They counted pull requests merged during a few hours while Facebook was down. I’m guessing the number of PRs merged during any 5-hour window is extremely volatile, so it’s not surprising that they found it different than average when sampled randomly.
This reads like someone wanted to capitalize on the Facebook outage to get some traffic, so they threw their developers under the bus for some clickbait.
I wonder how good their presumably hard-working developers feel about the company blog implying that they’re all using so much Facebook that their productively suffers by a measurable amount every day.
I get why they did it, it makes for good branded content. But I was a bit confused in the article, which PR's? Are they just talking about PR's closed at Facebook? Or PR's closed anywhere?
I think the author should have heard one phrase before starting on this blog post: correlation does not equal causation.
In other news I'm working on a blog post about how the Facebook outage caused temperatures to drop 20% in New Jersey. Idk it's either Facebook or a cold front
A lot of assumptions about causality based on weak data here. This company is just trying to capitalize on what is perceives as an inbound marketing opportunity. Next.
exactly. They have a plausible (but hardly confident) story based on their not very clear raw data (without using actual research methods on it), and turned it into marketing, that's it.
I've always thought when I see one of these numbers about how people are collectively dumping millions of hours into Youtube or WoW or whatever else every day, imagine if that'd be spent on something genuinely social instead, learning, creating something, contributing something to the commons, volunteer an hour at the soup kitchen, clean the local park, however trivial. A billion hours of that every day instead of reading garbage on facebook or tiktok and I'd like to think things would look very different
goes well beyond breaking up big tech though, needs an entire reversal of culture at this point
You say this, but here you are wasting time on HN.
Please stop with this appeal to get others to be constantly productive; it is not helpful advice, and being unproductive is crucial to helping the brain relax.
I’m not endorsing toxic social media, but I’m debating your overall gist nonetheless.
read carefully, I suggested people ought to be more social in a genuine sense of the term and not more 'productive' in some superficial corporate sense, the examples i gave should have made that clear.
Secondly I surely do waste too much time on social media, I don't see how that should stop me from appealing to others as well as myself though, consider me included in the criticism, I'm not a saint. However this holier than thou silencing tactic of thinking we can't criticize culture just because we're also part of perpetuating it has always been silly.
> ‘productive' in some superficial corporate sense
While you didn’t use the word, the exemplar “social” activities involve more productivity in the general sense of the word, than doom scrolling on social media does. There is space in our lives for both.
> holier than thou silencing tactic of thinking we can't criticize culture just because we're also part of perpetuating
That is not what I meant. You implied that people should not want a certain aspect of relaxation, while enjoying the same aspect yourself. This is akin to rich people saying “money doesn’t buy you happiness” while enjoying the outcome of having money. There are nuances, but the appeal is flawed nonetheless.
It's not going to happen. People want to veg out after a hard day of work, most are not going to volunteer even if all video games and social media ended tonight.
Agreed. I absolutely hate the things I dump my hours into. There are things which I have to, chores, work, sleep. But then even the things I don't have to, the ones I do to "de-stress" I end up hating and loathing after I've done it. And yet I'll continue to dump hours and hours into it. I could have learnt a language by now, or two. But the path of least resistance always wins, then you regret it immediately. Addiction and laziness are at fault to be honest and it's a vicious cycle.
Note: Here my de-stress is playing video games. I don't do it much, but a couple hours here and there adds up to thousands eventually.
People choose to spend time on social media, instead of going to park and volunteering. Banning social media isn’t going to fix that, people will waste time in other ways.
At some point there needs to be personal accountability
+1 to that. A 15 minute walk around the block, or through the park, picking up any litter along the way, times a billion, means you won't see litter, and you won't have to pay quite as many sanitation workers.
Most of my friends moved away from Facebook to Discord.
At first, it was small private chats but now everyone is on 10+ big servers with thousands of members and enough channels to drown in.
Everyone is spending their times on it, staring at the screen waiting for a precious message, scrolling the channel list in the hope that one of them contain a good conversation.
At work, Discord was used so much that the company had to ban it from the computers.
