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The way I read it, the advice is this: Allow and encourage your people to build tools to solve their own problems and if the projects are good, teams will form

The way I read it, the advice is this: Allow and encourage your people to build tools to solve their own problems and if the projects are good, teams will form around them. This answers the question from a management perspective. Facebook has a lot to gain from a small number of huge success stories like React. This makes up for the cost of all the failed little tooling projects.

timr 11y ago
That's the way I read it, and no, it doesn't really answer the question -- it just begs the question. Most "good" projects are totally irrelevant to your business. Someone has to pick and choose, or you rapidly end up with the team situation I described: lots of people working on "their own problems", and only a few people working on the core problems of the business. Your second paragraph is an assertion -- maybe it's true that one project like React makes up for all of the failed initiatives that the author describes (i.e. multiple person-years of effort), but that's a claim that deserves some evidence. Even if it's true, there's a level of management implied, or else everyone would spend their work hours chasing the same, captivating rabbits. My suspicion is that there's a lot more selection happening inside Facebook than the author lets on. From experience, it's easy to get to a place where you have a lot of smart, well-intended people working on things that just don't matter. Saying "the best projects win" doesn't really solve anything, because you still have to define "best". Either that, or it's true that this is just a "champagne problem", and the Facebooks and Googles of the world can just throw dollars at anything, in the hope that something sticks.
- jhuckestein 11y ago
  I think your last sentence is absolutely right. The author works on a team whose responsibility is to make programming easier for everyone in the world. That's a luxury most startups don't have.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- jacques_chester 11y ago
  I call this the "spaghetti cannon" approach. Fire a cannon of spaghetti at a wall, see what sticks.

timr 11y ago

That's the way I read it, and no, it doesn't really answer the question -- it just begs the question. Most "good" projects are totally irrelevant to your business. Someone has to pick and choose, or you rapidly end up with the team situation I described: lots of people working on "their own problems", and only a few people working on the core problems of the business. Your second paragraph is an assertion -- maybe it's true that one project like React makes up for all of the failed initiatives that the author describes (i.e. multiple person-years of effort), but that's a claim that deserves some evidence. Even if it's true, there's a level of management implied, or else everyone would spend their work hours chasing the same, captivating rabbits. My suspicion is that there's a lot more selection happening inside Facebook than the author lets on. From experience, it's easy to get to a place where you have a lot of smart, well-intended people working on things that just don't matter. Saying "the best projects win" doesn't really solve anything, because you still have to define "best". Either that, or it's true that this is just a "champagne problem", and the Facebooks and Googles of the world can just throw dollars at anything, in the hope that something sticks.

jhuckestein 11y ago
I think your last sentence is absolutely right. The author works on a team whose responsibility is to make programming easier for everyone in the world. That's a luxury most startups don't have.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
jacques_chester 11y ago
I call this the "spaghetti cannon" approach. Fire a cannon of spaghetti at a wall, see what sticks.