4 ms·

I had a really great time talking to the Facebook engineers during my interviews there. The main pattern I noticed was Harvard (i was applying in management).

I had a really great time talking to the Facebook engineers during my interviews there. The main pattern I noticed was Harvard (i was applying in management). Even more so, the guys interviewing me were extremely talented and smart. What always weirded me out was... the problems they work on are not that difficult. Once you grasp sharding and operations, you are pretty much set. These guys are not the Manhattan project. The true hard problems in their space: developing their own mobile hardware, keeping teens engaged, pushing the boundaries of design, losing tracking systems in mobile, etc; they don't face head on. Moving petabytes around or caching lots of things in memcache - my roomate and I could do with an aws account and a few beers. Memcache for god sakes is what 300 lines of C?

e12e 12y ago
No idea how much you're trolling, but the single file: https://github.com/memcached/memcached/blob/master/memcached.c https://github.com/memcached/memcached/blob/master/memcached... is more like 4000 lines of C (by guesstimating the amount of comments etc).
- tiler 12y ago
  Nice guess. There are 4486 lines of C when the set of lines that start with {/* , * , */} + the set of empty lines are excluded.
- mqsiuser 12y ago
  I liked his comment (don't shoot me for that), made me smile. 4000 isn't that much either & whats memchached? A hashmap? He maybe means 300 lines of relevant code (+ ~3700 sugar)
  - e12e 12y ago
    Hehe. Well, this is just one file. I might agree that memcached is 300 lines of relevant pseudocode -- but then again, it's implemented in C, not pseudocode... I agree that 4k lines isn't that much, but it's an order of magnitude off from 300. And again, that's just for that one single file.
bachback 12y ago
true - Facebook scales linearly. If you're interested in really hard problems in distributed systems & blockchains let me know. Facebook should not own social data. the future will be end-to-end encrypted and de-centralised.

e12e 12y ago

No idea how much you're trolling, but the single file: https://github.com/memcached/memcached/blob/master/memcached.c https://github.com/memcached/memcached/blob/master/memcached... is more like 4000 lines of C (by guesstimating the amount of comments etc).

tiler 12y ago
Nice guess. There are 4486 lines of C when the set of lines that start with {/* , * , */} + the set of empty lines are excluded.
mqsiuser 12y ago
I liked his comment (don't shoot me for that), made me smile. 4000 isn't that much either & whats memchached? A hashmap? He maybe means 300 lines of relevant code (+ ~3700 sugar)
- e12e 12y ago
  Hehe. Well, this is just one file. I might agree that memcached is 300 lines of relevant pseudocode -- but then again, it's implemented in C, not pseudocode... I agree that 4k lines isn't that much, but it's an order of magnitude off from 300. And again, that's just for that one single file.

bachback 12y ago

true - Facebook scales linearly. If you're interested in really hard problems in distributed systems & blockchains let me know. Facebook should not own social data. the future will be end-to-end encrypted and de-centralised.