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Anyone else find that they love FB engineering and FB research, but don't like the product much? FB does so much awesome technical stuff, and often shares/open

Anyone else find that they love FB engineering and FB research, but don't like the product much? FB does so much awesome technical stuff, and often shares/open-sources it. But the actual FB site -- for me, at least -- is lacklustre. The only thing it really shines for is event management. This said, I guess anyone who reads HN is likely to be an outlier; and the site's success evidently means a lot of people like it.

Grishnakh 11y ago
It's worse than lackluster, IMO: it's downright confusing and nonsensical. To someone who uses it every single day and spends a lot of time there, I can see how they would become accustomed to the UI, but if you're an occasional user it's not easy to use at all. Also, it changes frequently so every time you come back things will be different. Worse, every time I try to use it, it seems like everything on the page is jumping around; it takes too long to render and scrolling isn't smooth, so it's impossible to just smoothly scroll down and see everything. But I see that on a lot of sites these days.
smrtinsert 11y ago
A lot of their stuff makes me ask why bother, HHVM comes to mind. Even React at times seems like serious overkill.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > A lot of their stuff makes me ask why bother, HHVM comes to mind. What about HHVM makes you think that? Producing an optimised version of PHP is easier than moving from PHP to another language.
kennydude 11y ago
Some of their engineering is good. Saying "nothing meets our scale" as an excuse for everything is just silly though
andy_ppp 11y ago
Events-wise I think most good engineers/product people would add proper ticketing as well as mind body online style booking etc. for classes etc. It could be a huge business for Facebook if they could be bothered.
- untog 11y ago
  Even a huge engineering events business would be a rounding error for Facebook.
  - andy_ppp 11y ago
    I mean all events, not sure what you mean by engineering events? However, I just looked... and they make so much more than I ever imagined. Who are these people clicking Facebook ads, or is it so amazing at targeting me I haven't noticed myself clicking.
  - illicium 11y ago
    A regular events business, not an engineering events business. They could squash TicketMaster if they wanted to.
    - andy_ppp 11y ago
      Exactly, and eventbrite; gotta be worth the investment/maintenance cost I'm guessing.
taylorwc 11y ago
This. I killed off my FB account years ago and have not had the tiniest regret. But they do amazing things, and I love keeping tabs on what they are open sourcing.
amelius 11y ago
The Facebook site itself has lots of bugs also. For example, basic navigation was broken for months (perhaps it still is). The back-button was completely useless. I really don't understand why they don't fix the problems on their own website first.
- donatj 11y ago
  I have been too well trained by the modern internet not to use the back button to have noticed.
  - JangoSteve 11y ago
    I don't think I understand. I use and develop for the modern web all day every day, and I use the back button all the time. I was thinking maybe you're referring to highly interactive interfaces that use e.g. Angular, React, et. al., but even those generally use push-state to maintain back-button functionality by synchronizing the state of the app with the browser.
    - sbarre 11y ago
      I think he is jokingly referring to the fact that so many "modern" sites break the back button without a second thought that many of us have simply stopped using the back button as a result of this.
- diminish 11y ago
  This. I regularly use Facebook mobile website on my quite powerful smartphone. Basic UX functions are lacking there though they are possible . Facebook engineering is over-engineering the whole application across multiple platforms but can't fix many usability issues and add missing features on many of them. Finally a like/action, comments around a few hundred "friends" with text, audio and video shouldn't require that much effort. I mostly suspect they over engineer because they can! namely too much money can buy too much talent and skills. But maybe they don't need that much.
- nucleardog 11y ago
pluma 11y ago
I am deeply suspicious of Facebook the company (not just because Zuckerberg's early attitude towards users and privacy). I absolutely love Facebook's open source efforts. This contradiction made it really weird to get started with React. It still makes me feel dirty sometimes.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
If you are an engineer I can tell you most of the things you care about product-wise, consumers don't care about. This mentally, which myself I suffer from, is the reason many fail to build things that people love.
- irremediable 11y ago
  Yeah, this is kind of what I was going for when I mentioned HN readers being outliers. FB doesn't do much for me, but evidently it does a lot for most consumers, because it's damned popular.
jayd16 11y ago
I still laugh at their hack to get around Android's method count limit. https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-dalvik-patch-for-facebook-for-android/10151345597798920/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th... They go through all this reverse engineering before they go back to usual solution of code stripping with ProGuard. And then continue on with more crazy hacks. FB engineering is usually impressive feats but questionable motives. "Wow you sure fit that square peg through that round hole. That's ...impressive"
- ethanbond 11y ago
  "Move fast and do things not quite the way they should really be done"
- LegNeato 11y ago
  Why laugh? We were already using proguard heavily. We eventually hit build perf issues and had to patch it too (https://github.com/facebook/proguard https://github.com/facebook/proguard) Do you think we wanted to do a crazy runtime patch and didn't explore every other short/medium-term option? Do you think we wanted to write our own build system (Buck)? Or our own JS view layer (React)? Our own PHP virtual machine (HHVM)? Our own database (Presto/RocksDB)? Our own IDE (Nuclide)? You "laughing" tells me you have never worked on a large codebase with hundreds of engineers shipping very quickly, so you can't empathize with the sort of problems that come up. Btw, every time Google Apps hit the limit they merely bumped the limit in AOSP and dropped support for old OS versions...
  - nitwit005 11y ago
    You had hundreds of engineers cramming stuff into a mobile app, till it didn't fit. Then you apparently had to make an entirely new version of it since people in much of the world couldn't even download the thing. That sounds laugh worthy to me. I also work at a large company that has had its own mobile development "issues", and I found those plenty humorous as well.
  - jayd16 11y ago
    You're right. I've never worked or will work in a place where a PHP virtual machine is the correct answer. I'm certain I can't empathize with that situation.
TheOneTrueKyle 11y ago
I am loving what Facebook is doing and even considered buy stock at one point. That being said, I don't really use the product Facebook all too often, though I am interested to see where it is going. I shall gaze from afar.
limeyx 11y ago
Facebook is still the flakiest and crash-prone app on my phone bar none
bane 11y ago
I remember a chat I had with a colleague about 6 years ago. He posited that I would be really excited to work at FB since it was such a fast growing company with all these interesting problems. I responded that I couldn't understand what he was talking about, there really wasn't much interesting going on outside of some graph analytics at the time and that problem had a pretty limited life-span given FB's particular use-cases. There's been very little really truly interesting blue-sky technical work at FB that's I'm aware of other than trying to figure out how to get around pretty prosaic issues through clever hackery rather than just doing it some other already established way and trying to figure out how to exploit their user-base for targeted ads (which by many accounts from folks I know aren't all that great w/r to ROI). The more interesting stuff seems to be happening in their acquisitions like WhatsApp and Oculus, but the "Facebook stink" feels like it's already starting to get to those teams as well. I honestly have almost no idea what their 13,000 employees must be doing outside of data center operations and various O&M projects at this point. Building quality mobile client software definitely doesn't seem to be it. What I find immensely interesting is how they're pulling in around $11/user/year (about $4 in pure profit)! Their economy of scale is pretty good considering it only costs them about $7/user/year to run the service. I'd easily pay $10/year for a service like FB that didn't entirely suck and had all my friends on it.
- Eridrus 11y ago
  > What I find immensely interesting is how they're pulling in around $11/user/year (about $4 in pure profit)! Their economy of scale is pretty good considering it only costs them about $7/user/year to run the service. I'd easily pay $10/year for a service like FB that didn't entirely suck and had all my friends on it. If you're not blocking facebook ads, they're making far more money from you than $10/yr. There's a huge difference in the value of different eyeballs and anyone on HN is probably worth significantly more than average to advertisers. $11/user/yr is tiny for a social network that is many people's primary communication tool, it's only going to get bigger as facebook growth levels off and mobile continues to monetize better.