How far do we have to go in order to fulfil the end goal that comes from wanting to delete Facebook?
HN has no marketing, the simplest of design and the most basic of features. Yet, any still refresh it hourly, to the point where the site implemented features to keep you away from it.
A dystopia with fewer people in poverty than ever, and the ability to communicate instantly with people around the globe, while we wander to the supermarket and buy plentiful food sourced from all over the world at prices normal people can afford, to go home and sit in climate controlled homes and entertain ourselves with endless games and have our housework eased by machines that wash our clothes and dishes with water that flows freely into our homes and doesn't need to be fetched, and we choose when our next child will be born
A dystopia where the White House was stormed and 703,000 Americans are dead from Covid while 56% of the population is fully vaccinated. A dystopia where the world seems more divided than ever, and I attribute a very large portion of the blame on the tech giants that are profiting from human misery.
The world is more connected than ever before. White house getting stormed by unarmed protestors is much better world then presidents getting shot (and dying) like what happened in the 80s, 60s.
Global warning may feel hopeless but compare that to the threat of ozone layer disappearing or acid rain or..
Covid has kill 700+ h1n1 killed 575+. wwi+ii millions
People are so much safer and less likely to die but we have so much more media so we invent things to be scared of because people want you to pay attention to their ads.
i) facebook has not contributed an iota to the consumerist utopia you seem to cherish. it is the result of a long period of scientific / technological development. communicating instantly with people around the globe can be done perfectly well with, e.g. Signal. you do not need the apparatus of surveillance capitalism to deliver it.
ii) said consumerist utopia is neither available to large fractions of humanity, nor is it environmentally sustainable for those who currently enjoy it beyond a few more decades
More fundamentally, if we do not develop "social media" that are trully social: actually promote global mutual understanding, support fact based consensus, promote the genuine empowerment of individuals instead of exploiting and aggravating their ignorance etc. many of the real gains and progress (<ref>Hans Rosling</ref>) achieved in the past century will be squandered, never to return
Facebook hasn't contributed one iota? Facebook has contributed an immense amount to the developer community, small businesses and literally everyone else.
Free communication with almost any human on the planet: check. Advertise alongside industry incumbents with any ad budget: check. Oh yeah and React, React Native, GraphQL, pyTorch, and a whole lot more.
"Free communication" in... exchange for personal data. But thats a price that is invisible to fanboys. Exploiting those who either can't understand or who can't afford the tiny cost of communicating with data privacy.
As for small businesses, its walled garden simply cannibalized their earlier websites and made every small trader dependent upon opaque and arbitrary discovery algorithms that can wipe them out without warning.
The open source projects you mention have multiple alternatives, many from genuine community projects that will sustain irrespective of a corporate sponsor.
The problem i have with the article is it doesn't go into "which" PR's. If this is about PR's at Facebook then it's one thing, but if it's about PR's everywhere then I really don't see the point of this article except to talk about their product.
As headline grabbing as this is, a single event is not data. I'm sure there are other outliers in their data that they've not written a "X improves developer throughput by y%" articles about.
Plus, measuring developer productivity by pull requests merged is a very noisy way to measure "throughput"
I really want to share this with my colleagues, because it's funny. But I really don't want anyone in management finding out that things like Haystack exist. What a shame.
That depends on your company culture. We introduced a tool like that and it’s been helpful for both for management and eng teams to start meaningful discussions — e.g PRs are taking long to review (e.g perceived as not high priority), PR sizes are getting bigger (e.g hard for the reviewer), some people review way more PRs than others (e.g bottlenecks), bug vs chore vs feature PR trends, new code vs refactoring trends, etc.
Need to have the right people who are asking the right questions.
There is not a single signal that would not be better defined by just asking your devs.
Don't use commit history to measure any sort of performance if you have competent managers who can communicate with developers, and don't accept "devs are hard to talk to" as an excuse.
This reads like someone wanted to capitalize on the Facebook outage to get some traffic, so they threw their developers under the bus for some clickbait.
I wonder how good their presumably hard-working developers feel about the company blog implying that they’re all using so much Facebook that their productively suffers by a measurable amount every day.