[ignoramous]

Facebook engineering generally is super competent. Leet code or not, such slip ups are bound to happen from time to time. True test of competence would be these mistakes don't repeat and that they learn from it, which I'm pretty sure they would.

[SwiftyBug]

Exactly. OP makes it harder on everyone expecting engineers to be flawless just because they've gone through a very selective hiring process. Programming is hard.

[stefan_]

Lets skip the hyperbole, appeals to authority and platitudes. This crash is from handwritten API response wrapping code that lacks checks. This is string-based programming. This is utter shit.

[mynameisvlad]

Ok, I'm sure you've written perfect code your entire career and have never made a single mistake, however simple, and however early in your career. Right?

If you want to criticize something, criticize the testing that let this change through, not the developer who made it. We were all young and inexperienced once, we've all had bad days, and we've all written crap code. This is only unique because it affected a lot of people.

[rdgthree]

Without staking my flag on either side of this argument, it's a bit silly to say "the only reason this stands out is because it affected so many people" as if that's a reasonable counter-argument.

The large amount of people affected reinforces your parent comment's argument. Something that has the potential to affect an immense amount of people should be treated with a relative amount of care. Writing crap code and pushing carelessly would be a far more significant failure of judgement if that code were in the Facebook SDK than if it were in Johnny's Hello World App.

It's also worth noting the difference between writing code with a minor change in behavior that when pushed to production causes an unexpected domino-effect of obfuscated cascading failures across multiple different services that eventually impacts an immense amount of people, vs. directly writing code that crashes on the client side and impacts an immense amount of people. This is the latter.

[madeofpalk]

> criticize the testing

Criticise the process that let it through.

Why was the testing not sufficient? Was it even tested at all? Maybe a developer just "pushed it straight to master"? Why/how can they do that (hypothetically)

[akmarinov]

That’s not a slip up on their end, it’s a feature to enable them to collect stuff even if you don’t use their code.

[5cott0]

So you're saying we can be confident they won't break democracy again?

[airstrike]

https://www.quitfacebook.org/img/zucc-ads-smile-robot-small....

[pb7]

What does that have to do with engineering talent?

[5cott0]

It has everything to do with it. Software engineers should take care to consider the risks and potential downsides to the shady products they build with that talent that aren't just downtime or tech debt but the larger impact to society itself. Silicon Valley prioritizes technical talent while completely disregarding strength and quality of character.

[Lammy]

> True test of competence would be these mistakes don't repeat and that they learn from it

It's not that they aren't smart or don't learn but that FB's performance review process rewards optimizing for growth over reliability/sustainability.

e: you can downvote me but I lived it so you won't change my mind :)

[mlthoughts2018]

> “ True test of competence would be these mistakes don't repeat and that they learn from it, which I'm pretty sure they would.”

Which begs the question why test engineers with leetcode trivia bullshit. You are yourself emphasizing why their interview process (and they are just one of many offenders) is so bananas inappropriate.

[pb7]

One single bug is why their process is bananas inappropriate? I really hope all of your code is perfect every single time to be acting so high and mighty.

[Apocryphon]

This isn't exactly the first time Facebook has been called out for poor engineering practices:

https://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-p...

https://blog.timac.org/2017/0410-analysis-of-the-facebook-ap...

[pb7]

So what? They're an enormous engineering company with many millions of lines of code. Bugs are expected.

[Apocryphon]

Those criticisms aren't about mere bugs, but a bloated over-engineered iOS apps with far too many classes (18k back in 2015) [0]. The Android app was also previously notorious for patching Dalvik at runtime to deal with the huge number of Java methods [1].

Granted, perhaps things have gotten better in the last five years.

It's certainly possible for an enormous engineering company to have poor code quality or poor engineering practices, despite having a high interviewing standard. And a criticism of Facebook need not be a criticism of all companies that interview by Leetcode, for instance no one here is criticizing Google, Amazon, or Apple, and all have better reputations for code quality.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/iOSProgramming/comments/6upeu6/how_...

[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-th...

[saagarjha]

I think I’ve done things like what Facebook did, when I was writing one-off security exploit scripts. Someone needs to stop that team.

[mlthoughts2018]

This is so shortsighted it’s painful.

You’re describing the attitude Facebook takes towards candidates, not the attitude I take towards anything.

Candidates should be saying to Facebook, “ I really hope all of your code is perfect every single time to be acting so high and mighty” and absolutely making a huge deal out of a case like this when it isn’t.