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So? I've become very cynical since the past year or so because there is a lot of noise/articles on the net, all knowing what's best for you or wrong with what

So? I've become very cynical since the past year or so because there is a lot of noise/articles on the net, all knowing what's best for you or wrong with what you are doing. Yet without context or true authority to talk about it. My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" There is rarely anything to be found. Facebook might have a "code quality problem." But until you have worked at an organization that is big like Facebook please hold forth your tongues or fingers in this case. Startup principles don't apply nor academia. Facebook's "code problem" is what really does happen in the real world with such humongous business enterprises. Lot's of moving pieces in code, in people, in ideas and the amalgamation of these results in what most programmers will see as "code quality problem" yet the market sees as billions of dollars.

aaron-lebo 10y ago
Isn't that an appeal to authority? Because someone hasn't done X they don't have the right to criticize X? Facebook's "code problem" is what really does happen in the real world with such humongous business enterprises. But does it have to be this way?
- evgen 10y ago
  Until someone provided s counter-example the assumption is that yes, this is just what happens. We have entire industries of competing methodologies, some almost cult-like in their slavish devotion to "the one true process", and none have birthed any great successes. Why is that?
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - dustingetz 10y ago
    History is littered with counter-examples and great successes. Each generation of company is more efficient or solves more complicated problems than those before it. Facebook itself is an industry leader in open source innovation, which is why their product is so smooth. But not all companies specialize in hard tech, and all companies get old.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >Facebook itself is an industry leader in open source innovation In the sense that they gave us React and couple JS tools? What are their other "industry leading open source innovations"? That's hardly a major "open source innovation". Heck, Google itself has produces 2-3 similar JS pieces (Angular, GWT, Closure compiler, Dart, etc).
      - objclxt 10y ago
        > In the sense that they gave us React and couple JS tools? What are their other "industry leading open source innovations"? OpenCompute (http://opencompute.org http://opencompute.org), Hack (http://hacklang.org http://hacklang.org), Phabricator (now spun off, still OSS, https://secure.phabricator.com https://secure.phabricator.com), GraphQL (http://graphql.org http://graphql.org)...none of these are JS tools, all have had major industry impact. GitHub's entire API, for example, is now GraphQL based. And that's just a small sampling. I can't quite decide if you're being deliberately provocative or just misinformed.
        coldtea 10y ago
        >I can't quite decide if you're being deliberately provocative or just misinformed. Or maybe I genuinely disagree in your assessment that any of those technologies (apart from GraphQL, and that is still nowhere near major league) had any major "industry impact".
  - chii 10y ago
    Let me provide a counter example. facebook, revenue in 2016 is $27 Billion, maintains approx 60mil lines of code (incl backend - source http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million... find facebook in the list) Nasa, budget is $19 billion. I can't find a public official record of their code size, but the IIS is approx 6 mil lines of code, and i don't think the other missions they did (all 33 unmanned space missions in total) are too far off, so lets give each an average of 5mil per mission. That's 165 million lines of code. And arguably, probably more difficult code than facebook's domain.
    - evgen 10y ago
      And all of the code for the NASA HR system, and budget management tools, and conference system, etc. The Facebook code base is not just the web pages you see and backend to serve them, but encompasses just about everything used to run the company. It is also built and maintained by a much smaller group of coders for a much more ambiguous target domain. (And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's.) I guess I have to question the relevancy of your counter-example.
      - muricula 10y ago
        If programmers at NASA make a serious mistake on say the space stations's code, people will die and billions of dollars of equipment will be lost. The same cannot be said for a social website which serves a bunch of content. NASA has way more on the line than Facebook. Here's a great article on how NASA did development on the space shuttles code and the importance of process and quality: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Write-the-Right-Stuff.pdf http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Wri...
        evgen 10y ago
        Well, if someone at Facebook screws up and inadvertently reveals certain names or locations or the existence of particular groups within some countries people get arrested, tortured, and die. Last I checked NASA screw ups only kill a couple of people at a time. So you are right, they are not even close to comparable. See how easy it is to make false equivalences? I am familiar with the referenced article and if anyone in the software industry outside of few specialized areas tried to push a process like that they would need to start the endeavor by polishing their resume because they would soon be looking for a new job.
- deleted 10y ago
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- watwut 10y ago
  You have right to criticize, but don't expect your criticism to be taken too seriously. There are two reasons for it: a.) you don't have frame of reference to compare whether facebooks result is better or worst then other companies b.) you don't know what tradeoff are necessary for making it work nor what it takes to achieve success.
  - europeansoft 10y ago
    So by the same logic, criticism agains the government shouldn't be taken seriously unless they come from a former prime minister?
