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I agree mostly, though I think the "break things" bit got twisted and misunderstood. We were supposed to break; limits, barriers, status-quos, ossified ideas..

I agree mostly, though I think the "break things" bit got twisted and misunderstood. We were supposed to break; limits, barriers, status-quos, ossified ideas... Instead we broke; treasured social norms, privacy, mutual respect and dignity. There's a difference between benevolent innovation and reckless iconoclasm. I think it started the day Peter Thiel gave money to Mark Zuckerberg.

trgn 3y ago
I understood it much smaller fwiw. As long as you can add useful features really quickly, it's fine if your website crashes every once in a while.
- Kye 3y ago
  Yep. It came from Facebook, and it was changed to favor stability while moving fast almost a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History >> '"On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure".[40][41] The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."[42]"'
- __s 3y ago
  Last night I changed some solid-js ui code to replace mutating game in ui state with updating ui state with mutated clones (cloning is efficient & shares most data, optimizations made for AI efficiency long ago) ofc, with these stale game references around, I soon got reports of broken things: targeting was broken, pvp was broken, fade out animations were broken A few hours later these issues were resolved. The players are used to these things happening sometimes. It's fine since the stakes are low. It's just a game after all. & being free, the active playerbase understands that they're QA
- chmod600 3y ago
  And, crucially, you'd generally be around to help fix the website.
vlovich123 3y ago
No? You’re projecting what you want it to mean. The “break things” is don’t be afraid to break functionality/features/infrastructure in the process of improving it (new features, new scaling improvements, etc etc). That’s why it was renamed “Move fast with stable infrastructure". > The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough." It’s about growth at all costs and then once Facebook got big enough they had to balance growth against other factors (+ the things people were doing that were causing breakages weren’t actually helping to grow). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History
- iakov 3y ago
  Mottos like that live their own life. Take google’s “dont be evil” - people remember that, and see all the evil shit google does now, of course they are going to recall the motto and laugh at the irony. Whatever Sergey meant when he coined the phrase is irrelevant imo.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > You’re projecting what you want it to mean Maybe true. But then if it's just about development it's a rather mundane old chestnut about reckless engineering versus good software engineering etc. Granted, that's a different discussion and we can see the tide turning now in terms of regulation and mandated software quality. Sure, the Post-Office/Fujitsu scandal, Boeing etc, show how bad software actually ruins lives, but for the most-part the externality imposed by the reckless software engineer is measured in "hours of minor inconvenience". That said.. I wonder if you did a ballpark calculation of how much harm lies behind the Google Graveyard [0], whether the cost of what is broken outweighs the benefits of it ever having been made? [0] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    Engineering was literally taught to me in a well respected engineering university as making an appropriate cost/reward trade off and being careful in taking that risk. But the economics of the business were important too as it was part of the competition of driving more efficiency into a system. In classical engineering, there can be more risk because you’re dealing with people’s lives and so you have to be more careful and add extra margins of error even if more expensive. One person’s recklessness is another person’s calculated risk. The consequences of FB engineering mistakes are minimal in both impact to customers and FB’s business. As FB scaled, the impact to individual people is still largely minimal (perhaps even beneficial) but the impact to their own business is larger and same for their customers if their ads aren’t getting eyeballs. So they shifted as big companies do. It’s kind of the best case of thoughtful risk taking - we’re rolling out a new system and we don’t know what could go wrong at scale and we put in monitoring of what we think we need. If there’s problems we’ll catch it with our monitoring/alerting and rollback or fix. You see the outages but not 99% of changes that go in without anything going wrong which lets the business resolve issues quickly and cheaply. As for Boeing and Fujistsu, I’d say those are very different situations and aren’t an engineering problem nor do they indicate a move fast and break things mentality. As with many things like that, the engineering mistakes are a small detail within the overall larger picture of corruption. Boeing wanted to escape being classified as a new aircraft and met a perfect storm of skimping on hardware and corrupting the FAA through regulatory capture. I don’t fully understand Boeing’s role with the recent failures as a subcontractor is involved, but my hunch is that they’re nominally responsible for that subcontractor anyways. Same goes for Fujitsu - bad SW combined with an overly aggressive prosecution mandate and then cover ups around having made mistakes based on the assumption that the SW was correct rather than assuming new SW that hadn’t run anywhere before may contain bugs (not really sure whether Fujitsu hid the bugs or if politicians did or what happened but certainly the Post Office officials hid the reports of the auditors that found bugs in the sw and continued with prosecutions anyway). Btw in engineering classes, all the large scale failures we were taught about involved some level of corruption or chain of mistakes. A contractor not conforming to the engineering specs to save on costs (valid optimization but should be done extra carefully), overlooking some kind of physical modeling that wasn’t considered industry standard yet, kickbacks, etc.
mquander 3y ago
Picture of two little identical castles, towns, and armies, caption: Their barbarous "barriers", "status quo", "ossified ideas" vs. Our blessed "privacy", "treasured social norms", "dignity"
- samatman 3y ago
  The alternative to describing the meme here is to call it by name: a Russell conjugation.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Exactly. Words that seem different but mean whatever you want them to mean, including the exact opposite. tools for peace <--> weapons of mass destruction etc.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  [flagged]
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Ah the good old "there's literally no difference between good things and bad things" argument. Compelling.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Amorality. The refuge of the bewildered.
- stavros 3y ago
  Source: https://twitter.com/tomgauld/status/571994690289061888/photo/1 https://twitter.com/tomgauld/status/571994690289061888/photo...
waynesonfire 3y ago
I always thought move fast and break things used at FB was to empower the ambitious, talented, fresh crop of ivy-college grads with confidence to move forward with poor decisions due to lack of experience.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  You’re closer to the truth, but with a bit of a harsh bias. It was simply permission to make mistakes. Sometimes you get it wrong, and it’s better to get more done and risk mistakes instead of moving cautiously. Facebook was famously unit-test sparse, for example.
  - iraqmtpizza 3y ago
    Or rather fail fast before we blow all our money only to find out our new product doesn't work
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  Only the best and brightest inexperienced developers :)

