,
11 tweets,
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3.1/ Mike on Facebook Engineering: “I will say a thing about this two, an interesting anecdote about Facebook culture is that I think many of the very best engineers in Facebook's history were also the cause of catastrophic engineering failures.”
3.2/ Harkens back to MS: “I remember there was this element of lore. I don't know if it's still true … Excel was written in hand-tuned assembly. There was something like 91 global variables in Excel that were protected by one spin lock. No one could unravel the hairball.”
3.3/ “That was I think you're still limited to 256 columns in Excel, because of the morass at the very center of it.” My comment: 😲😲😲
3.4/ “I think it's easy for systems, especially systems that are scaling quickly and evolving quickly to just become inscrutable and have people not be willing to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty and actually just go in and try to fix it.“
3.5/ “I think one of the core – The whole “Move, Fast and Break Things” gets maligned all the time now, because it's subtle and people don't like subtlety… It was not a product thing, or a company-wide thing. To me, it was fundamentally a technical mantra.”
3.6/ “One of the things I thought was impressive, especially at the early days of Facebook, in the early days of Facebook was just the constant evolution of the underlying primary product infrastructure” My comment: This continues today. See developers.facebook.com/videos/2019/bu…
3.7/ “That's in most companies, I think there is either just fear. People are too scared to go do that, so you end up with 91 global variables protected by a spin lock.”
3.8/ Ok I’m going to personally comment here, because I’m one of the those engineers that did a massive fuck up. I think there is a bit of mythology here. I believe we could have done what we did without the catastrophic screw ups.
3.9/ *However*, the fearlessness and urgency is real. FB engineers were willing to dive into the core. This is software. It is abstraction stacked on abstraction. They are not permanent. The final chapter is never written.
3.10/ No blame culture, the permission to fail very important here. But, this is absolutely not an excuse for wanton recklessness.
3.11/ And that’s a wrap. I really look forward to doing another trance of these in a few weeks. Stay tuned!
