Occasionally I found basic features on Facebook website just don't work. For example: 2-3 days ago, I can't put description on my newly uploaded photo. I have to complete the photo upload workflow, and then click the newly uploaded photo on my album and edit the description.
Regression on basic feature.
I suppose Facebook is just like any other companies with sharp growth: you don't want to know what's inside it (or how the sausage is made). That boils down to ship features and ignore everything else (documentation, good design, good habit, better architecture, better quality, etc).
I'm not saying that's a very bad idea for them because I've seen this practice a lot in our industry.
Having said that, this is one of the many reasons why young startups want to hire the brightest and smartest engineers out of college: they need warm bodies smart enough to move forward, to deal with legacy codebases and figuring a clever (but may be dirty) hack to workaround the legacy design decision, less on solving complex new problems. The latter may be reserved for the infrastructure teams where people develop back-end infrastructure component like Haystack or something along that line.
The recent "rant" stories/articles of the quality of Facebook Platform showed us the same repeated story we've read before in the past and to confirm that Facebook engineers were not way much better than Googlers or Yahoo or Microsoft engineers.
Having said that, this is one of the many reasons why young startups want to hire the brightest and smartest engineers out of college: they need warm bodies smart enough to move forward, to deal with legacy codebases and figuring a clever (but may be dirty) hack to workaround the legacy design decision, less on solving complex new problems.
Wasn't it the brightest and smartest engineers who created these problems?
Occasionally I found basic features on Facebook website just don't work. For example: 2-3 days ago, I can't put description on my newly uploaded photo. I have to complete the photo upload workflow, and then click the newly uploaded photo on my album and edit the description.
Regression on basic feature.
I suppose Facebook is just like any other companies with sharp growth: you don't want to know what's inside it (or how the sausage is made). That boils down to ship features and ignore everything else (documentation, good design, good habit, better architecture, better quality, etc).
I'm not saying that's a very bad idea for them because I've seen this practice a lot in our industry.
Having said that, this is one of the many reasons why young startups want to hire the brightest and smartest engineers out of college: they need warm bodies smart enough to move forward, to deal with legacy codebases and figuring a clever (but may be dirty) hack to workaround the legacy design decision, less on solving complex new problems. The latter may be reserved for the infrastructure teams where people develop back-end infrastructure component like Haystack or something along that line.
The recent "rant" stories/articles of the quality of Facebook Platform showed us the same repeated story we've read before in the past and to confirm that Facebook engineers were not way much better than Googlers or Yahoo or Microsoft engineers.