[rangledangle]

No company I've worked at after FB/Meta ships or works even at a non-eng level with the same velocity. I always attributed that to their internal tools, since most of the other companies seem to be using the same crap. Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system. And don't get me started on the how good the task tool is compared to literally any other ticketing system out there. Everything is behind their intern tool, and usually built to all just work together without friction.

[castlecrasher2]

>Slack is straight up painful compared to their chat system.

As someone who vastly prefers Slack over all its competitors, I'm very interested in hearing how Meta's compares. What makes it better than Slack for you?

[KaiserPro]

As a chat system workplace is inferior to slack. Discovery and organisation of chats are hard, especially group chats that would normally be a channel.

However the combination of the "newsgroup" and chat makes it kinda better than slack on it's own.

Would I use workplace at a new startup? probably not. I would use slack though.

[rangledangle]

Yea, it could be that FBs internal tooling connected to workchat is what made it so great. I think channels are a nasty way to handle topics of conversation compared to posts on a forum type place. Leaning into searchability and all that was great.

I’ve seen sub 500 employee companies and Slack kicks ass, but it seems once it goes over 1k it’s like glhf managing channels and bots.

Butterfly bot integration to workplace was really something.

Workplace def overkill sub ~ 600 users though.

[changoplatanero]

I also think meta's workchat was better than slack. Maybe its because at my new company slack has to play the role of both workplace and workchat whereas at meta they have two separate things for that.

[rangledangle]

Moving to a company using a hodgepodge of constantly rotating SaaS tools has been hell. I’m always thinking to myself “why can’t they just do this?”. I think I’ve been both spoiled and broken permanently.

On the other hand, building all these connections between the disparate apps is basically my job, so it’s got its positives.

[crakhamster01]

Slack tries to satisfy a number of requirements, all through a chat interface. 1:1 chatting, group chatting, team/project discussions, company updates, etc. I think Slack is as good or superior to Workplace just considering chat functionality, but as a tool for inter-company collaboration Workplace is much better.

Once your company reaches a sufficient size (maybe 300+ employees?), Slack channels just become so clunky and tedious for trying to keep up with projects and discussions. Using Slack keyword notifications helps cut through the noise, but I really think applying Facebook's ranking/Groups expertise to work-related content has been the best solution I've seen so far. You're no longer inundated with unread channels that may or may not have messages relevant to you, Workplace just surfaces the relevant content (and obviously there's chat/mentions for more pressing issues).

[dnissley]

Don't believe the hype -- I think workchat probably beats slack for speed in the web client, but the desktop/android clients which I use regularly are truly sluggish and constantly refusing to load new messages if I'm not constantly using them, forcing me to restart them in order to do so.

[rangledangle]

Oh yea, web comparison for sure, but I also don’t see a difference between slack desktop and web. They’re both electron clients though iirc, the desktop client just wasn’t given much attention because web worked great.

[anonymoushn]

slack is incredibly, unbearably slow

[umanwizard]

Meta uses workchat which is just a reskinned Facebook Messenger. It’s been a while since I’ve used it but I remember it being a lot less glitchy than slack on iOS (desktop is another story).

[pavlov]

Code review on stacked diffs was awesome for bigger features.

[rangledangle]

The open-ness of code, visibility, diffs. It was perfection. Something broke in my env suddenly? OH, I just checked recently pushed diffs that affect my realm. Hey there it is, security pushed something weird. I'll just revert the part that affects me and tag them. No meeting, maybe a SEV for visibility and review, maybe not. Easy peasy.

[no_wizard]

Its not the tools, its the culture. Meta cut red tape in its early years especially. I know there is more "process" now, but they empowered teams and individuals to just make decisions and move on and the ecosystem around everything supports this.

They'd be just as fast with Slack or whatever, for the most part.

EDIT: as someone posted below:

> The open-ness of code, visibility, diffs. It was perfection. Something broke in my env suddenly? OH, I just checked recently pushed diffs that affect my realm. Hey there it is, security pushed something weird. I'll just revert the part that affects me and tag them. No meeting, maybe a SEV for visibility and review, maybe not. Easy peasy.

This is the kind of empowerment developers are given and expected to handle (both the explicitly ability to revert previously committed code and the implicit responsibility that the teams code that was overridden must deal with it once they're notified rather than push back)

[rangledangle]

And just to add that last part. Moving fast was so damn cool. That shared understanding of responsibilities and freedom of making changes. In most cases of course they were added as reviewers to the revert diff review, and in some cases they knew it could adversely affect us and they’d tag us for our perspective before pushing, but the open-ness of it all. The freedom to bring me in at a later stage or for me to do the same to them.

