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Meta pushed up pay for the whole industry. They also created the most important frameworks: React and PyTorch. For everyone hating on the company, they did mo

Meta pushed up pay for the whole industry. They also created the most important frameworks: React and PyTorch. For everyone hating on the company, they did more for software engineers than any other company. The most meritocratic and highly compensated

rapsey 4y ago
Also Cassandra, RocksDB, zstd, Open Compute and probably a bunch I'm forgetting. Meta has one of the most stellar open source contributions of any company.
- igsomething 4y ago
  GraphQL and Jest too.
- thrasibule 4y ago
  Zstd already existed before Yann Collet joined Facebook.
  - rektide 4y ago
    But also credit for hiring someone and ongoingly supporting good work. Honestly this is one of the more essential things companies could be doing.
    - anotherhue 4y ago
      You're not wrong, but if we've all collectively decided that companies should be patrons then I think we've made a mistake. These people are only one reorg away from losing their income, Mr. lz4/zstd should be able to focus on his work without such fears, so great is his contribution to our field.
      - rektide 4y ago
        Yeah it's wildly off the wall how hard it is for enoromously valuable critical people doing amazing things to get support for themselves & their work. That the direct-corporate-patronage/semi-employeeship model is so prevailing is a sign of brokenness. We need more, collectively, to have a health of our technical ecosystem. Having these corps willing to hire great folk & have them keep hacking is still often a good option, often. "Create more vue than you capture" is easy to back/do when it's so clear who is out there creating mad value.
wnevets 4y ago
It also allowed foreign entities to unduly influence Americas elections.
- voisin 4y ago
  And knowingly allowed their technology to fuel at least one genocide. Not many companies have that on their resume.
acdha 4y ago
React is important because they pushed a ton of money into devrel and a lot of people used it because Facebook was using it, not because it was breathtakingly advanced over the alternatives. If it hadn’t happened, something else would have and we might have been enjoying better-performing web pages for the last decade, too, without the mythology around virtual DOMs.
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  It was a breakthrough in front end development, angular by comparison is pure garbage
  - acdha 4y ago
    I’d agree with an incremental improvement for developers but it came at the cost of fair performance & accessibility regressions and a culture of tool chain complexity which undercuts the productivity gains. If I had to pick, I’d say TypeScript has had a much more noticeable impact on teams’ ability to ship code rapidly and reliably.
naillo 4y ago
ML would have been fine without torch, we would have just used tensorflow instead.
debacle 4y ago
They also brought PHP into the 21st century (as best they could) through competition via hphp.
scarface74 4y ago
Yes, I’m sure the web wouldn’t have progressed without yet another framework.
- brigadier132 4y ago
  React is THE web framework. The difference between react and previous frameworks is like night and day. Maybe nowadays people are seeing the rough spots with things like useEffect but pre-react web was literal hell for web development.
  - CydeWeys 4y ago
    This is gonna blow your mind, but most developers don't use React at all. Hell most developers don't rarely if ever do frontend web development.
    - brigadier132 4y ago
      This is gonna blow your mind, but if you reread my comment, I qualified everything with "for web development"
      - scarface74 4y ago
        And there were dozens of frameworks before React that were popular.
        CydeWeys 4y ago
        I remember when Perl cgi-bins blew my mind. A webpage wasn't just static HTML and images anymore, it could be a program that did arbitrary things! Nothing new under the Sun.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Kids these days. Developing for the web was far from hell before React…
fullshark 4y ago
And they are an engineer lead instead of wall street lead company, supposedly with an eye on long term value creation over short term stock movements (though possibly Zuckerberg has just capitulated) with its metaverse bet, i.e. the thing that engineers claim all software companies should be. And yet, I think no other software company gets the scorn Meta gets from engineers on the interwebs, it's hilarious.
- drunkpotato 4y ago
  I don’t think many engineers claim all software companies should bet long on the metaverse, whatever that is.
- TingPing 4y ago
  Because their end products that actually generate their income have been, in the eyes of some, immoral and unhealthy to society?
woodruffw 4y ago
I don’t understand what this has to do with the article: are you saying that employees (and commenters) shouldn’t be mad about Meta’s actions because they’ve done other, important things?
- fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
  Yeah I'm saying they should be grateful this company ever existed
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Two points: 1. Being angry at an action doesn’t make someone an ingrate. You can both be grateful and angry; I’d say it’s even common to be both. 2. Meta has had no meaningful impact on my software niche, or many others’. Their only real impact on me has been radicalizing my older family members and firing a few of my friends. They aren’t entitled to any particular gratitude for that.
    - super256 4y ago
      I don't think you get radicalized by social networks alone. Usually things like economic distress, mental health issues, (missing?) social life irl are much bigger factors here. But yes, if you are already leaning towards it, the internet can probably reinforce any kind of extreme beliefs, as they usually provide simple solutions for complex issues.
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        I understand the distinction you’re making, but I think the “radicalization” characterization is appropriate: my experience is that Facebook-exposed relatives place both more and more extreme value on policies that they might otherwise have. Were they primed by other sources of media and culture exposure? Absolutely; what distinguishes Facebook is its place in the timeline, and the abundance of evidence that radicalization broadly tracks with social media engagement.
CydeWeys 4y ago
React and PyTorch are just libraries, with plenty of competition. The industry wouldn't be that different if everyone was instead using Vue or Angular or whatever other frontend JS library would've come along had React not. You're giving Facebook too much credit here. Most developers have never used any of these (me included). I agree with the pushing up pay point. That was good, though it appears to be ending now.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  React had 2 major contributions which were industry changing on the front end, IMO, and may not have happened or would have happened a lot later without it. 1. Virtual Dom 2. One way data binding I think one could argue that the virtual DOM wasn’t important, and possibly even led the industry in the wrong direction considering how it’s not as popular, for good reasons, anymore. One way data binding was huge, however. Every other framework at the time was proudly promoting 2 way data binding. 2 way data binding would be in their website’s hero image and their entire sample app (invariably a todo list app) would be based around promoting the benefits of 2 way data binding. I think minus React, a switch to one way data binding would have taken much longer, simply because the momentum behind 2 way data binding was so strong.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
tambourine_man 4y ago
Can't say much about PyTorch, but I see React as a detriment to the web and the world, like most things this blue company touches on.
baby 4y ago
I agree but you’re on HN so you should hate facebook and think Zuck is evil.
analognoise 4y ago
"Meritocracy" was first used in a dystopian, satirical book. That whole concept is severely busted. The ancient Greeks knew some part of success was just luck - I have no idea why these ideas which started off being used as a joke, or a dystopian pejorative term, got taken seriously. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is another - try it. It's physically impossible! The term started as a JOKE. But there's this sector of people who honestly believe their success says something about them, but they give nothing back to their community and offer nothing to Luck. Wild.
- acdha 4y ago
  Whenever something seems off like that I usually try to follow the money to see who profits from it. In this case, I’m partial to the explanation that it stems back to business opposition to the New Deal pushing a lot of money into promoting libertarian Christianity, with one of the bedrock principles being that the world is just and therefore someone rich must have deserved it in some way. Kevin Kruse wrote a book about that a few years ago and anyone familiar with American politics or religion will recognize a lot of the people involved: http://kevinmkruse.com/book/one-nation-under-god/ http://kevinmkruse.com/book/one-nation-under-god/