    - pliny 10y ago
      Criticism against governments by former governors should and is taken more seriously than criticism by some joe who's never had to wrangle a bureaucracy.
    - watwut 10y ago
      Government criticism from people who have experience with running government or being in the politics tend to have much higher quality then criticism coming from sixteen years old high school class president.
      - ue_ 10y ago
        What tends to be the case is irrelevant. The contents of what is being said is all that matters.
      - sooheon 10y ago
        So when it comes to the highest level of government, only those who have reached such heights may say a peep. Only criticism from former US presidents regarding Trump, please!
        watwut 10y ago
        When random dude possibly with asperger gives advice/criticism on how to negotiate, reasonable government official will igore him - even if the criticism came in form of a blog. Likewise, succesfull activists ignore armchair advice from people on anonymous twitter. Not sure how is that controversial. Torwalds does not spend his time worrying about whether random bloggers agree with linux core style guide. You did not demonstrated enough of knowledge/expeciance for me to take your criticism seriously is valid answer.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Well, sure, they can. But don't you think someone who has been involved in a massive company would have more trenchant insights into massive companies?
  - deleted 10y ago
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- feedjoelpie 10y ago
  Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy. It's a valid argument unless said authority is false in some way.
  - thehardsphere 10y ago
    It's fallacious if you use it merely as "Authority X said so," no matter whether the authority is true or false. A fallacy happens when the conclusions do not follow from the premises of an argument. E.g. it doesn't follow from the fact that "Al Gore says that Global Warming is happening," that Global Warming is happening. If, on the other hand, you say "Al Gore said Global Warming is happening, Al Gore's argument is premise A and B, therefore C" that's not fallacious because your argument doesn't actually rest on the identity of the authority, but the argument they made. But all of this is irrelevant because it's not an appeal to authority. It's an ad hominem. The author is being attacked for not-being-an-authority.
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  It's ad hominem; the author is being attacked to invalidate the argument, instead of attacking the argument itself. Which is never valid. Appeal to authority usually takes the form of skipping making an actual argument for something and instead resting upon "X said so" and not explaining further. This is also not valid but is sometimes a shorthand for saying "X made argument Y," which can be valid if argument Y is valid (in which case the fact that X made the argument is purely incidental trivia).
ycombinete 10y ago
Hold forth = To talk at great length. Have you used it as such?
- yladiz 10y ago
  Is "hold forth" an older or less common phrase? I don't know if I've ever run into it, and I wouldn't have guessed initially that is its definition.
  - FroshKiller 10y ago
    It is a bit old. I've seen it in English sources from the 19th century. I think it's common in literature for that period though less common now.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Well, judge for yourself. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=speak+at+length%2Chold+forth&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cspeak%20at%20length%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chold%20forth%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=speak+at+lengt...
    - jamessb 10y ago
      It's a phrase that I've usually encountered in the past tense. Google Ngrams shows that in 1800 "held forth" was used about three times as frequently as "hold forth" [1], but this ratio decreased as both uses became less common. [1]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=held+forth%2Chold+forth&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cheld%20forth%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chold%20forth%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=held+forth%2Ch...
      - emodendroket 10y ago
        I don't know a lot about the ngram corpus, but assuming there's lots of fiction everything will be skewed toward the past tense.
ebbv 10y ago
This is an absurd leap of logic. There's many quality programmers who have never worked at a large company and many more terrible programmers who have worked at large companies. Anyone can share their opinion and regardless of where they have worked it may or may not be valuable. If you are judging value based on the market CAP of their LinkedIn profile then you are probably missing out on most good information out there.
randomnumber314 10y ago
>So? So, there's a huge lesson when an organization starts blaming every one else for scale problems; if everywhere you go there are issues, it's you.
stkni 10y ago
>> My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" Well I happen to (vaguely) know the author and have worked with him in the past and he has done a lot of great work, not all of it in the public domain though. Comparing him with an organisation that employs 17k people is a little unfair but he comes out of it favourably IMHO!
coldtea 10y ago
>My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" There is rarely anything to be found. The thing about critique is that you don't need to have made an equivalent project/effort/artwork/whatever to be able to critique it with a valid objection. You just need to be able to spot an actual issue. Sure, some might think they've spotted an issue when there is none. Or not understand that the issue exists for a reason (e.g. engineering tradeoff). But those are orthogonal to the subject. The key is that critique can come from any source, and it doesn't need someone to have done something "equivalent" or to have specific credentials to be valid. The latter can at best serve as a rough filter to throw out some noise. But they will throw a lot of valid critique as well, which can come from everybody, including a layman.
