, that would never do - then they're imposing THEIR choices on ME. That's not freedom!

They are not imposing their choices on you. You are perfectly free to stay on the side of the road and bleed to death. Rough? Sure. Unfair? Nope. Just like a farmer should know that he needs to prepare for the next year by saving some seed to plant, you should plan for problems like this. If the farmer eats his own seed corn over the winter, people are free to rip him off in the spring when he wants to buy seed from those who prepared. Likewise, your safety is your responsibility. You should have known what doctor to go to in the first place. Especially if you are stupid enough to go to a bad neighborhood where you can get stabbed. The free market is free because it does not force you to do anything, even if it would be for your own good. Since you did not prepare when you should have, you are stuck with a couple of EMTs who are probably 2-year community college graduates whose opinion will decide whether you will live or die. Tough. Next time, if there is one, you would be wiser, and prepare better. Personal freedom includes having the freedom to screw up and die.

> The key thing is, along with those recommendations, I knew that there was a certain minimum level
> of capability each doctor had to have in order to hang a shingle and practice medicine. Beyond
> that minimum, I was able to make choices based on the recommendations of family, friends, and
> co-workers. It's amazing how a reputation-based system can coexist with minimum licensing standards!

Until you realise that licensing is a reputation based system, with the difference being that the value of the reputation bestowed by a license is imposed on you at gunpoint. You do not have the freedom to choose who provides the minimum qualifications. Under a free market, you could turn to a variety of reputation brokers, who would tell you which doctor has had what qualifications. All without having to force every doctor to adhere to a single arbitrary standard or throwing doctors in jail because they don't even though their level of training may be perfectly adequate for my needs. What you keep forgetting is that whatever the government does, it does at the point of a gun. If you just stop thinking that you have to impose your opinions on everybody, you might be a better person for it.

You don't get Facebook

[Sloppy]

It's not like anything really changes on it.

How would you know? Are you one of their paying customers?

You are what you eat...

[Anonymous Coward]

and Facebook is dog food.
Funny coincidence, no?

Dogfooding the product

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm not wild about the term, dogfooding your own product is not a bad way to find bugs, and also to see if the product sucks or not. Things people want are likely things customers want. Fix your niche wish (wouldn't it be great if we had...) and you are likely (with Facebook) fixing 10,000,000 users wish. I occasionally go to an upscale Chinese restaurant. Sure, they flip the dirty tablecloths over, and if the other side is dirty too, they pull it off quick, and put on a clean one. But the thing I remember most is that before they open (at noon), all the waiters, the chefs, and the boss sit down to lunch. If there is any problem with the food (or it isn't quite right), everyone will know right away, before they serve it to customers, so customers get the version thats been past quality control. The chefs sit across from the boss. I always wonder about companies that prefer other companies products over their own. There is something insincere about it.

Insider Attacks

[gweihir]

Urgh. That means every competent insider can easily put disguised backdoors into the code to be used later. Ordinarily you want to severely limit who can do that. In fact one fundamental principle when operating high security applications is that development personnel must not have access to the production environment, exactly to not hand all eggs to everybody.

Obviously a young and highly risk-taking company. Not good at all.

Re:Insider Attacks

[Anrego]

high security applications

That's the key phrase. really. Facebook has a metric ass-tonne of private data.. but it is not treated as a secure application. The problem is that it's somewhere in between, and as much as I personally dislike facebook.. I think this kind of "continuous hack" development works well for this kind of site.

It's always a trade off. More process and more layers.. means less features and longer between updates. Great in avionics or banks or military software.. but this is a website! And really if everyone has full access to the live DB.. who needs a back door.. (a thought that would disturb me a bit if I had an account).

Re:Insider Attacks

[gweihir]

On one level, I agree with you. It is just a rather unimportant social web web site.

On a different level, what causes the need for an application to be highly secure? One key factor is high attacker motivation because really valuable data can be stolen. From an attackers point-of-view, the Facebook dataset is very, very valuable. This means there will be targeted, sophisticated attacks by highly competent individuals and small groups of such individuals. Unless you think Facebook does not need to be resistant to the types of attacks that are to be expected (and by typical ethical standards and legal standards you have to be able to deal gracefully with expected things), that makes Facebook a high risk application, which in turn mandates it being designed and implemented as a high security application.