rapsey 4y ago

Also Cassandra, RocksDB, zstd, Open Compute and probably a bunch I'm forgetting. Meta has one of the most stellar open source contributions of any company.

igsomething 4y ago
GraphQL and Jest too.
thrasibule 4y ago
Zstd already existed before Yann Collet joined Facebook.
- rektide 4y ago
  But also credit for hiring someone and ongoingly supporting good work. Honestly this is one of the more essential things companies could be doing.
  - anotherhue 4y ago
    You're not wrong, but if we've all collectively decided that companies should be patrons then I think we've made a mistake. These people are only one reorg away from losing their income, Mr. lz4/zstd should be able to focus on his work without such fears, so great is his contribution to our field.
    - rektide 4y ago
      Yeah it's wildly off the wall how hard it is for enoromously valuable critical people doing amazing things to get support for themselves & their work. That the direct-corporate-patronage/semi-employeeship model is so prevailing is a sign of brokenness. We need more, collectively, to have a health of our technical ecosystem. Having these corps willing to hire great folk & have them keep hacking is still often a good option, often. "Create more vue than you capture" is easy to back/do when it's so clear who is out there creating mad value.

wnevets 4y ago

It also allowed foreign entities to unduly influence Americas elections.

voisin 4y ago
And knowingly allowed their technology to fuel at least one genocide. Not many companies have that on their resume.

acdha 4y ago

React is important because they pushed a ton of money into devrel and a lot of people used it because Facebook was using it, not because it was breathtakingly advanced over the alternatives. If it hadn’t happened, something else would have and we might have been enjoying better-performing web pages for the last decade, too, without the mythology around virtual DOMs.