- morley 10y ago
  > You just need to be able to spot an actual issue. My problem with the article is that it's extremely hard for humans in general, and critics in particular, to accurately model the alternative. I think that's the heart of what the commenter is talking about. Unless you've worked at Facebook's scale, it's really difficult to tell what happens. (I don't work anywhere near that scale, so maybe take my opinion with a grain of salt.) This critic is reading signals and attributing them to a failure on Facebook's part, but who knows if an alternate scenario (a) actually makes things better, or just results in different trade-offs; or (b) is even feasible for a company of Facebook's size to do. I have no idea. There are only a handful Facebook-sized enterprises that have ever existed.
  - forgottenpass 10y ago
    My problem with the article is that it's extremely hard for humans in general, and critics in particular, to accurately model the alternative. The lack of a visible solution does not make all criticism less valid. Criticism can be an expression of flaws without including a drubbing for not doing better. It's often made public as combination of the two, but the later can be disqualified without impeaching the validity of the former. Even if the criticized thing is the best possible expression of the goal(s) given all the other constraints, it is still right to accept and express that limitations exist. -- Pretending they don't is just an ugly attempt to prevent the critic from refining their criticism to include the goals and self-imposed constants they view as causing the flaw.
matwood 10y ago
I agree to some extent, but think of it as more of this is how the sausage is made type of thing. As engineers we like to opine about perfect code, functional this, and monad that. It pains us to see that business success requires very little of even good code much less perfect. The reality is that the code rarely matters as long as it can be held together long enough for the next user or investor check to clear the bank.
- HeroOfAges 10y ago
  This is a reality I've had a great deal of difficulty coming to terms with. I haven't internalized it fully, but I can't help but think not acknowledging this has harmed my career.
pdpi 10y ago
Facebook is a really successful company, and they blame everybody but themselves for these problems. The obvious conclusion is: Because they're so successful, they're right and XCode, Dalvik, Git et al are wrong, and their hacks are entirely justified. The less obvious conclusion is: despite them being so successful, they have a code quality issue, and the tools are entirely justified in breaking under the load that's being put on them. Arguably, the big problem here is that the obvious conclusion is wrong, and the less obvious conclusion is right. And, because the right conclusion is the less obvious one, there's plenty of value in advising the kind of onlooker that's likely to want to emulate facebook's success (read: the sort of startup that's precisely HN's target audience!) that they shouldn't accept FB's excuses at face value, and should think about avoiding these problems in the future.
- MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
  Totally agree; it's a case of fallacy by results-oriented thinking. I don't actually know if that's recognized in any of the official lists of logical/rhetorical fallacies, but it ought to be. Well, I guess it's a variant of the 'Post hoc ergo propter hoc' fallacy, but seems like an important special case.
- rwallace 10y ago
  > they have a code quality issue, and the tools are entirely justified in breaking under the load that's being put on them That's not one conclusion, it's two. Suppose for the sake of argument we grant the first part and say Facebook has a code quality issue and they should have less code. (I'm not familiar enough with Facebook to have an opinion on the matter, but I'm willing to postulate this for the sake of argument.) That does not in any way imply the second conclusion! One of the most important differences between a good tool and a shoddy one is precisely that a shoddy tool can only withstand the load that should be put on it, whereas a good tool can go beyond that.
  - pdpi 10y ago
    Sure, kind of. I agree: good tools should be able to handle being pushed beyond what counts as reasonable usage. But all tools break, at some point. Now we're splitting hairs: Is Facebook's use of the tools merely somewhat unreasonable, such that the tools should still hold? Or is it sufficiently past reasonability that they shouldn't have to hold any longer? To answer that, the fact that they managed to break not one but several tools is highly informative. I'm willing to accept that some tools might not work at scale. I'm less willing to accept that what basically amounts to the whole stack for mobile development is _that_ weak, not without very solid evidence. Near as I can tell, there haven't been reports of this sort of issue with MS Office for either Android or iOS, or from other applications that should, by any reasonable metric, be more complex than facebook.
TallGuyShort 10y ago
I'm no fan of the "knowing-all-that's-best" trend of articles either, but here's why I don't mind this: Facebook popularized the idea of "move fast and break things." Move fast, by all means, and don't be paralyzed by fear of all change whatsoever, but I really didn't appreciate it when my classmates thought that by being willing to break things constantly in our group project they were showing us all their potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. Or when some of those classmates were hired as my team mates and brought that crap into a customer-facing service. I interviewed at Facebook and was scared by the cowboy mentality I sensed in every room and with every interviewer. I'd like the glorification of that to be balanced by, "hey here's some concrete data demonstrating they have some real issues that could clearly be addressed better."
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  I've seen that "move fast and break things" mantra used in projects, and yeah, some people think they're being the next Zuckerberg when doing so. But what I've (almost) never seen is someone who actually fixes the shit when it's broken. Fine, go ahead and break stuff, but be willing and able to actually FIX it afterwards. That part never seems to get picked up.
