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> They may need some better QA There's no such thing as QA at Facebook. Really. Developers are supposedly responsible for all testing of their own code, but al

> They may need some better QA There's no such thing as QA at Facebook. Really. Developers are supposedly responsible for all testing of their own code, but all of the pressure is to "move fast" so that goes about as well as you'd expect.

ceejayoz 6y ago
I’ve had the same basic bug crop up 3x in the last two years while using the API - posts to Groups with dollar amounts just… fail. “An unknown error occurred.” The first two times it took months to fix. It’s happening again currently, too. Clear there are GAPING holes in their test suites.
markmark 6y ago
Looks like it's going pretty well, Facebook is currently worth 700 billion dollars. Or is that not what you meant?
- jfb 6y ago
  There are multiple dimensions you can use to measure success. Market capitalization is certainly one of them, but it is at best only tenuously related to engineering quality.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Close a great venture capital round, suddenly you've got a big pile of money in the bank and your company's valuation is really high. That means you're successful! Make a lot of money selling lifetime subscriptions, then have nowhere to go for cash next year: look at all that money! I'm very successful now! If all you're measuring and optimizing for is "valuation" or "revenue" you're not automatically going to get a good product or happy customers...
KaiserPro 6y ago
There is, it just depends on the part of the company you're in. If you have a team run by idiots, then you won't have QA. If you have a team run by adults, then there is plenty of QA. I mean its total shite that this wasn't caught. I'd expect much better, especially as this is the second time in n months. But then perhaps working for a company run by a dick who can't listen is getting to people.
- notacoward 6y ago
  I work there (in infra). I have yet to interact with a team that has dedicated QA. Checked the internal jobs board; no relevant term is listed among titles, areas of work, talent profiles, or skills, anywhere in the company including WhatsApp or Oculus. This is consistent with the "developers are fully responsible for their own code" ethos we're all taught in bootcamp - same reason we all get to do oncall. I'm personally familiar with many real adults up to senior director level, so "if you have a team run by adults" is definitely not true. Given your characterization of MZ (whether or not it's accurate), I'd say you clearly don't have any actual knowledge of the situation and shouldn't be presenting your guesses as fact.
  - KaiserPro 6y ago
    >Checked the internal jobs board; no relevant term is listed among titles Engineer in test. QA engineering lead. (https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/?q=QA https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/?q=QA) You must have leet scuba skills with searching skills like that. AR/VR, Oculus, portal and workplace all have dedicated QA engineering teams. I'm sure there are more. > Given your characterization of MZ if it was only zuck. Zuck has two faults: he's not able to articulate any single thought inside of 15 minutes and he consistently throws out integrity products that would have stopped bad PR. Its not just me, you should look at the micropulse. confidence in leadership has taken a good battering recently. The whole juneteenth buisness, we had an entire _day_ of people telling us the problem. Senior management then sat next to them and said in reverent tones: "thank you so much [[dabs a tear]] for telling us your lived experience" posts a selfie and then does fuck all else. Or, having revved up the company to generate hundreds of ideas to tackle abuse on FB platform, do shit all with them, not even acknowledge they exist.
    - notacoward 6y ago
      > You must have leet scuba skills with searching skills like that. Nothing to do with scuba, and if you did any operational work you'd know that it's in the category of tools that are often flaky due to lack of QA. It's also worth noting that the link you provide only shows 41 listings, and most of those merely mention "familiarity with QA" in some boilerplate for what's obviously a developer position. Leet reading skills you have there. Percentage-wise, there are fewer true QA positions there than we have E-10s. For a company that hires 10K a year, that's indistinguishable from zero. > AR/VR, Oculus, portal and workplace In other words some small percentage of the company, none of it near me. All of the systems that the profitable parts of Facebook rely on - to provision systems, monitor systems, store data, move data around, analyze data, etc. - rely entirely on developer testing. So here's an amended statement to make you happy. "99.9% of Facebook has no QA, and the rest has really bad QA."

ceejayoz 6y ago

I’ve had the same basic bug crop up 3x in the last two years while using the API - posts to Groups with dollar amounts just… fail. “An unknown error occurred.” The first two times it took months to fix. It’s happening again currently, too. Clear there are GAPING holes in their test suites.

markmark 6y ago

Looks like it's going pretty well, Facebook is currently worth 700 billion dollars. Or is that not what you meant?

jfb 6y ago
There are multiple dimensions you can use to measure success. Market capitalization is certainly one of them, but it is at best only tenuously related to engineering quality.
kevingadd 6y ago
Close a great venture capital round, suddenly you've got a big pile of money in the bank and your company's valuation is really high. That means you're successful! Make a lot of money selling lifetime subscriptions, then have nowhere to go for cash next year: look at all that money! I'm very successful now! If all you're measuring and optimizing for is "valuation" or "revenue" you're not automatically going to get a good product or happy customers...

KaiserPro 6y ago

There is, it just depends on the part of the company you're in. If you have a team run by idiots, then you won't have QA. If you have a team run by adults, then there is plenty of QA. I mean its total shite that this wasn't caught. I'd expect much better, especially as this is the second time in n months. But then perhaps working for a company run by a dick who can't listen is getting to people.

notacoward 6y ago
I work there (in infra). I have yet to interact with a team that has dedicated QA. Checked the internal jobs board; no relevant term is listed among titles, areas of work, talent profiles, or skills, anywhere in the company including WhatsApp or Oculus. This is consistent with the "developers are fully responsible for their own code" ethos we're all taught in bootcamp - same reason we all get to do oncall. I'm personally familiar with many real adults up to senior director level, so "if you have a team run by adults" is definitely not true. Given your characterization of MZ (whether or not it's accurate), I'd say you clearly don't have any actual knowledge of the situation and shouldn't be presenting your guesses as fact.
- KaiserPro 6y ago
  >Checked the internal jobs board; no relevant term is listed among titles Engineer in test. QA engineering lead. (https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/?q=QA https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/?q=QA) You must have leet scuba skills with searching skills like that. AR/VR, Oculus, portal and workplace all have dedicated QA engineering teams. I'm sure there are more. > Given your characterization of MZ if it was only zuck. Zuck has two faults: he's not able to articulate any single thought inside of 15 minutes and he consistently throws out integrity products that would have stopped bad PR. Its not just me, you should look at the micropulse. confidence in leadership has taken a good battering recently. The whole juneteenth buisness, we had an entire _day_ of people telling us the problem. Senior management then sat next to them and said in reverent tones: "thank you so much [[dabs a tear]] for telling us your lived experience" posts a selfie and then does fuck all else. Or, having revved up the company to generate hundreds of ideas to tackle abuse on FB platform, do shit all with them, not even acknowledge they exist.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    > You must have leet scuba skills with searching skills like that. Nothing to do with scuba, and if you did any operational work you'd know that it's in the category of tools that are often flaky due to lack of QA. It's also worth noting that the link you provide only shows 41 listings, and most of those merely mention "familiarity with QA" in some boilerplate for what's obviously a developer position. Leet reading skills you have there. Percentage-wise, there are fewer true QA positions there than we have E-10s. For a company that hires 10K a year, that's indistinguishable from zero. > AR/VR, Oculus, portal and workplace In other words some small percentage of the company, none of it near me. All of the systems that the profitable parts of Facebook rely on - to provision systems, monitor systems, store data, move data around, analyze data, etc. - rely entirely on developer testing. So here's an amended statement to make you happy. "99.9% of Facebook has no QA, and the rest has really bad QA."