trgn 3y ago

I understood it much smaller fwiw. As long as you can add useful features really quickly, it's fine if your website crashes every once in a while.

Kye 3y ago
Yep. It came from Facebook, and it was changed to favor stability while moving fast almost a decade ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History >> '"On May 2, 2014, Zuckerberg announced that the company would be changing its internal motto from "Move fast and break things" to "Move fast with stable infrastructure".[40][41] The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."[42]"'
__s 3y ago
Last night I changed some solid-js ui code to replace mutating game in ui state with updating ui state with mutated clones (cloning is efficient & shares most data, optimizations made for AI efficiency long ago) ofc, with these stale game references around, I soon got reports of broken things: targeting was broken, pvp was broken, fade out animations were broken A few hours later these issues were resolved. The players are used to these things happening sometimes. It's fine since the stakes are low. It's just a game after all. & being free, the active playerbase understands that they're QA
chmod600 3y ago
And, crucially, you'd generally be around to help fix the website.

vlovich123 3y ago

No? You’re projecting what you want it to mean. The “break things” is don’t be afraid to break functionality/features/infrastructure in the process of improving it (new features, new scaling improvements, etc etc). That’s why it was renamed “Move fast with stable infrastructure". > The earlier motto had been described as Zuckerberg's "prime directive to his developers and team" in a 2009 interview in Business Insider, in which he also said, "Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough." It’s about growth at all costs and then once Facebook got big enough they had to balance growth against other factors (+ the things people were doing that were causing breakages weren’t actually helping to grow). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_Platforms#History

iakov 3y ago
Mottos like that live their own life. Take google’s “dont be evil” - people remember that, and see all the evil shit google does now, of course they are going to recall the motto and laugh at the irony. Whatever Sergey meant when he coined the phrase is irrelevant imo.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
> You’re projecting what you want it to mean Maybe true. But then if it's just about development it's a rather mundane old chestnut about reckless engineering versus good software engineering etc. Granted, that's a different discussion and we can see the tide turning now in terms of regulation and mandated software quality. Sure, the Post-Office/Fujitsu scandal, Boeing etc, show how bad software actually ruins lives, but for the most-part the externality imposed by the reckless software engineer is measured in "hours of minor inconvenience". That said.. I wonder if you did a ballpark calculation of how much harm lies behind the Google Graveyard [0], whether the cost of what is broken outweighs the benefits of it ever having been made? [0] https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Engineering was literally taught to me in a well respected engineering university as making an appropriate cost/reward trade off and being careful in taking that risk. But the economics of the business were important too as it was part of the competition of driving more efficiency into a system. In classical engineering, there can be more risk because you’re dealing with people’s lives and so you have to be more careful and add extra margins of error even if more expensive. One person’s recklessness is another person’s calculated risk. The consequences of FB engineering mistakes are minimal in both impact to customers and FB’s business. As FB scaled, the impact to individual people is still largely minimal (perhaps even beneficial) but the impact to their own business is larger and same for their customers if their ads aren’t getting eyeballs. So they shifted as big companies do. It’s kind of the best case of thoughtful risk taking - we’re rolling out a new system and we don’t know what could go wrong at scale and we put in monitoring of what we think we need. If there’s problems we’ll catch it with our monitoring/alerting and rollback or fix. You see the outages but not 99% of changes that go in without anything going wrong which lets the business resolve issues quickly and cheaply. As for Boeing and Fujistsu, I’d say those are very different situations and aren’t an engineering problem nor do they indicate a move fast and break things mentality. As with many things like that, the engineering mistakes are a small detail within the overall larger picture of corruption. Boeing wanted to escape being classified as a new aircraft and met a perfect storm of skimping on hardware and corrupting the FAA through regulatory capture. I don’t fully understand Boeing’s role with the recent failures as a subcontractor is involved, but my hunch is that they’re nominally responsible for that subcontractor anyways. Same goes for Fujitsu - bad SW combined with an overly aggressive prosecution mandate and then cover ups around having made mistakes based on the assumption that the SW was correct rather than assuming new SW that hadn’t run anywhere before may contain bugs (not really sure whether Fujitsu hid the bugs or if politicians did or what happened but certainly the Post Office officials hid the reports of the auditors that found bugs in the sw and continued with prosecutions anyway). Btw in engineering classes, all the large scale failures we were taught about involved some level of corruption or chain of mistakes. A contractor not conforming to the engineering specs to save on costs (valid optimization but should be done extra carefully), overlooking some kind of physical modeling that wasn’t considered industry standard yet, kickbacks, etc.

mquander 3y ago

Picture of two little identical castles, towns, and armies, caption: Their barbarous "barriers", "status quo", "ossified ideas" vs. Our blessed "privacy", "treasured social norms", "dignity"

samatman 3y ago
The alternative to describing the meme here is to call it by name: a Russell conjugation.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Exactly. Words that seem different but mean whatever you want them to mean, including the exact opposite. tools for peace <--> weapons of mass destruction etc.
nonrandomstring 3y ago
[flagged]
mvdtnz 3y ago
Ah the good old "there's literally no difference between good things and bad things" argument. Compelling.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  Amorality. The refuge of the bewildered.
stavros 3y ago
Source: https://twitter.com/tomgauld/status/571994690289061888/photo/1 https://twitter.com/tomgauld/status/571994690289061888/photo...

waynesonfire 3y ago

I always thought move fast and break things used at FB was to empower the ambitious, talented, fresh crop of ivy-college grads with confidence to move forward with poor decisions due to lack of experience.

vineyardmike 3y ago
You’re closer to the truth, but with a bit of a harsh bias. It was simply permission to make mistakes. Sometimes you get it wrong, and it’s better to get more done and risk mistakes instead of moving cautiously. Facebook was famously unit-test sparse, for example.
- iraqmtpizza 3y ago
  Or rather fail fast before we blow all our money only to find out our new product doesn't work
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
Only the best and brightest inexperienced developers :)