  - TallGuyShort 10y ago
    Better yet, move fast and have good test coverage that can run fast and does so automatically.
    - Cofike 10y ago
      "The client won't want to pay for testing" "We'll circle back and add tests later"
      - mgkimsal 10y ago
        "The client won't want to pay for testing" becomes "the client will pay for not testing" My deepity for the day...
Zombiefruit 10y ago
> My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" There is rarely anything to be found. Literally an ad hominem.
- taeric 10y ago
  Rephrase it to "What experience does the author have that indicates their experience would actually scale to Facebook levels?" Is it bullet proof? Of course not. As an easy example, there are many that are more overweight than I am that know nutrition better than I do. That said, it is does seem somewhat logical to question health advice from clearly unhealthy people.
  - differentView 10y ago
    >As an easy example, there are many that are more overweight than I am that know nutrition better than I do. That said, it is does seem somewhat logical to question health advice from clearly unhealthy people. Using your easy example with OP's logic, a 100-pound overweight person trying to lose 100 pounds by throwing up and taking dangerous diet pills should also discount the advice of a physician who've never lost 100 pounds themselves or successfully helped a patient lose at least 100 pounds.
    - taeric 10y ago
      Hmm... if that is what the OP intended, yes. Mayhap I was giving too much charity, but I would take it more of "Where is the evidence that you have successfully helped a patient lose 100 pounds?" That is, again, it is not bullet proof. But, it is too often for someone to have experience that does not scale to the speed and size of facebook in this regard. Life is too easy to argue in the extremes of straw men. Wanting to know of experience that backs an argument is perfectly reasonable.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  It is also intrinsically hypocritical. Poster questions author's qualifications to criticize Facebook. Poster's own blog post about software quality never hit the front page of HN. To quoque, dude. Tu quoque.~
ergl 10y ago
>"What has the author done that is equivalent?" Remember your words the next time you complain about the food in a restaurant.
yAnonymous 10y ago
>"What has the author done that is equivalent?" Being able to build something equivalent is not a requirement for criticizing things. In fact, some of the best and most valuable criticism often comes from people who have no idea about how the thing they are criticizing works.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  Do you have some examples? I think the most valuable criticism is that which comes with some ideas for improvement, which it is difficult for people who don't know how the thing they're criticizing works to give. In my experience, the criticism of the non-experts that you're lauding, most often points out things that the experts already know about, but simply haven't been able to solve. In general, I think identifying problems is the easy part, and that good ideas for solutions is where the value is.
  - lostcolony 10y ago
    "user testing"
amelius 10y ago
> My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" There is rarely anything to be found. I have the feeling that your reasoning follows a classic fallacy, which I don't know the name of (somebody please help me). The closest one I found is: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic
nstart 10y ago
That's a good point you make. But that's also why we have a formal system for making logical arguments. Critical essays which break things down into a premise, arguments, and a conclusion. This allows anyone to challenge anyone else without falling prey to the bias of deferring to authority. Thus we can and should challenge writers and pundits, but probably from the perspective of first asking if they are making a logical argument or an emotional one instead of making it about their experience levels
omouse 10y ago
Facebook's "code problem" is what really does happen in the real world with such humongous business enterprises. Lot's of moving pieces in code, in people, in ideas and the amalgamation of these results in what most programmers will see as "code quality problem" yet the market sees as billions of dollars There's something called waste. The issue is that we don't know how much better the situation can be but we can recognize that it's pretty shitty at the moment. If they're making billions of dollars and they're a big company and have all these code quality issues, what hope does a small company have when trying to make quality software? How many more billions could have been made with less churn and less maintenance costs?
pvg 10y ago
"What has the author done that is equivalent? The author has picked some data points and written an article. You have said 'So?'.
BinaryIdiot 10y ago
> My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" There is rarely anything to be found.[...]Facebook might have a "code quality problem." But until you have worked at an organization that is big like Facebook please hold forth your tongues or fingers in this case. Sorry but, in my opinion, this is dangerous thinking. Saying you shouldn't say anything unless you've done equivalent / better creates the implication that anyone who hasn't worked on a Facebook scale mobile app doesn't know what they're talking about or can't provide something to the conversation that is at least informational or useful. Do you complain about politics? If so then I would expect you to have at least held office in the past otherwise you should hold your tongue. Have you complained about a truck driver on the road? Well, have you driven a truck? If not you should not complain. etc...
valuearb 10y ago
So you are saying it's reasonable to have 18,000 objective C classes in a single iOS app?
tomcam 10y ago
Yeah, fuck that noise. Not a fan of Facebook or its CEO. But clearly there is no code problem – look at the stock price over extended period. QED

