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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

didn't at first want to work for facebook because he thought it was a toy, but was eventually persuaded and now loves it

...

Apparently he's responsible for the "Gift" feature in facebook (you know, the hole-in-a-box/heart/pantie/etc. little graphic you can gift to people?). He was the sole person responsible for that.

Fight fiercely, Harvard. It amazes me that code-up-a-copycat-in-a-weekend websites like facebook think that they need 1st rate engineers.

"It was either the little graphic gift heart, or control systems for helicopters..."

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Control systems for helicopters are developed by soulless clock-punching factory workers, marching to the slow beat of enormous, impenetrable bureaucracies under the iron fist of stifling, heavyweight processes. Inquisitive engineers need not apply.

Upvoted for literary quality.

Facebook scalability is quite impressive. I think you do need first rate engineers for that.

No, you need first rate engineers to come up with stuff like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop. I'm sorry, but a scalable web friend contact app is not first rate engineering. I found it funny that they had such rigorous requirements for something so mundane as well. Pearls before swine, I suppose.

I think the end (goal) of Facebook is not exactly a noble one but the means can still be impressive. Managing 110 million users (or 110 million of any high-maintenance node for that matter) is no picnic. Their engineering blog has some pretty interesting stories about the challenges they have faced.

If you are into changing the world by willing society forward with ground breaking [insert impressive thing here], your talents would be wasted at Facebook (despite Mark Zuckerburg's stated belief that fb can change the world by allowing people to share with each other and understand each other better).

I think they are solving complex problems (which is respectable) for a largely trivial mission.

Would you say that Google does not require first rate engineers? I would imagine that the most important part of their operation is scaling. They have admitted themselves that the difference in search results returned by the search engines is virtually nil, so their strategic advantage is really being able to support a lot of users (for the search engine as well as other internet services).

It depends on what you mean by first-rate. I mean, developing the sorts of things the parent mentioned requires a lot more talent than writing an app. But, to be fair, that requires an incredible amount of skill. Most people, including bright and capable people who work hard to learn, won't ever do something like that. But I agree that the people at Facebook, if not all revolutionary and brilliant, are all pretty damn good at what they do. Beyond scalability, too: Facebook has got more small little quirks that go towards usability than any other site that I know. Then they make a redesign that renders all those small quirks pointless because the new layout is vastly easier. Then they introduce more quirks.

The first time that I wrote a long message and saw the message window expand, I jumped with excitement. It was pretty awesome to find a new feature one day that I didn't expect and never would have thought to ask for.

I think that if people don't call fb engineers first rate then they have to refrain from using that label for many very good engineers (I used Google as an example in my last comment).

Maybe we are using "meaningful contributions as a metric". Here is a page of some of their contributions: http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php

I am just reluctant to say that engineers at fb are not first-rate. Are we saying that they are second rate?

I agree that fb is the toy analog in the web app world but does that mean that the engineers who banged out the PS3/XBox 360/Wii are second-rate?

I am just reluctant to say that engineers at fb are not first-rate. Are we saying that they are second rate?

That's exactly the problem that I had with my comment. They're only not first-rate if you expect every engineer to be literally genius. That's too much to expect for any one company. So first-rate is as close to accurate a description as you could get.

I've always found it odd that not many hackers that I've met really get into discussing video game mechanics: either hardware or software. It's odd because video games are what got me into programming software, and the only time I've ever felt like making hardware it was designing imaginary game systems.

Wow, Kalman Filters are awesome. Time to dig deeper into the wikipedia rabbit hole!

It's a glorified CRUD app. If they had written the DBMS or Apache or Memcached, then I'd give them credit for the scaling.

They're actually responsible for a lot of improvements to Memcached.

Here's a list of things you should give them credit for: http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php

I agree with Kalvin above. They've had to do a lot of work to keep facebook running smooth and snappy, incorporating many different technologies. And luckily they are open sourcing a lot of their technologies! =]

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