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> "Best people" according to what metric, other than salary? Facebook scales. It’s not easy to scale computing infrastructure to support billions of daily acti

> "Best people" according to what metric, other than salary? Facebook scales. It’s not easy to scale computing infrastructure to support billions of daily active users. Only a handful of companies can do that right now. On top of that they scaled an ad business that can target billions of people. There is only one other company in the world who can do that. > What technology has Facebook developed with all of those "best people" that could compare to what Bell Labs did with a group of fewer than 10? See it’s less about “quality”, it’s more about “quantity”. Scaling is a different problem on its own. I adore Unix but I admire what Facebook did as well. Scaling any project over 10 exceptional people is one thing and scaling a project with 10,000 engineers is a completely different thing and Facebook succeeded at that. Whether that’s a good thing or not that they have succeeded is a separate discussion.

gregjor 4y ago
Granted, just keeping FB running requires a lot of work from smart and dedicated people. But we can’t really tell how well they do it. If my bank or cell provider or AWS fail to scale I notice right away, but I won’t even know if FB fails to deliver ads to me, or fails to show me something in my feed (assuming I used FB, which I don’t). FB could actually get away with scaling poorly as long as they keep the lights on because few of their users would notice. I don’t doubt that delivering an online service, even a crappy service, at FB scale presents some unique and difficult challenges, and I’m sure FB employs lots of smart and talented people. But given the number of supposedly “best” engineers they do employ the results seem underwhelming. I find it more impressive that Amazon manages to keep AWS up and reliable while constantly introducing new services, and that Apple manages to support a billion iPhone users without spewing ads in their face.

gregjor 4y ago

Granted, just keeping FB running requires a lot of work from smart and dedicated people. But we can’t really tell how well they do it. If my bank or cell provider or AWS fail to scale I notice right away, but I won’t even know if FB fails to deliver ads to me, or fails to show me something in my feed (assuming I used FB, which I don’t). FB could actually get away with scaling poorly as long as they keep the lights on because few of their users would notice. I don’t doubt that delivering an online service, even a crappy service, at FB scale presents some unique and difficult challenges, and I’m sure FB employs lots of smart and talented people. But given the number of supposedly “best” engineers they do employ the results seem underwhelming. I find it more impressive that Amazon manages to keep AWS up and reliable while constantly introducing new services, and that Apple manages to support a billion iPhone users without spewing ads in their face.