undefined | Better HN

Skip to content

Top Best Ask Show New Jobs

0 pointsastrange3y ago0 comments

Facebook developers seem to have a surprising amount of free time to go around reinventing things that are not obviously social network features. (Or to have had it in the 2010s, at least.)

0 comments

6 comments · 1 top-level

saagarjha3y ago· 5 in thread

It's not particularly surprising that a surprising amount of infrastructure is needed to run a social network.

astrangeOP3y ago

Note WhatsApp had 35 employees when they were acquired and Instagram had 13. At that size you need to be productive at managing servers but you're probably not thinking how great it'd be to have a "whole new programming language and source control system" team.

saagarjha3y ago

WhatsApp and Instagram at the point of acquisition were simpler than Facebook is (and was), or even compared to what it is now. Once you scale you start to need a lot of engineers to help keep things standing up and everyone on the same page.

origin_path3y ago

Note though that other large projects with similar scaling-git problems tended to just write wrapper tools to work around it, see how Chromium and Android do it.

astrangeOP3y ago

That’s still Google, though. I suspect non-MetaBet companies would try harder to avoid scaling the development team in the first place.

(My other two posts in this thread are -4 and +7 although they both have the same point. Never sure how to interpret that.)

saagarjha3y ago

Android and Chrome are small projects in this context :P

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse