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It depends on what you mean by first-rate. I mean, developing the sorts of things the parent mentioned requires a lot more talent than writing an app. But, to b
by unalone 18y ago
It depends on what you mean by first-rate. I mean, developing the sorts of things the parent mentioned requires a lot more talent than writing an app. But, to be fair, that requires an incredible amount of skill. Most people, including bright and capable people who work hard to learn, won't ever do something like that. But I agree that the people at Facebook, if not all revolutionary and brilliant, are all pretty damn good at what they do. Beyond scalability, too: Facebook has got more small little quirks that go towards usability than any other site that I know. Then they make a redesign that renders all those small quirks pointless because the new layout is vastly easier. Then they introduce more quirks.
The first time that I wrote a long message and saw the message window expand, I jumped with excitement. It was pretty awesome to find a new feature one day that I didn't expect and never would have thought to ask for.
- kwamenum86 18y agoI think that if people don't call fb engineers first rate then they have to refrain from using that label for many very good engineers (I used Google as an example in my last comment). Maybe we are using "meaningful contributions as a metric". Here is a page of some of their contributions: http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php I am just reluctant to say that engineers at fb are not first-rate. Are we saying that they are second rate? I agree that fb is the toy analog in the web app world but does that mean that the engineers who banged out the PS3/XBox 360/Wii are second-rate?
- unalone 18y agoI am just reluctant to say that engineers at fb are not first-rate. Are we saying that they are second rate? That's exactly the problem that I had with my comment. They're only not first-rate if you expect every engineer to be literally genius. That's too much to expect for any one company. So first-rate is as close to accurate a description as you could get. I've always found it odd that not many hackers that I've met really get into discussing video game mechanics: either hardware or software. It's odd because video games are what got me into programming software, and the only time I've ever felt like making hardware it was designing imaginary game systems.