Grishnakh 11y ago

It's worse than lackluster, IMO: it's downright confusing and nonsensical. To someone who uses it every single day and spends a lot of time there, I can see how they would become accustomed to the UI, but if you're an occasional user it's not easy to use at all. Also, it changes frequently so every time you come back things will be different. Worse, every time I try to use it, it seems like everything on the page is jumping around; it takes too long to render and scrolling isn't smooth, so it's impossible to just smoothly scroll down and see everything. But I see that on a lot of sites these days.

smrtinsert 11y ago

A lot of their stuff makes me ask why bother, HHVM comes to mind. Even React at times seems like serious overkill.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> A lot of their stuff makes me ask why bother, HHVM comes to mind. What about HHVM makes you think that? Producing an optimised version of PHP is easier than moving from PHP to another language.

kennydude 11y ago

Some of their engineering is good. Saying "nothing meets our scale" as an excuse for everything is just silly though

andy_ppp 11y ago

Events-wise I think most good engineers/product people would add proper ticketing as well as mind body online style booking etc. for classes etc. It could be a huge business for Facebook if they could be bothered.

untog 11y ago
Even a huge engineering events business would be a rounding error for Facebook.
- andy_ppp 11y ago
  I mean all events, not sure what you mean by engineering events? However, I just looked... and they make so much more than I ever imagined. Who are these people clicking Facebook ads, or is it so amazing at targeting me I haven't noticed myself clicking.
- illicium 11y ago
  A regular events business, not an engineering events business. They could squash TicketMaster if they wanted to.
  - andy_ppp 11y ago
    Exactly, and eventbrite; gotta be worth the investment/maintenance cost I'm guessing.

taylorwc 11y ago

This. I killed off my FB account years ago and have not had the tiniest regret. But they do amazing things, and I love keeping tabs on what they are open sourcing.

amelius 11y ago

The Facebook site itself has lots of bugs also. For example, basic navigation was broken for months (perhaps it still is). The back-button was completely useless. I really don't understand why they don't fix the problems on their own website first.

