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How do two engineers affect an entire company project?
by _9rq6 5y ago
How do two engineers affect an entire company project?
- programmarchy 5y agoCrypto talent is scarce, for one. And the intersection of crypto developers who would work at Facebook is vanishingly small.
- HarryHirsch 5y agoIt's supposed to be the technology of the future that everyone uses. It's not supposed to be like direct methods in crystallography, which are understood by a dozen people, of which half are over 50 years old.
- seibelj 5y agoRight but a bunch of nobodies on HN actively disparage the entire sector for whatever reason, which requires a pretty deep knowledge that the average REST slinger doesn’t possess, so the market is tight for competent devs let alone top-tier.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nucleogenesis 5y ago> for whatever reason Gimme a break
- bostonsre 5y agoYea, it's disparaged constantly for no good reason and if you know about crypto you are a God and everyone else is shit.
- knownjorbist 5y agoCould be somewhere in-between. There are very intelligent people focusing on the crypto, defi, decentralization and "metaverse" space. It's colloquially referred to as web3, but after "Web 2.0" people here have skepticism of such a term. Why would they be spending their time on this? Are they all just, as another poster said, "ideologically delusional and/or pathologically greedy"?
- rabuse 5y agoIt's not like that by design. It's still very niche from a dev perspective, and constantly evolving with so many different protocols released on the regular (most are shit), but you still have to sift through it to stay in the "know".
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoBy comparison, crypto really just isn't that useful or interesting. What will humanity learn from crypto.
- bobsil1 5y agoPrivacy freak ∩ surveillance biz model
- stavros 5y agoWell this hits the nail on the head...
- sirclueless 5y agoThese things really aren't so far apart. --> solve the problem / see a problem \ --> exploit the problem
- post_from_work 5y agoLearn the tactics, techniques, and procedures employed by large corporate/state surveillance adversaries, identify gaps in their capabilities, secure your PERSONAL privacy based on your insider knowledge, anonymously distribute similar protection methods to the privacy-conscious, and get paid to do it? Sounds like a no-brainer to me...
- vmception 5y agoand also 2 years at a FAANG is normal and non-news
- ffhhj 5y agoCrypto is the new COBOL.
- pavlov 5y agoAt least COBOL in its time was a major breakthrough that resulted in immediate productivity improvements. Crypto is more like a honeypot for the incompetent, ideologically delusional and/or pathologically greedy. (Which explains why certain FB executives are still running this doomed Libra/Diem/whatever project. They might do more harm somewhere else.)
- knownjorbist 5y agoHow on earth is this a take on HN, of all places? I have a feeling people with this opinion stopped paying attention in 2017.
- Animats 5y agoI'm not impressed with the crypto crowd. I've read too many "white papers" full of bullshit. In the newer rounds, most of the creativity is applied to escaping fraud charges. If the DAO controlled by the governance token controls the payments to the people behind the scheme, and they give up control of the governance token, then those people are just subcontractors of the DAO. So they're not responsible for fraud losses, right? All you really need to secure a blockchain is a number of parties who are not likely to collude. The original idea was huge numbers of miners using spare CPU time. There's a famous picture of the top 5 Bitcoin mine owners in China, who together had well over 51% of the hash power, all on the same stage, talking about what they, as a group, intended to do. That was not the plan. The "smart contract" system was botched. Smart contracts should have been something like decision tables, which can be checked exhaustively. But no, they had to put in a bytecode interpreter, become Turing complete, and dig themselves into an expensively bug-ridden hole. Incidentally, I suspect that the SEC's hammer is about to come down on the "metaverse" NFT people. Back in 2018, the SEC brought the hammer down on the ICO people, by prosecuting the worst of the worst and sending the rest of them letters saying "please explain to them why this isn't a security offering". Suddenly most of the ICOs disappeared. What we're seeing now are schemes where people are selling NFTs which represent virtual land in virtual worlds not yet built. I've seen three of those in the last week. That's a security offering under the Howey test. If you sell an NFT for something that already exists, that's one thing. If you use NFT sales to fund the creation of something, you're selling shares in a common enterprise run by someone else. That's a security. This metaverse stuff irks me because I'm into virtual world technology, and the make-money-fast crowd is giving metaverses a bad name by not actually building good virtual worlds. (Go visit Decentraland, which, by the way, only has 200-300 concurrent users. It makes Facebook Horizon look good.) Or, in too many case, building anything at all beyond the money-collection NFT system.
- ashtonkem 5y agoI have no insider knowledge, but my guess is that nobody wants to work on this project. Best to avoid any project that might get you hauled in front of the senate, which has already happened to Libra.
- nuclearnice1 5y agoIs some 2 years at Facebook developer going to end up in front of the senate? Well, possible, I guess. It could be exciting!
- ashtonkem 5y agoTheoretically it’s possible! But unlikely, I’ll admit.
- AlbertCory 5y agoMaybe not as "a 2-year developer" but if they make VP of Novi, then yeah, they'd better lawyer up.
- asdfman123 5y agoHell, dude. That's hard to imagine. Maybe it's hard for them to recruit world leading experts on crypto, but Facebook still has a ton of top talent and a ton of hungry people willing to make a name for themselves within the company.
- hnbad 5y agoSure but justifying working for Facebook or in crypto currencies to yourself takes enough cognitive dissonance, I can't imagine the lengths you have to got to to justify working on Facebook's crypto currency projects.
- asdfman123 5y agoIt's easy if you actually believe the libertarian crypto gospel like many do. Or just believe that technology is inevitable, and you might as well be the one building it.
- rising-sky 5y agoThis article is a bit sensational / hyperbole, Morgan Beller, who's is mentioned as instrumental also left the team a while ago and it was still moving along, albeit slowed due to external pressures
- random314 5y agoThey look like junior engineers from LinkedIn profiles. I don't think this matters to Facebook.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agowell if X10 engineers exist, and these two are them, it's like 20 engineers just left. Or also if the project has 10 engineers, and the first is the lead who knows everything and the second one is the one who knows deeply about some real important dependency it could suck - losing 20% of your engineers on a project is bad enough, but the two most important ones comprising that 20% could derail a project.