I admit freely that I do not care very much about Facebook. But it does set a precedent, and what they are doing at the moment is unprofessional, unethical and driven by greed. "Innovation" is just used as a fig-leaf. With the money they have, they could very well implement this thing securely. However that would mean hiring top people in the area of secure software engineering, which are expensive. (I sort-of qualify for such a job, but they would probably have to pay me twice as much as a normal developer. I expect something similar for other qualified people. There are not that many of us, but many of us can teach and lift up others, so it can be done.) These people then would take things the site designers (what they call "developers") make and turn them into secure code. Standard principles (input validation, privilege separation, marking & tagging, secure libraries, application-integrated IDS, competent use of crypto, data-leakage detection, audit-logs that are carefully examined, diversification, Design-by-Contract, ...) can be used to make attacking the system far, far harder and give a high probability of attacked being detected. They also serve to make putting in backdoors hard and give this activity a high-risk of being detected. The security people would need to be fairly isolated from the site designers, so social engineering by insiders becomes harder. All this is doable and the process is not hard to understand by competent secure software engineering experts.

True, this would probably increase the cost of development by a factor of 2-5. But it would not compromise profitability and it would be adequate to the attacks that must be expected on a site like this, including insider attacks. Flexibility would suffer a bit, but not too badly. As they are running now, they offensively say that they do not care at all and that means their database will get compromised sooner or later. I say those responsible should go to prison then, in addition to paying for all the damage their users will suffer. This damage may exceed the total value of Facebook.

Heard it all before

[Anonymous Coward]

Programmers can not be held liable, have no professional license, no government accountable body, no code of ethics, no liability insurance

So government is what makes a good engineer? Pfft. I think we all know what really makes a good engineer:

- Knowledge
- Experience
- Precision
- Imagination
- Genuine interest in the subject

At best, government simply verifies some of the above.

(Let me guess -- you're one of those people who spent gobs of time and money petitioning government to call yourself an engineer, and now you're complaining because you're out of work and "god damn it, I earned the right to an engineering job".)

Very common sentiment

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'd have thought that a team of 3-4 engineers could achieve the same effect.

This is very typical sentiment in people with little to no experience in running large sites. They believe a) What they see is all the exist, b) Scale does not matter, and c) The site never changes.

This lead them to the faulty conclusion that any high-availability, high-traffic site could be run by two people (of which they no doubt are one) live-updating PHP scripts on the fly. See Also: Dunning-Kruger effect.

Re:Very common sentiment

[revlayle]

I'm *usually* not for modding up ACs - but if I had points, I would certainly point this out.

Held together by scotch tape

[us7892]

That does seem high. 1000 engineers is indeed ridiculous. Perhaps 1000 are needed to keep scotch taping the site together. It might very well be a fragile mess of servers and services just barely hanging on by a thread...

Bug Free Code

[Ytsejam-03]

Interesting article, especially this little snippet:

re: surprise at lack of QA or automated unit tests — “most engineers are capable of writing bug-free code. it’s just that they don’t have an incentive to do so at most companies. when there’s a QA department, it’s easy to just throw it over to them to find the errors.” [EDIT: please note that this was subjective opinion, I chose to include it in this post because of the stark contrast that this draws with standard development practice at other companies]

This guy's obviously fresh out of college. It would be interesting to hear from someone with a little more real-world experience.

Re:Bug Free Code

[Anrego]

Indeed! Anyone who has _actually_ worked in an environment with heavy formal testing _and_ a QA department knows that when something gets kicked back by QA it tends to mean:

a) more work
b) paperwork
c ) schedule delays and the resulting hassles of that
d) coming in on weekends
e) pissed off *coordinators

Knowing that something I write is going to be tested at _several levels_ and if any of those levels reveals a problem it's going to be a shit storm tends to encourage me to write damn good code. I (and I think most people) don't treat this as a crutch, but more an obstacle.

Took the Dive

[twotimes]

I registered for /. after years of lurking AND deleted my fb in the same day.

