Yeah 100%. I found it immensely frustrating to be using tools with no community (except internally), so-so documentation, and features that were clearly broken in a way that would be unacceptable for a regular consumer product. If you have a question or error not covered by an internal search or documentation, good luck, you'll need it. Literally part of the reason I left the company.
People probably think you’re exaggerating but it’s true. Sometimes when I would get blocked the suggestion was to “read the source code” or “submit a fix” on some far flung internal project. Huge fucking waste of time and effort, completely unserious.
That’s how open source already works by default. The difference is if an OSS tool is broken my boss doesn’t imply landing a fix is my responsibility on top of my regular job duties.
> being able to land a diff to fix the issue is awesome imo.
yes, if its a one off. but for my last project that would involve spinning up many "XFNs" (multi-team chat fests) to argue that actually they don't want to have that change because of reason x,y and z.
At which point you just give up and make a stupid fucking hack.
So much is not about engineering excellence, its about trying to get people to accept change.
Doesn't sound like your type of company tbh, the flipside is that a "serious" company will often have broken bs too except now nobody is going to look at your contribution/fix.
Yes lmao, the number of times I would start off on some nominally useful task only to find out 3 weeks later that there is actually already a solution to that created by team XYZ that nobody in my reporting chain has ever heard of…(3 weeks was optimistic case, I remember my team member getting like 2 months in to some new data pipeline before finding out some tables already existed that did what he needed…)
Welcome to meta! where everything is a murder mystery.
Except you're not really sure if there has been a murder, or sometimes you wonder if you're the murderer, because at every turn you're told that you've been a bad dev for trying x,y and z
Same as Google. Many internal tools have painful interfaces and poor or documentation because the hiring bar was high and it was acceptable to assume that the user's skill level is high enough to figure it out. That attitude becomes a bigger problem when trying to sell tools to the public (e.g. Google Cloud Platform).
As an outsider, I was always under the impression that Google had a tradition of engineering excellence (robust tools, clean and while tested code following strict guidelines), while Meta has more of a Hacker culture (move fast and break things).
Agreed. I often get my work done using open source build instructions and tools and then when everything works I port it to internal infra. Other people are the opposite though, which for open source based code bases has a nasty side effect of the work having no upstream able tests!
