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Comment by oaththrowaway | Hacker News Reader

I had a boss at Yahoo who gave our QA to another team because "Facebook doesn't use QA, we shouldn't either". I can't remember if it was Facebook or MS, but he was willing to buy all of us a book talking about how amazing it was.

Long story short, it wasn't. It was like taking away a crutch. Of course we could have been more diligent about testing before having QA validate it, but it slowed development down so much trying to learn all the things we never thought to test that QA did automatically.

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An article about Facebook's reason for no QA with some of the mitigations:

https://blog.southparkcommons.com/move-fast-or-die/

A bit recent to have affected Yahoo - but it sells a good story.

  We would celebrate the first time someone broke something.

  Let anyone touch any part of the codebase and get in there to fix a bug or build a feature. Yes, this can cause bugs. Yes, that is an acceptable tradeoff. We had a shared mythology about the times that the site went down and we all rallied together to quickly bring it back up.

Sounds like hell: running as close to the edge of the cliff as you can. Presumably totally ignoring thousands of papercuts of slightly broken functionality. Optimising to produce an infinite number of shallow bugs.

The difference is that bugs in the social network parts of Facebook (the ones where you see your friends and family's pictures and posts) are not directly making money for Facebook. The only real stuff that matters for the money is all the tracking.

I bet the people responsible for Facebook Ads Manager are a lot less enthusiastic about "move fast and break things", although I'd be interested to hear an opposing viewpoint from anyone here who's worked for that group.

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