And just to add that last part. Moving fast was so damn cool. That shared understanding of responsibilities and freedom of making changes. In most cases of course they were added as reviewers to the revert diff review, and in some cases they knew it could adversely affect us and they’d tag us for our perspective before pushing, but the open-ness of it all. The freedom to bring me in at a later stage or for me to do the same to them.
These days at different companies it’s all planning and hashing out all those details before implementing, and then guess what? Surprises happen anyway. And in the end we become master planners and never actually build anything. Those blueprints sure do look great though.
100% agree. The culture is a huge factor as well, but in some of the environments that I encountered before and after, that culture was there, but the tools didn’t allow the same cohesion.
To your point, other experiences have shown me the ego that rears it’s ugly head when trying to move that way in an env that didn’t have that culture. At FB there was a lot of candor, but in other environments I feel like I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings in code review, or even just watching what I say in slack messages. People take work too seriously in some companies. It’s so rewarding to have fun with it.
They used to say “Nothing at FB is someone else’s problem”
Oh yea, I elaborated more in another comment. But the ease of finding documentation related to code, SEVs, anything wrong. Someone pushing something and breaking something else in my env, then me using the amazing tools like diff to see what was pushed recently that affects my realm, I can quickly track down, find, and often times alter to fix my problem with no more than a message to the original author in a comment on the new diff.
Early career this is pretty huge for growth. I was there until 2019 though, so not sure how it is now.
My point was that the cohesion of all these internal tools makes information discovery frictionless. cross-pollination of functional space in a business is like butter because everything is built by Meta and behind their intern tool. The other companies I've worked at just don't have this. They lack the Eng capacity to build it, unfortunately.
I’ve got coworkers who went back and forth. Their thoughts were (in 2019) that Facebook had cooler things going on, but less mature. Nicer to use, but less stable in some cases.
I personally loved things breaking at times. The monorepo and all the tools were so open that enabled me to follow along and try my own fixes in some cases (sometimes being the one to fix it!).
At that point in my career, that kind of exposure was like a rocket ship for personal growth. Others shared similar sentiments.
Yea I was on the internal side, not outward facing production apps. They have and are building their own versions of ENTIRE companies for internal use. It’s a marvel to see. But the blue app? I can’t speak to that one on the internal side, but I’d agree with you there as a customer.
Moving to a company using a hodgepodge of constantly rotating SaaS tools has been hell. I’m always thinking to myself “why can’t they just do this?”. I think I’ve been both spoiled and broken permanently.
On the other hand, building all these connections between the disparate apps is basically my job, so it’s got its positives.
Oh yea, web comparison for sure, but I also don’t see a difference between slack desktop and web. They’re both electron clients though iirc, the desktop client just wasn’t given much attention because web worked great.
Yea, it could be that FBs internal tooling connected to workchat is what made it so great. I think channels are a nasty way to handle topics of conversation compared to posts on a forum type place. Leaning into searchability and all that was great.
I’ve seen sub 500 employee companies and Slack kicks ass, but it seems once it goes over 1k it’s like glhf managing channels and bots.
Butterfly bot integration to workplace was really something.
Most of the open source Ai things are Meta. React, GraphQL, pytorch, rocksdb, docusaurus, prophet, a whole ton of internal tools that aren’t public knowledge. Full disclosure I haven’t worked there since 2019 though, so not sure since then.
The open-ness of code, visibility, diffs. It was perfection. Something broke in my env suddenly? OH, I just checked recently pushed diffs that affect my realm. Hey there it is, security pushed something weird. I'll just revert the part that affects me and tag them. No meeting, maybe a SEV for visibility and review, maybe not. Easy peasy.
No company I've worked at after FB/Meta ships or works even at a non-eng level with the same velocity. I always attributed that to their internal tools, since most of the other companies seem to be using the same crap. Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. And don't get me started on the how good the task tool is compared to literally any other ticketing system out there. Everything is behind their intern tool, and usually built to all just work together without friction.