[zwass]

Among many serious engineering projects at Facebook:

* HHVM (open source) - A PHP runtime and JIT compiler (http://www.hhvm.com/blog/)

* Presto (open source) - A distributed SQL query engine working on hundreds of petabytes of data (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-i...)

* Running graph algorithms on a graph with a trillion edges (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scaling-...)

* Open Compute (open source) - Custom designed data centers down to the motherboard (http://opencompute.org/)

[borplk]

Almost all of these projects are the result of the size and scale of Facebook not the nature of the problem they are solving or their core business.

The nature of Facebook (or Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat) is a simple CRUD application that many people are capable of writing. The additional complexity is mostly due to the size of their user base.

[lazyjones]

Are (were) any of these essential for Facebook's success? I doubt it. They are by-products of Facebook hiring talented people after they already had a leading product.

[zwass]

Given that Facebook is motivated by profits, one must assume that these projects are, in fact, essential to the continued success of the product.

[lazyjones]

> one must assume that these projects are, in fact, essential to the continued success of the product.

In the same way that Google Reader, Google Wave, Google Base and dozens of other products were essential to continued success of Google for a while (before they were discontinued), just because they were developed at Google?

[clark-kent]

Of course they are, facebook handles petrabytes of data. Their infrastructure will fall apart without such projects.

[ihsotas]

Yeah. OP has never worked near any of these companies. Writing some basic linear algebra routines in python doesn't mean you're doing the same work that Google has to.