aaron-lebo 10y ago

Isn't that an appeal to authority? Because someone hasn't done X they don't have the right to criticize X? Facebook's "code problem" is what really does happen in the real world with such humongous business enterprises. But does it have to be this way?

evgen 10y ago
Until someone provided s counter-example the assumption is that yes, this is just what happens. We have entire industries of competing methodologies, some almost cult-like in their slavish devotion to "the one true process", and none have birthed any great successes. Why is that?
- deleted 10y ago
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- dustingetz 10y ago
  History is littered with counter-examples and great successes. Each generation of company is more efficient or solves more complicated problems than those before it. Facebook itself is an industry leader in open source innovation, which is why their product is so smooth. But not all companies specialize in hard tech, and all companies get old.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Facebook itself is an industry leader in open source innovation In the sense that they gave us React and couple JS tools? What are their other "industry leading open source innovations"? That's hardly a major "open source innovation". Heck, Google itself has produces 2-3 similar JS pieces (Angular, GWT, Closure compiler, Dart, etc).
    - objclxt 10y ago
      > In the sense that they gave us React and couple JS tools? What are their other "industry leading open source innovations"? OpenCompute (http://opencompute.org http://opencompute.org), Hack (http://hacklang.org http://hacklang.org), Phabricator (now spun off, still OSS, https://secure.phabricator.com https://secure.phabricator.com), GraphQL (http://graphql.org http://graphql.org)...none of these are JS tools, all have had major industry impact. GitHub's entire API, for example, is now GraphQL based. And that's just a small sampling. I can't quite decide if you're being deliberately provocative or just misinformed.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        >I can't quite decide if you're being deliberately provocative or just misinformed. Or maybe I genuinely disagree in your assessment that any of those technologies (apart from GraphQL, and that is still nowhere near major league) had any major "industry impact".
- chii 10y ago
  Let me provide a counter example. facebook, revenue in 2016 is $27 Billion, maintains approx 60mil lines of code (incl backend - source http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million-lines-of-code/ http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/million... find facebook in the list) Nasa, budget is $19 billion. I can't find a public official record of their code size, but the IIS is approx 6 mil lines of code, and i don't think the other missions they did (all 33 unmanned space missions in total) are too far off, so lets give each an average of 5mil per mission. That's 165 million lines of code. And arguably, probably more difficult code than facebook's domain.
  - evgen 10y ago
    And all of the code for the NASA HR system, and budget management tools, and conference system, etc. The Facebook code base is not just the web pages you see and backend to serve them, but encompasses just about everything used to run the company. It is also built and maintained by a much smaller group of coders for a much more ambiguous target domain. (And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's.) I guess I have to question the relevancy of your counter-example.
    - muricula 10y ago
      If programmers at NASA make a serious mistake on say the space stations's code, people will die and billions of dollars of equipment will be lost. The same cannot be said for a social website which serves a bunch of content. NASA has way more on the line than Facebook. Here's a great article on how NASA did development on the space shuttles code and the importance of process and quality: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Write-the-Right-Stuff.pdf http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/sp13/hand-outs/They-Wri...
      - evgen 10y ago
        Well, if someone at Facebook screws up and inadvertently reveals certain names or locations or the existence of particular groups within some countries people get arrested, tortured, and die. Last I checked NASA screw ups only kill a couple of people at a time. So you are right, they are not even close to comparable. See how easy it is to make false equivalences? I am familiar with the referenced article and if anyone in the software industry outside of few specialized areas tried to push a process like that they would need to start the endeavor by polishing their resume because they would soon be looking for a new job.
deleted 10y ago
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watwut 10y ago
You have right to criticize, but don't expect your criticism to be taken too seriously. There are two reasons for it: a.) you don't have frame of reference to compare whether facebooks result is better or worst then other companies b.) you don't know what tradeoff are necessary for making it work nor what it takes to achieve success.
- europeansoft 10y ago
  So by the same logic, criticism agains the government shouldn't be taken seriously unless they come from a former prime minister?
  - pliny 10y ago
    Criticism against governments by former governors should and is taken more seriously than criticism by some joe who's never had to wrangle a bureaucracy.
  - watwut 10y ago
    Government criticism from people who have experience with running government or being in the politics tend to have much higher quality then criticism coming from sixteen years old high school class president.
    - ue_ 10y ago
      What tends to be the case is irrelevant. The contents of what is being said is all that matters.
    - sooheon 10y ago
      So when it comes to the highest level of government, only those who have reached such heights may say a peep. Only criticism from former US presidents regarding Trump, please!
      - watwut 10y ago
        When random dude possibly with asperger gives advice/criticism on how to negotiate, reasonable government official will igore him - even if the criticism came in form of a blog. Likewise, succesfull activists ignore armchair advice from people on anonymous twitter. Not sure how is that controversial. Torwalds does not spend his time worrying about whether random bloggers agree with linux core style guide. You did not demonstrated enough of knowledge/expeciance for me to take your criticism seriously is valid answer.
emodendroket 10y ago
Well, sure, they can. But don't you think someone who has been involved in a massive company would have more trenchant insights into massive companies?
- deleted 10y ago
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feedjoelpie 10y ago
Appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy. It's a valid argument unless said authority is false in some way.
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  It's fallacious if you use it merely as "Authority X said so," no matter whether the authority is true or false. A fallacy happens when the conclusions do not follow from the premises of an argument. E.g. it doesn't follow from the fact that "Al Gore says that Global Warming is happening," that Global Warming is happening. If, on the other hand, you say "Al Gore said Global Warming is happening, Al Gore's argument is premise A and B, therefore C" that's not fallacious because your argument doesn't actually rest on the identity of the authority, but the argument they made. But all of this is irrelevant because it's not an appeal to authority. It's an ad hominem. The author is being attacked for not-being-an-authority.
thehardsphere 10y ago
It's ad hominem; the author is being attacked to invalidate the argument, instead of attacking the argument itself. Which is never valid. Appeal to authority usually takes the form of skipping making an actual argument for something and instead resting upon "X said so" and not explaining further. This is also not valid but is sometimes a shorthand for saying "X made argument Y," which can be valid if argument Y is valid (in which case the fact that X made the argument is purely incidental trivia).