donatj 11y ago
I have been too well trained by the modern internet not to use the back button to have noticed.
- JangoSteve 11y ago
  I don't think I understand. I use and develop for the modern web all day every day, and I use the back button all the time. I was thinking maybe you're referring to highly interactive interfaces that use e.g. Angular, React, et. al., but even those generally use push-state to maintain back-button functionality by synchronizing the state of the app with the browser.
  - sbarre 11y ago
    I think he is jokingly referring to the fact that so many "modern" sites break the back button without a second thought that many of us have simply stopped using the back button as a result of this.
diminish 11y ago
This. I regularly use Facebook mobile website on my quite powerful smartphone. Basic UX functions are lacking there though they are possible . Facebook engineering is over-engineering the whole application across multiple platforms but can't fix many usability issues and add missing features on many of them. Finally a like/action, comments around a few hundred "friends" with text, audio and video shouldn't require that much effort. I mostly suspect they over engineer because they can! namely too much money can buy too much talent and skills. But maybe they don't need that much.
nucleardog 11y ago

pluma 11y ago

I am deeply suspicious of Facebook the company (not just because Zuckerberg's early attitude towards users and privacy). I absolutely love Facebook's open source efforts. This contradiction made it really weird to get started with React. It still makes me feel dirty sometimes.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

If you are an engineer I can tell you most of the things you care about product-wise, consumers don't care about. This mentally, which myself I suffer from, is the reason many fail to build things that people love.

irremediable 11y ago
Yeah, this is kind of what I was going for when I mentioned HN readers being outliers. FB doesn't do much for me, but evidently it does a lot for most consumers, because it's damned popular.

jayd16 11y ago

I still laugh at their hack to get around Android's method count limit. https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-dalvik-patch-for-facebook-for-android/10151345597798920/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th... They go through all this reverse engineering before they go back to usual solution of code stripping with ProGuard. And then continue on with more crazy hacks. FB engineering is usually impressive feats but questionable motives. "Wow you sure fit that square peg through that round hole. That's ...impressive"

ethanbond 11y ago
"Move fast and do things not quite the way they should really be done"
LegNeato 11y ago
Why laugh? We were already using proguard heavily. We eventually hit build perf issues and had to patch it too (https://github.com/facebook/proguard https://github.com/facebook/proguard) Do you think we wanted to do a crazy runtime patch and didn't explore every other short/medium-term option? Do you think we wanted to write our own build system (Buck)? Or our own JS view layer (React)? Our own PHP virtual machine (HHVM)? Our own database (Presto/RocksDB)? Our own IDE (Nuclide)? You "laughing" tells me you have never worked on a large codebase with hundreds of engineers shipping very quickly, so you can't empathize with the sort of problems that come up. Btw, every time Google Apps hit the limit they merely bumped the limit in AOSP and dropped support for old OS versions...
- nitwit005 11y ago
  You had hundreds of engineers cramming stuff into a mobile app, till it didn't fit. Then you apparently had to make an entirely new version of it since people in much of the world couldn't even download the thing. That sounds laugh worthy to me. I also work at a large company that has had its own mobile development "issues", and I found those plenty humorous as well.
- jayd16 11y ago
  You're right. I've never worked or will work in a place where a PHP virtual machine is the correct answer. I'm certain I can't empathize with that situation.

TheOneTrueKyle 11y ago

I am loving what Facebook is doing and even considered buy stock at one point. That being said, I don't really use the product Facebook all too often, though I am interested to see where it is going. I shall gaze from afar.

limeyx 11y ago

Facebook is still the flakiest and crash-prone app on my phone bar none

bane 11y ago

I remember a chat I had with a colleague about 6 years ago. He posited that I would be really excited to work at FB since it was such a fast growing company with all these interesting problems. I responded that I couldn't understand what he was talking about, there really wasn't much interesting going on outside of some graph analytics at the time and that problem had a pretty limited life-span given FB's particular use-cases. There's been very little really truly interesting blue-sky technical work at FB that's I'm aware of other than trying to figure out how to get around pretty prosaic issues through clever hackery rather than just doing it some other already established way and trying to figure out how to exploit their user-base for targeted ads (which by many accounts from folks I know aren't all that great w/r to ROI). The more interesting stuff seems to be happening in their acquisitions like WhatsApp and Oculus, but the "Facebook stink" feels like it's already starting to get to those teams as well. I honestly have almost no idea what their 13,000 employees must be doing outside of data center operations and various O&M projects at this point. Building quality mobile client software definitely doesn't seem to be it. What I find immensely interesting is how they're pulling in around $11/user/year (about $4 in pure profit)! Their economy of scale is pretty good considering it only costs them about $7/user/year to run the service. I'd easily pay $10/year for a service like FB that didn't entirely suck and had all my friends on it.

Eridrus 11y ago
> What I find immensely interesting is how they're pulling in around $11/user/year (about $4 in pure profit)! Their economy of scale is pretty good considering it only costs them about $7/user/year to run the service. I'd easily pay $10/year for a service like FB that didn't entirely suck and had all my friends on it. If you're not blocking facebook ads, they're making far more money from you than $10/yr. There's a huge difference in the value of different eyeballs and anyone on HN is probably worth significantly more than average to advertisers. $11/user/yr is tiny for a social network that is many people's primary communication tool, it's only going to get bigger as facebook growth levels off and mobile continues to monetize better.