Google SREs

[toby]

a 27-year-old former Google engineer repeatedly took advantage of his position as a member of an elite technical group at the company to access users' accounts

Although SREs are probably a privileged subgroup and ordinary feature engineers do not have access to all data. Elementary measure, but when did Facebook ever care about your privacy?

Engineers

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a narrow definition of engineer. Surely almost everyone here understands engineer to mean a PE; like a civil, chemical, mechanical, electrical, &c, engineer, but maybe I'm assuming too much.

Maybe people just call themselves engineers because the label makes them feel a bit like actual licensed professional engineers who pass certification exams and have liability insurance.

FWIW, I'm not an engineer, and I can't ethically or legally sell my services by calling myself one, being in Canada.

That explains a LOT**2

[kriston]

"What is interesting for a company this size is that there is no official QA group at Facebook..."

No kidding!!

Keep it up, hacks.

SOX compliance!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Aha, this is definitely not SOX compliance!

I wonder how are they planning to manage the SOX heavy auditions before going public if every single developer has access to the live DB,etc.

Codebase Size?

[Hobbes_2100]

Anyone have a guesstimate as to the size of the backend, frontend, and synchronization/distribution codebase sizes?

My take

[WinstonWolfIT]

It sounds to me like FB is rolling in so much money, that they may be throwing 150% more development staff at the project than they really need. If money were object, my bet is that they would find that their process model is wildly skewed from optimal for their business.

I aint no not using that unphrase

[TiggertheMad]

I guess by your reckoning it would be like contracting "as if I like Hitler"

Yes, using strict grammatical logic, it is contradictory. You get a cookie and a gold star for spotting something illogical in the English language.

While isn't literally what the speaker is intending, everybody in the western world understands the intent. The English language isn't a static construct, and it's richness is a result of it's tendency to beg borrow or steal everything under the sun, and change it around at the speaker's whim. Yeah, it mangles the king's English, but who really cares?

Re:I aint no not using that unphrase

[NoSig]

I see you like Hitler too. It isn't part of English as spoken by people who know what the hell they are saying, it's part of stupid-English, the anti-language spoken by stupid people. It's actually very nice of them to self-identify like that. I find it strange that people who would violently object to carrying around a sign saying "I'm stupid" will never the less express themselves in ways that amount to the same thing. Que quips about how I'm doing the same thing and about mistakes in what I just wrote.

Still can't get it 'write'...

[Niophant]

'400-500 team members each' and they still can't fix the horribly buggy instant messaging system...

Eat Your Own Dogfood.

[Anonymous Coward]

almost every employee is dogfooding the product every day.

Problem, is, like a dog, they tend to eat their own shit too.

Frumage Grand here.

[HornWumpus]

Obviously stolen from Python and no doubt misspelling in frog.

QQ moar n00b

[TiggertheMad]

it's part of stupid-English, the anti-language spoken by stupid people. It's actually very nice of them to self-identify like that.

Spend less time whining about the font that a book is written in, and more time paying attention to the content.

Re:QQ moar n00b

[NoSig]

I'm sure you prefer wingdings, I'd just prefer to avoid such authors. You can keep whining about my whining if you wish. Carry on.

Compare with Meetup.com's 63 employees.

[cavebison]

WTF is with Facebook and 500+ engineers?

Meetup.com has 63 people, not all engineers, and they deal with a client base which uses their product in a much more demanding way than Facebook's users. I look at Meetup.com as more of a performance-critical application, at least in terms of their users. If Meetup gets a bug, it affects whole groups of people - a lot of them engaged in technical, educational, aid and political activities - trying to organise themselves. I'd like to say it again - *63 employees*.

Facebook, on it's face (so to speak), is not rocket science. Neither is Meetup. This indicates to me that there's a LOT going on behind the scenes and most of it has to do with implementing the API and other technology to support all the marketing, advertising, strategic partnerships, etc. Either that or the UI changes are deceptively complicated.

Yeah, I'd love to know what those 500 people are mostly coding. Perhaps this is an indication of the difference between an advertising-run business vs subscription. One of them allows you to get on with what matters to your users. If anything shows where Facebooks's primary focus is, this does.