ycombinete 10y ago

Hold forth = To talk at great length. Have you used it as such?

yladiz 10y ago
Is "hold forth" an older or less common phrase? I don't know if I've ever run into it, and I wouldn't have guessed initially that is its definition.
- FroshKiller 10y ago
  It is a bit old. I've seen it in English sources from the 19th century. I think it's common in literature for that period though less common now.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Well, judge for yourself. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=speak+at+length%2Chold+forth&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cspeak%20at%20length%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chold%20forth%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=speak+at+lengt...
  - jamessb 10y ago
    It's a phrase that I've usually encountered in the past tense. Google Ngrams shows that in 1800 "held forth" was used about three times as frequently as "hold forth" [1], but this ratio decreased as both uses became less common. [1]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=held+forth%2Chold+forth&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cheld%20forth%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chold%20forth%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=held+forth%2Ch...
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      I don't know a lot about the ngram corpus, but assuming there's lots of fiction everything will be skewed toward the past tense.

ebbv 10y ago

This is an absurd leap of logic. There's many quality programmers who have never worked at a large company and many more terrible programmers who have worked at large companies. Anyone can share their opinion and regardless of where they have worked it may or may not be valuable. If you are judging value based on the market CAP of their LinkedIn profile then you are probably missing out on most good information out there.

randomnumber314 10y ago

>So? So, there's a huge lesson when an organization starts blaming every one else for scale problems; if everywhere you go there are issues, it's you.

stkni 10y ago

>> My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" Well I happen to (vaguely) know the author and have worked with him in the past and he has done a lot of great work, not all of it in the public domain though. Comparing him with an organisation that employs 17k people is a little unfair but he comes out of it favourably IMHO!

coldtea 10y ago

>My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" There is rarely anything to be found. The thing about critique is that you don't need to have made an equivalent project/effort/artwork/whatever to be able to critique it with a valid objection. You just need to be able to spot an actual issue. Sure, some might think they've spotted an issue when there is none. Or not understand that the issue exists for a reason (e.g. engineering tradeoff). But those are orthogonal to the subject. The key is that critique can come from any source, and it doesn't need someone to have done something "equivalent" or to have specific credentials to be valid. The latter can at best serve as a rough filter to throw out some noise. But they will throw a lot of valid critique as well, which can come from everybody, including a layman.

