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I was lucky enough to work at Facebook for a while and got to see (and learn) a very successful working model of product development. Facebook has been extreme

I was lucky enough to work at Facebook for a while and got to see (and learn) a very successful working model of product development. Facebook has been extremely successful commercially, but I think it's dangerous to read too much into how a unicorn like that develops its software, partly because there is survivorship bias at work here, and partly because the most important things Facebook has achieved have relatively little to do with software. Facebook's golden goose is the network effect. Once it reached a critical mass of users, it was all but unstoppable. Arguably its most impressive technical feat was achieving enough scalability in its infrastructure that it could keep up with that many users and that much data. That was a remarkable success story by any standard, but while it surely has a software element, no doubt it involved much more than just code. On the other hand, to a first approximation Facebook has had infinite resources for most of its existence. It operates in an online environment where problems can be fixed even in production. And it doesn't really do anything that is going to cause catastrophic, unfixable consequences if something does break for a while. That is a list of luxuries that few software development teams enjoy, and what works if you can make those assumptions won't necessarily be a good idea if you can't. As you say, you do have to pay attention to other factors as well, but there are not many organisations that have as much room to manoeuvre on the software side as Facebook does.

Maro 9y ago
When you're looking at templates for success, then looking at the successful companies (survivorship bias) is a good start. The fallacy is when it turns out that there are lots of other companies doing the same thing, but those companies aren't successful. This is the problem with all those blog posts examining the daily habits of highly successful people (like, they wake up early, or, they eat energy bars to save time, etc). Clearly, just doing these things won't make you a billionaire. For what I wrote, I believe this doesn't apply, because of the stark difference between the culture I experienced at FB and other companies. (Admittedly, this is not a stat.sign. sample.) So in my experience it's _not_ true that other companies are doing the same thing... Having said that, you're right that FB is a one in a million company, and probably nobody reading this will be the next M.Zuckerberg... But still, if you want to be the best in your domain (eg. best todo app), I strongly think these are good patterns to follow.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  The fallacy is when it turns out that there are lots of other companies doing the same thing, but those companies aren't successful. Well, there is no shortage of web startups trying to be all agile and fast-moving that still fail, and among the ones that survive long enough to become established, there seem to be plenty of problems with reliability and security issues that better software design might have avoided. Facebook seem to have significant problems quite often too. I've seen teams redistribute their planned Facebook spending for entire ad campaigns across other channels, because the Facebook UI for setting up the ads was so broken on that day that it was impossible to run the intended FB campaign, or because FB's approval system for promotional content rejected something for obviously incorrect reasons. In one case, FB made a rookie mistake in their payment processing that stopped everything to do with Facebook ads dead for that business until the problem could be resolved, which itself was only possible because of some personal contacts who happened to work at Facebook and could escalate the issue internally. The thing is, if you're Facebook, you can survive repeatedly causing this sort of hassle for the people paying your bills, because you're big enough that they'll probably come back and try again another time anyway. It's still x% of your potential revenue that you're throwing away, but you don't need that revenue to remain a viable business. However, if you're almost anyone other than Facebook, those kinds of quality control issues will damage your reputation and ultimately sink your business if they become serious enough.

Maro 9y ago

When you're looking at templates for success, then looking at the successful companies (survivorship bias) is a good start. The fallacy is when it turns out that there are lots of other companies doing the same thing, but those companies aren't successful. This is the problem with all those blog posts examining the daily habits of highly successful people (like, they wake up early, or, they eat energy bars to save time, etc). Clearly, just doing these things won't make you a billionaire. For what I wrote, I believe this doesn't apply, because of the stark difference between the culture I experienced at FB and other companies. (Admittedly, this is not a stat.sign. sample.) So in my experience it's _not_ true that other companies are doing the same thing... Having said that, you're right that FB is a one in a million company, and probably nobody reading this will be the next M.Zuckerberg... But still, if you want to be the best in your domain (eg. best todo app), I strongly think these are good patterns to follow.

Silhouette 9y ago
The fallacy is when it turns out that there are lots of other companies doing the same thing, but those companies aren't successful. Well, there is no shortage of web startups trying to be all agile and fast-moving that still fail, and among the ones that survive long enough to become established, there seem to be plenty of problems with reliability and security issues that better software design might have avoided. Facebook seem to have significant problems quite often too. I've seen teams redistribute their planned Facebook spending for entire ad campaigns across other channels, because the Facebook UI for setting up the ads was so broken on that day that it was impossible to run the intended FB campaign, or because FB's approval system for promotional content rejected something for obviously incorrect reasons. In one case, FB made a rookie mistake in their payment processing that stopped everything to do with Facebook ads dead for that business until the problem could be resolved, which itself was only possible because of some personal contacts who happened to work at Facebook and could escalate the issue internally. The thing is, if you're Facebook, you can survive repeatedly causing this sort of hassle for the people paying your bills, because you're big enough that they'll probably come back and try again another time anyway. It's still x% of your potential revenue that you're throwing away, but you don't need that revenue to remain a viable business. However, if you're almost anyone other than Facebook, those kinds of quality control issues will damage your reputation and ultimately sink your business if they become serious enough.