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
It was a breakthrough in front end development, angular by comparison is pure garbage
- acdha 4y ago
  I’d agree with an incremental improvement for developers but it came at the cost of fair performance & accessibility regressions and a culture of tool chain complexity which undercuts the productivity gains. If I had to pick, I’d say TypeScript has had a much more noticeable impact on teams’ ability to ship code rapidly and reliably.

naillo 4y ago

ML would have been fine without torch, we would have just used tensorflow instead.

debacle 4y ago

They also brought PHP into the 21st century (as best they could) through competition via hphp.

scarface74 4y ago

Yes, I’m sure the web wouldn’t have progressed without yet another framework.

brigadier132 4y ago
React is THE web framework. The difference between react and previous frameworks is like night and day. Maybe nowadays people are seeing the rough spots with things like useEffect but pre-react web was literal hell for web development.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  This is gonna blow your mind, but most developers don't use React at all. Hell most developers don't rarely if ever do frontend web development.
  - brigadier132 4y ago
    This is gonna blow your mind, but if you reread my comment, I qualified everything with "for web development"
    - scarface74 4y ago
      And there were dozens of frameworks before React that were popular.
      - CydeWeys 4y ago
        I remember when Perl cgi-bins blew my mind. A webpage wasn't just static HTML and images anymore, it could be a program that did arbitrary things! Nothing new under the Sun.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Kids these days. Developing for the web was far from hell before React…

fullshark 4y ago

And they are an engineer lead instead of wall street lead company, supposedly with an eye on long term value creation over short term stock movements (though possibly Zuckerberg has just capitulated) with its metaverse bet, i.e. the thing that engineers claim all software companies should be. And yet, I think no other software company gets the scorn Meta gets from engineers on the interwebs, it's hilarious.

drunkpotato 4y ago
I don’t think many engineers claim all software companies should bet long on the metaverse, whatever that is.
TingPing 4y ago
Because their end products that actually generate their income have been, in the eyes of some, immoral and unhealthy to society?

woodruffw 4y ago

I don’t understand what this has to do with the article: are you saying that employees (and commenters) shouldn’t be mad about Meta’s actions because they’ve done other, important things?

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
Yeah I'm saying they should be grateful this company ever existed
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Two points: 1. Being angry at an action doesn’t make someone an ingrate. You can both be grateful and angry; I’d say it’s even common to be both. 2. Meta has had no meaningful impact on my software niche, or many others’. Their only real impact on me has been radicalizing my older family members and firing a few of my friends. They aren’t entitled to any particular gratitude for that.
  - super256 4y ago
    I don't think you get radicalized by social networks alone. Usually things like economic distress, mental health issues, (missing?) social life irl are much bigger factors here. But yes, if you are already leaning towards it, the internet can probably reinforce any kind of extreme beliefs, as they usually provide simple solutions for complex issues.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      I understand the distinction you’re making, but I think the “radicalization” characterization is appropriate: my experience is that Facebook-exposed relatives place both more and more extreme value on policies that they might otherwise have. Were they primed by other sources of media and culture exposure? Absolutely; what distinguishes Facebook is its place in the timeline, and the abundance of evidence that radicalization broadly tracks with social media engagement.

CydeWeys 4y ago

React and PyTorch are just libraries, with plenty of competition. The industry wouldn't be that different if everyone was instead using Vue or Angular or whatever other frontend JS library would've come along had React not. You're giving Facebook too much credit here. Most developers have never used any of these (me included). I agree with the pushing up pay point. That was good, though it appears to be ending now.

rhaway84773 4y ago
React had 2 major contributions which were industry changing on the front end, IMO, and may not have happened or would have happened a lot later without it. 1. Virtual Dom 2. One way data binding I think one could argue that the virtual DOM wasn’t important, and possibly even led the industry in the wrong direction considering how it’s not as popular, for good reasons, anymore. One way data binding was huge, however. Every other framework at the time was proudly promoting 2 way data binding. 2 way data binding would be in their website’s hero image and their entire sample app (invariably a todo list app) would be based around promoting the benefits of 2 way data binding. I think minus React, a switch to one way data binding would have taken much longer, simply because the momentum behind 2 way data binding was so strong.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

tambourine_man 4y ago

Can't say much about PyTorch, but I see React as a detriment to the web and the world, like most things this blue company touches on.

baby 4y ago

I agree but you’re on HN so you should hate facebook and think Zuck is evil.

analognoise 4y ago

"Meritocracy" was first used in a dystopian, satirical book. That whole concept is severely busted. The ancient Greeks knew some part of success was just luck - I have no idea why these ideas which started off being used as a joke, or a dystopian pejorative term, got taken seriously. "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is another - try it. It's physically impossible! The term started as a JOKE. But there's this sector of people who honestly believe their success says something about them, but they give nothing back to their community and offer nothing to Luck. Wild.

acdha 4y ago
Whenever something seems off like that I usually try to follow the money to see who profits from it. In this case, I’m partial to the explanation that it stems back to business opposition to the New Deal pushing a lot of money into promoting libertarian Christianity, with one of the bedrock principles being that the world is just and therefore someone rich must have deserved it in some way. Kevin Kruse wrote a book about that a few years ago and anyone familiar with American politics or religion will recognize a lot of the people involved: http://kevinmkruse.com/book/one-nation-under-god/ http://kevinmkruse.com/book/one-nation-under-god/