morley 10y ago
> You just need to be able to spot an actual issue. My problem with the article is that it's extremely hard for humans in general, and critics in particular, to accurately model the alternative. I think that's the heart of what the commenter is talking about. Unless you've worked at Facebook's scale, it's really difficult to tell what happens. (I don't work anywhere near that scale, so maybe take my opinion with a grain of salt.) This critic is reading signals and attributing them to a failure on Facebook's part, but who knows if an alternate scenario (a) actually makes things better, or just results in different trade-offs; or (b) is even feasible for a company of Facebook's size to do. I have no idea. There are only a handful Facebook-sized enterprises that have ever existed.
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  My problem with the article is that it's extremely hard for humans in general, and critics in particular, to accurately model the alternative. The lack of a visible solution does not make all criticism less valid. Criticism can be an expression of flaws without including a drubbing for not doing better. It's often made public as combination of the two, but the later can be disqualified without impeaching the validity of the former. Even if the criticized thing is the best possible expression of the goal(s) given all the other constraints, it is still right to accept and express that limitations exist. -- Pretending they don't is just an ugly attempt to prevent the critic from refining their criticism to include the goals and self-imposed constants they view as causing the flaw.

matwood 10y ago

I agree to some extent, but think of it as more of this is how the sausage is made type of thing. As engineers we like to opine about perfect code, functional this, and monad that. It pains us to see that business success requires very little of even good code much less perfect. The reality is that the code rarely matters as long as it can be held together long enough for the next user or investor check to clear the bank.

HeroOfAges 10y ago
This is a reality I've had a great deal of difficulty coming to terms with. I haven't internalized it fully, but I can't help but think not acknowledging this has harmed my career.

pdpi 10y ago

Facebook is a really successful company, and they blame everybody but themselves for these problems. The obvious conclusion is: Because they're so successful, they're right and XCode, Dalvik, Git et al are wrong, and their hacks are entirely justified. The less obvious conclusion is: despite them being so successful, they have a code quality issue, and the tools are entirely justified in breaking under the load that's being put on them. Arguably, the big problem here is that the obvious conclusion is wrong, and the less obvious conclusion is right. And, because the right conclusion is the less obvious one, there's plenty of value in advising the kind of onlooker that's likely to want to emulate facebook's success (read: the sort of startup that's precisely HN's target audience!) that they shouldn't accept FB's excuses at face value, and should think about avoiding these problems in the future.

MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
Totally agree; it's a case of fallacy by results-oriented thinking. I don't actually know if that's recognized in any of the official lists of logical/rhetorical fallacies, but it ought to be. Well, I guess it's a variant of the 'Post hoc ergo propter hoc' fallacy, but seems like an important special case.
rwallace 10y ago
> they have a code quality issue, and the tools are entirely justified in breaking under the load that's being put on them That's not one conclusion, it's two. Suppose for the sake of argument we grant the first part and say Facebook has a code quality issue and they should have less code. (I'm not familiar enough with Facebook to have an opinion on the matter, but I'm willing to postulate this for the sake of argument.) That does not in any way imply the second conclusion! One of the most important differences between a good tool and a shoddy one is precisely that a shoddy tool can only withstand the load that should be put on it, whereas a good tool can go beyond that.
- pdpi 10y ago
  Sure, kind of. I agree: good tools should be able to handle being pushed beyond what counts as reasonable usage. But all tools break, at some point. Now we're splitting hairs: Is Facebook's use of the tools merely somewhat unreasonable, such that the tools should still hold? Or is it sufficiently past reasonability that they shouldn't have to hold any longer? To answer that, the fact that they managed to break not one but several tools is highly informative. I'm willing to accept that some tools might not work at scale. I'm less willing to accept that what basically amounts to the whole stack for mobile development is _that_ weak, not without very solid evidence. Near as I can tell, there haven't been reports of this sort of issue with MS Office for either Android or iOS, or from other applications that should, by any reasonable metric, be more complex than facebook.

TallGuyShort 10y ago

I'm no fan of the "knowing-all-that's-best" trend of articles either, but here's why I don't mind this: Facebook popularized the idea of "move fast and break things." Move fast, by all means, and don't be paralyzed by fear of all change whatsoever, but I really didn't appreciate it when my classmates thought that by being willing to break things constantly in our group project they were showing us all their potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. Or when some of those classmates were hired as my team mates and brought that crap into a customer-facing service. I interviewed at Facebook and was scared by the cowboy mentality I sensed in every room and with every interviewer. I'd like the glorification of that to be balanced by, "hey here's some concrete data demonstrating they have some real issues that could clearly be addressed better."

mgkimsal 10y ago
I've seen that "move fast and break things" mantra used in projects, and yeah, some people think they're being the next Zuckerberg when doing so. But what I've (almost) never seen is someone who actually fixes the shit when it's broken. Fine, go ahead and break stuff, but be willing and able to actually FIX it afterwards. That part never seems to get picked up.
- TallGuyShort 10y ago
  Better yet, move fast and have good test coverage that can run fast and does so automatically.
  - Cofike 10y ago
    "The client won't want to pay for testing" "We'll circle back and add tests later"
    - mgkimsal 10y ago
      "The client won't want to pay for testing" becomes "the client will pay for not testing" My deepity for the day...

