As someone who vastly prefers Slack over all its competitors, I'm very interested in hearing how Meta's compares. What makes it better than Slack for you?
However the combination of the "newsgroup" and chat makes it kinda better than slack on it's own.
Would I use workplace at a new startup? probably not. I would use slack though.
I’ve seen sub 500 employee companies and Slack kicks ass, but it seems once it goes over 1k it’s like glhf managing channels and bots.
Butterfly bot integration to workplace was really something.
Workplace def overkill sub ~ 600 users though.
On the other hand, building all these connections between the disparate apps is basically my job, so it’s got its positives.
Once your company reaches a sufficient size (maybe 300+ employees?), Slack channels just become so clunky and tedious for trying to keep up with projects and discussions. Using Slack keyword notifications helps cut through the noise, but I really think applying Facebook's ranking/Groups expertise to work-related content has been the best solution I've seen so far. You're no longer inundated with unread channels that may or may not have messages relevant to you, Workplace just surfaces the relevant content (and obviously there's chat/mentions for more pressing issues).
They'd be just as fast with Slack or whatever, for the most part.
EDIT: as someone posted below:
> The open-ness of code, visibility, diffs. It was perfection. Something broke in my env suddenly? OH, I just checked recently pushed diffs that affect my realm. Hey there it is, security pushed something weird. I'll just revert the part that affects me and tag them. No meeting, maybe a SEV for visibility and review, maybe not. Easy peasy.
This is the kind of empowerment developers are given and expected to handle (both the explicitly ability to revert previously committed code and the implicit responsibility that the teams code that was overridden must deal with it once they're notified rather than push back)
To your point, other experiences have shown me the ego that rears it’s ugly head when trying to move that way in an env that didn’t have that culture. At FB there was a lot of candor, but in other environments I feel like I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings in code review, or even just watching what I say in slack messages. People take work too seriously in some companies. It’s so rewarding to have fun with it.
They used to say “Nothing at FB is someone else’s problem”
I hope they still do.
Meta cut through that by focusing on measurable improvements.
The downside is it can create silos, a negatively competitive environment. IE, teams not sharing resources or credit etc because they are only looking out for themselves at the end of the day, because any measurement you don't capture is one you can't claim as yours.
I also argue it can breed short therm thinking. Meta even had special teams from what I understand that were "exempt" from the typical metrics driven review cycles because they'd create the wrong incentives.
I think the general ethos can be really powerful though, but I'd peg it to collaboration and value driven measurements (and value is loose here, I'm not strictly thinking monetary) rather than strict "user based metrics".
These days at different companies it’s all planning and hashing out all those details before implementing, and then guess what? Surprises happen anyway. And in the end we become master planners and never actually build anything. Those blueprints sure do look great though.
Early career this is pretty huge for growth. I was there until 2019 though, so not sure how it is now.
My point was that the cohesion of all these internal tools makes information discovery frictionless. cross-pollination of functional space in a business is like butter because everything is built by Meta and behind their intern tool. The other companies I've worked at just don't have this. They lack the Eng capacity to build it, unfortunately.
This is a curious thing to see.
As a mere user, and speaking purely about FB not any other Meta IP…
Other than unbreaking things that break when the OS and browsers change under you, has Facebook shipped even one thing in the last five years?
Don't get me wrong, I know it takes a lot of effort to stand still — forgetting the Red Queen effect was Musk's obvious mistake with Twitter even before stuff broke — but Facebook seems completely unchanged.
But I guess that implies you didn't mean the website itself when you wrote "FB" in the comment I replied to? :)
(One of the most well known consumer brands shipping tooling rather than stuff the consumers use directly is, ah, apt for a company called "meta").
I personally loved things breaking at times. The monorepo and all the tools were so open that enabled me to follow along and try my own fixes in some cases (sometimes being the one to fix it!).
At that point in my career, that kind of exposure was like a rocket ship for personal growth. Others shared similar sentiments.