[exabrial]

"Go fast and break things" works for companies for Facebook for a lot of reasons. First: $, which they have a lot of. You can literally afford mistakes. Second: Monopoly, which they have a lot of. You can figuratively afford mistakes because your user base won't go anywhere.

If you're not operating at FB scale, quality is often your best asset. People tend to choose things that "just work". Getting things to the "just work" phase takes discipline in developing and testing.

If I could add one thing to the list, it'd be "stop writing clever code". Rather than finding a unique solution that shows your technical prowess, write code that's boring but clear in its intent.

[woolvalley]

That hasn't been a motto at facebook for years. It's now "Go fast with rock solid infra".

Move fast and break things is a motto for startups that might not be here 6 months from now. Speed is important because surviving as a business is the most important priority.

[danso]

Whatever Zuckerberg's mantra back in the day -- when he didn't have limitless capital or a monopoly on social media -- it doesn't seem that it applies to their software or engineering quality today. Any breakage that seems to happen seem to come from dealing with the user side. Whether these fuckups come from careless expansion without proper consideration, or just the difficulty inherent in making a platform meant to be universal for the world's social communication -- they don't seem to be in the same class of fuckups as poor software design and devops.

What other software is there that has to deal with such diverse user input and diverse expectations of output? Even Apple had problems with just autocorrect for the typing of messages.

[nunez]

“Go fast and break things” means that your software and infrastructure deployment process is so resilient, engineers can, safely and quickly, deploy anything into production and roll back should customers think that the new things are “broken”. “People and processes” usually inhibit the creation of such systems in large-enough companies, not money.