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> I do miss a bunch of Facebook internal tools. Phabricator, Workplace, Scuba, Deltoid and a bunch of others. I had the opposite experience leaving Facebook fo

> I do miss a bunch of Facebook internal tools. Phabricator, Workplace, Scuba, Deltoid and a bunch of others. I had the opposite experience leaving Facebook for a company that uses externally-available tools. I do miss 2017 Scuba, Workplace, and Deltoid, since they worked well in Facebook's ecosystem. I do not miss the 2021 versions of those tools (and of most other internal tools in Facebook), which are bloated messes with less functionality and also somehow being slower and more resource-heavy. One of my positive impressions when moving companies are how much better Grafana, Prometheus, JIRA, Slack, and many other external tools are from internal Facebook tools. It makes sense if you see it from an influence perspective: external tools need to improve to get new users and retain current ones, but Facebook's tools need to constantly add new features to get PSC performance points and they always keeping a guaranteed audience of the entire company.

vlovich123 5y ago
Workplace is definitely better than Google chat in my experience. Phabricator is miles ahead of anything. Automatic flaky test detection works like a charm and I miss it every day. However, the organizational culture… I agree with a lot of what he noted about reorgs and that it feels like walking through molasses trying to get anything done quickly.
- mFixman 5y ago
  I agree with you on Workplace, and I had an equally good time using Github than Phabricator. Still, current Workplace is very slow and its amount of whitespace-to-information grew a lot on the last years. Most other tools are just unambiguously worse than their public counterparts though.
- kyrra 5y ago
  Googler, opinions are my own. If the Chat team is ever able to get inline-threads out the door: https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-spaces https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-spaces, it should make rooms/spaces a much better experience.
  - vlovich123 5y ago
    How about opening a room and not having it scroll forever out from under me? How about clicking on a chat link to a long thread (or scrolling up to it) and having that scroll away randomly out from under me? There’s very basic usability and performance things that frustrate me on a fundamental level. The rest is at the margins. Also, the builtin @silent way to chat a thread without notifying anyone is gold. Same goes for reminders. Also it’s chat + a consistent way to communicate out for a team. Workplace solves actual problems working with other people. Google Chat simply does slack-like chat, and poorly at that. Edit: also all those things are drastically simpler than inline threads but not as sexy which tells you something about what the incentive structure looks like here. Disclaimer. I’m an ex googler. Thought chat was good when it came out but it’s regressed since then.

vlovich123 5y ago

Workplace is definitely better than Google chat in my experience. Phabricator is miles ahead of anything. Automatic flaky test detection works like a charm and I miss it every day. However, the organizational culture… I agree with a lot of what he noted about reorgs and that it feels like walking through molasses trying to get anything done quickly.

mFixman 5y ago
I agree with you on Workplace, and I had an equally good time using Github than Phabricator. Still, current Workplace is very slow and its amount of whitespace-to-information grew a lot on the last years. Most other tools are just unambiguously worse than their public counterparts though.
kyrra 5y ago
Googler, opinions are my own. If the Chat team is ever able to get inline-threads out the door: https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-spaces https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-spaces, it should make rooms/spaces a much better experience.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  How about opening a room and not having it scroll forever out from under me? How about clicking on a chat link to a long thread (or scrolling up to it) and having that scroll away randomly out from under me? There’s very basic usability and performance things that frustrate me on a fundamental level. The rest is at the margins. Also, the builtin @silent way to chat a thread without notifying anyone is gold. Same goes for reminders. Also it’s chat + a consistent way to communicate out for a team. Workplace solves actual problems working with other people. Google Chat simply does slack-like chat, and poorly at that. Edit: also all those things are drastically simpler than inline threads but not as sexy which tells you something about what the incentive structure looks like here. Disclaimer. I’m an ex googler. Thought chat was good when it came out but it’s regressed since then.