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It's interesting to hear the contrast between Meta and my experience talking with ex-Googlers who complain that open-source or industry standard infrastructure

by typon 3y ago

It's interesting to hear the contrast between Meta and my experience talking with ex-Googlers who complain that open-source or industry standard infrastructure is far inferior to what they were used to at Google. Why such a big chasm between the internal tool quality at Meta and Google?

kevinventullo 3y ago
FWIW I am a Meta-to-Google transplant and I feel the opposite way. There’s a lot of internal tooling and functionality I miss dearly. Most of all, Workplace.
- mattnewton 3y ago
  FWIW I did the opposite leap and felt the opposite way- I really disliked workplace’s stream of seemingly randomly sorted information compared to e-mail lists I could filter, control, and search better. I really dislike workplace as a store of institutional knowledge. The chat was definitely way better than hangouts chat though. I also felt like a lot of the developer tools looked nicer than their google counterparts at the surface but had major reliability problems under the hood where you would need to do a lot of turn it off and on again style operations.
- deleted 3y ago
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- theptip 3y ago
  I do really like Workplace, I think it provides a much better information architecture than docs/slack alone. It’s possible to run a really disciplined Slack where updates go in a ready-only channel, and people broadcast their work appropriately - but it’s really hard. Most people default to non-discoverable DMs and then stream-of-thought in public channels, which are both bad for discovery in their own way. Posts end up being a bit more considered than a slack message, but still lightweight, and more discoverable than docs. Shame Google nixed their “Google plus for workplace”, I would love to see this workflow used more widely.
loeg 3y ago
I think GP's opinion is fairly contrarian. I would say the in-house tools at Meta are substantially better than typical open source or commercial tools used at smaller companies.

by typon 3y ago

kevinventullo 3y ago

FWIW I am a Meta-to-Google transplant and I feel the opposite way. There’s a lot of internal tooling and functionality I miss dearly. Most of all, Workplace.

mattnewton 3y ago
FWIW I did the opposite leap and felt the opposite way- I really disliked workplace’s stream of seemingly randomly sorted information compared to e-mail lists I could filter, control, and search better. I really dislike workplace as a store of institutional knowledge. The chat was definitely way better than hangouts chat though. I also felt like a lot of the developer tools looked nicer than their google counterparts at the surface but had major reliability problems under the hood where you would need to do a lot of turn it off and on again style operations.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
theptip 3y ago
I do really like Workplace, I think it provides a much better information architecture than docs/slack alone. It’s possible to run a really disciplined Slack where updates go in a ready-only channel, and people broadcast their work appropriately - but it’s really hard. Most people default to non-discoverable DMs and then stream-of-thought in public channels, which are both bad for discovery in their own way. Posts end up being a bit more considered than a slack message, but still lightweight, and more discoverable than docs. Shame Google nixed their “Google plus for workplace”, I would love to see this workflow used more widely.

loeg 3y ago

I think GP's opinion is fairly contrarian. I would say the in-house tools at Meta are substantially better than typical open source or commercial tools used at smaller companies.