5 ms·

Until someone provided s counter-example the assumption is that yes, this is just what happens. We have entire industries of competing methodologies, some almos

by 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
[deleted]
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.

by evgen 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

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.