These days at different companies it’s all planning and hashing out all those details before implementing, and then guess what? Surprises happen anyway. And in the end we become master planners and never actually build anything. Those blueprints sure do look great though.

[rangledangle]

100% agree. The culture is a huge factor as well, but in some of the environments that I encountered before and after, that culture was there, but the tools didn’t allow the same cohesion.

To your point, other experiences have shown me the ego that rears it’s ugly head when trying to move that way in an env that didn’t have that culture. At FB there was a lot of candor, but in other environments I feel like I’m going to hurt someone’s feelings in code review, or even just watching what I say in slack messages. People take work too seriously in some companies. It’s so rewarding to have fun with it.

They used to say “Nothing at FB is someone else’s problem”

I hope they still do.

[no_wizard]

In part this is only possible at Meta because it incremental measured improvements would raise all boats. You didn't have someone being evaulated how well a project was planned (Product Managers), how well it was executed (Engineering Managers) and how well it was built (Engineers / IC). All 3 of these things can be extremely orthogonal to each other and human nature makes it so more often than good intentions of a person to even realizes.

Meta cut through that by focusing on measurable improvements.

The downside is it can create silos, a negatively competitive environment. IE, teams not sharing resources or credit etc because they are only looking out for themselves at the end of the day, because any measurement you don't capture is one you can't claim as yours.

I also argue it can breed short therm thinking. Meta even had special teams from what I understand that were "exempt" from the typical metrics driven review cycles because they'd create the wrong incentives.

I think the general ethos can be really powerful though, but I'd peg it to collaboration and value driven measurements (and value is loose here, I'm not strictly thinking monetary) rather than strict "user based metrics".

[innagadadavida]

Shipping faster should not be the only metric, the amount of SEVs should be given much higher weight. The attitude of most engineers is to show impact and if there is a SEV, it is better as it will show even more impact. This slows other people down and causes a gradual decline is actually shipping things that matter - quality over quantity.

[rangledangle]

Oh yea, I elaborated more in another comment. But the ease of finding documentation related to code, SEVs, anything wrong. Someone pushing something and breaking something else in my env, then me using the amazing tools like diff to see what was pushed recently that affects my realm, I can quickly track down, find, and often times alter to fix my problem with no more than a message to the original author in a comment on the new diff.

Early career this is pretty huge for growth. I was there until 2019 though, so not sure how it is now.

My point was that the cohesion of all these internal tools makes information discovery frictionless. cross-pollination of functional space in a business is like butter because everything is built by Meta and behind their intern tool. The other companies I've worked at just don't have this. They lack the Eng capacity to build it, unfortunately.

[ben_w]

> No company I've worked at after FB/Meta ships or works even at a non-eng level with the same velocity.

This is a curious thing to see.

As a mere user, and speaking purely about FB not any other Meta IP…

Other than unbreaking things that break when the OS and browsers change under you, has Facebook shipped even one thing in the last five years?

Don't get me wrong, I know it takes a lot of effort to stand still — forgetting the Red Queen effect was Musk's obvious mistake with Twitter even before stuff broke — but Facebook seems completely unchanged.

[nudgeee]

I don’t work for Meta, but you can see their product announcements here: https://about.fb.com/news/category/product-news/

[rangledangle]

Most of the open source Ai things are Meta. React, GraphQL, pytorch, rocksdb, docusaurus, prophet, a whole ton of internal tools that aren’t public knowledge. Full disclosure I haven’t worked there since 2019 though, so not sure since then.

[ben_w]

None of that looks like it's about the Facebook website itself?

But I guess that implies you didn't mean the website itself when you wrote "FB" in the comment I replied to? :)

(One of the most well known consumer brands shipping tooling rather than stuff the consumers use directly is, ah, apt for a company called "meta").

[rangledangle]

When I worked there it was still called Facebook. I’m still not used to calling it Meta haha. My bad.

[throwaways885]

Anyone who's used both, how does it compare to Google's internal tooling?

[rangledangle]

I’ve got coworkers who went back and forth. Their thoughts were (in 2019) that Facebook had cooler things going on, but less mature. Nicer to use, but less stable in some cases.

I personally loved things breaking at times. The monorepo and all the tools were so open that enabled me to follow along and try my own fixes in some cases (sometimes being the one to fix it!).

At that point in my career, that kind of exposure was like a rocket ship for personal growth. Others shared similar sentiments.

[steve1977]

For me as a customer/user, Facebook seems to be the same since 5 or more years. So that velocity doesn’t translate to user experience unfortunately.

[rangledangle]

Yea I was on the internal side, not outward facing production apps. They have and are building their own versions of ENTIRE companies for internal use. It’s a marvel to see. But the blue app? I can’t speak to that one on the internal side, but I’d agree with you there as a customer.