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Comment by intranation | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like utter chaos for any seasoned professional. No QA? No real product managers (or at least none with any teeth)? Design as optional resource? Ops managing user engagement metrics? Where's the security audit?

Scary, even for a developer like myself.

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Perhaps this is a good example of how much of that professional "seasoning" is actually unnecessary or gets in the way of building successful products and high-caliber responsible teams, i.e. "throwing over the wall to QA" etc.

edit: Can I ask why this is being downvoted? Because I am disagreeing with the parent poster? I don't think I am raising poor points or somehow not contributing to the discussion. Facebook seems to not do a lot of "standard" things because they view them as counter to their goals of building their product. I am merely stating that perhaps there is a lesson in there about the value of what some of the convential wisdom in our industry dictates.

Upmodded... with that said, I do think that this is very industry dependent. They are a free product that people don't necessarily "rely" on. If status messages were severely delayed or dropped, it wouldn't be a huge deal (assuming they fixed it when noticed).

There's very little that they can't fix after deployed, and they have no SLA with consumers (advertisers may be different). In essence they have 500 million testers.

This is a bit harder to do with a database or compiler.

App developers and other API users do in fact rely on them. Their unreliability is part of what's convincing many sites to rethink that.

I'm a little blown away at this myself. I knew they were extremely agile, able to make changes on a whim, but this sounds a bit crazy. Might check in with my buddy who works at FB to see if this matches up with reality. The sheer stress of working in an environment where perfection is not only desired, but required, would drive me crazy. Some of the processes, though, sound like they would be a dream. Working on things I want to work on would make me 100x more productive. Of course, it also means some things may never get done.

I'm especially wondering: who will take this platform to the next level? Is there anybody besides mark zuckerberg in charge for designing and testing out new ideas. I don't mean just new features like questions or places, but really significant changes like a facebook phone, or a new friends model to better graph you real network.

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