Zombiefruit 10y ago

> My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" There is rarely anything to be found. Literally an ad hominem.

taeric 10y ago
Rephrase it to "What experience does the author have that indicates their experience would actually scale to Facebook levels?" Is it bullet proof? Of course not. As an easy example, there are many that are more overweight than I am that know nutrition better than I do. That said, it is does seem somewhat logical to question health advice from clearly unhealthy people.
- differentView 10y ago
  >As an easy example, there are many that are more overweight than I am that know nutrition better than I do. That said, it is does seem somewhat logical to question health advice from clearly unhealthy people. Using your easy example with OP's logic, a 100-pound overweight person trying to lose 100 pounds by throwing up and taking dangerous diet pills should also discount the advice of a physician who've never lost 100 pounds themselves or successfully helped a patient lose at least 100 pounds.
  - taeric 10y ago
    Hmm... if that is what the OP intended, yes. Mayhap I was giving too much charity, but I would take it more of "Where is the evidence that you have successfully helped a patient lose 100 pounds?" That is, again, it is not bullet proof. But, it is too often for someone to have experience that does not scale to the speed and size of facebook in this regard. Life is too easy to argue in the extremes of straw men. Wanting to know of experience that backs an argument is perfectly reasonable.
logfromblammo 10y ago
It is also intrinsically hypocritical. Poster questions author's qualifications to criticize Facebook. Poster's own blog post about software quality never hit the front page of HN. To quoque, dude. Tu quoque.~

ergl 10y ago

>"What has the author done that is equivalent?" Remember your words the next time you complain about the food in a restaurant.

yAnonymous 10y ago

>"What has the author done that is equivalent?" Being able to build something equivalent is not a requirement for criticizing things. In fact, some of the best and most valuable criticism often comes from people who have no idea about how the thing they are criticizing works.

sanderjd 10y ago
Do you have some examples? I think the most valuable criticism is that which comes with some ideas for improvement, which it is difficult for people who don't know how the thing they're criticizing works to give. In my experience, the criticism of the non-experts that you're lauding, most often points out things that the experts already know about, but simply haven't been able to solve. In general, I think identifying problems is the easy part, and that good ideas for solutions is where the value is.
- lostcolony 10y ago
  "user testing"

amelius 10y ago

> My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" There is rarely anything to be found. I have the feeling that your reasoning follows a classic fallacy, which I don't know the name of (somebody please help me). The closest one I found is: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/genetic

nstart 10y ago

That's a good point you make. But that's also why we have a formal system for making logical arguments. Critical essays which break things down into a premise, arguments, and a conclusion. This allows anyone to challenge anyone else without falling prey to the bias of deferring to authority. Thus we can and should challenge writers and pundits, but probably from the perspective of first asking if they are making a logical argument or an emotional one instead of making it about their experience levels

omouse 10y ago

Facebook's "code problem" is what really does happen in the real world with such humongous business enterprises. Lot's of moving pieces in code, in people, in ideas and the amalgamation of these results in what most programmers will see as "code quality problem" yet the market sees as billions of dollars There's something called waste. The issue is that we don't know how much better the situation can be but we can recognize that it's pretty shitty at the moment. If they're making billions of dollars and they're a big company and have all these code quality issues, what hope does a small company have when trying to make quality software? How many more billions could have been made with less churn and less maintenance costs?

pvg 10y ago

"What has the author done that is equivalent? The author has picked some data points and written an article. You have said 'So?'.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

> My question these days when I read such article, "What has the author done that is equivalent?" There is rarely anything to be found.[...]Facebook might have a "code quality problem." But until you have worked at an organization that is big like Facebook please hold forth your tongues or fingers in this case. Sorry but, in my opinion, this is dangerous thinking. Saying you shouldn't say anything unless you've done equivalent / better creates the implication that anyone who hasn't worked on a Facebook scale mobile app doesn't know what they're talking about or can't provide something to the conversation that is at least informational or useful. Do you complain about politics? If so then I would expect you to have at least held office in the past otherwise you should hold your tongue. Have you complained about a truck driver on the road? Well, have you driven a truck? If not you should not complain. etc...

valuearb 10y ago

So you are saying it's reasonable to have 18,000 objective C classes in a single iOS app?

tomcam 10y ago

Yeah, fuck that noise. Not a fan of Facebook or its CEO. But clearly there is no code problem – look at the stock price over extended period. QED