Any other company in their shoes would have had a mass exodus. Chris was a big part of making employees feel like they shared a piece of the dream.
Whatever your thoughts about Facebook, the fact that some of the smartest people have worked, and continue to work at a company "beset by scandal" should give you pause.
They pay many people salaries that they’d have trouble getting elsewhere. If these people stick around for the dream even after the money dries up, then I’ll be impressed.
The sentiment I’ve heard so far is “let’s wait this out, and hope it goes back to business as usual.”
The ethical have likely left already. Those who are most talented and in it for the money will likely be next out, if things don’t turn around. Then they’re left with the untalented and overpaid, who will cling on for as long as possible while the ship sinks.
I personally know many people that stayed / have stayed 9-10 years at Facebook, long after the IPO and long after vesting.
I think people really underestimate the value of sheer impact on end users. I know the news about FB hasn't been positive, but as an engineer a lot of people would jump at the opportunity to literally change the world every month.
Of course. After 9-10 years they probably make tremendous salaries. I guess they could take a pay cut and go somewhere else, or even retire, but that’s not for everyone.
Facebook forgot that “change the world” isn’t the end goal. It’s to change the world for the better. At that, they have failed.
FAIR is one of the most advanced AI research labs in the world. PyTorch has massively growing adoption because it is substantially better than the competitors and FAIR work consistently pushes the state of the art forward. Calling their AI work 'also ran' is ridiculous.
1. Judging how smart the people there are by their tech stack is like judging how much horsepower a car has based on how many miles it has.
2. Even humoring that assumption, you’re conveniently forgetting React, Hive (+Hbase, hipal), presto, rocksdb, Cassandra, graphql, oauth 2, open compute, phabricator, hhvm, buck, and that’s just the open source stuff.
Sorry, I stopped considering your argument when you claimed the HHVM wasn't anything other than a crime against humanity.
PHP could have died, but no, it got a new lease on life.
Hive is a bad copy of a google tech. Buck is a bad copy of a google tech. Hbase is a bad copy of a google tech. Rocks is cute, but it's a bit sad that it's at the center of literally everything in the company.
Phabricator isn't bad, but it's a pretty close copy to things at google.
And I think Google only joined the open compute initiative to try and talk facebook out of it's weird ideas.
Being "smartest" (whatever that means, and assuming it even is so; being good at coding has very little to do with being smart) is completely orthogonal to being a decent person.
Well Jobs was the first that came to mind, but Google, Twitter, Dropbox, Spotify (I know, not Valley)... all have this identical cult like culture where the employees are fully indoctrinated and feel their execs are the best in the world.
Not to be rude, but this has been my universal experience in the tech industry for the past 20+ years.
Ask some of your friends who work at these companies to see their internal Blind posts. It ranges from pretty upbeat to exceedingly negative, and it also seems to correlate with how the company performs financially. Which makes sense since these people have half a million dollars of RSUs on the line.
At FB you have your first-day orientation and as a part of this Cox came in and gave a speech. I have no idea if it is the same speech to every week's 'class' or an evolving variation on the same themes, but it was a pretty good speech and is probably one reason why people are so eager to drink the kool-aid for the first few years.
I guess your takeaway from that story about my father is very different from mine. What I took from that was the extreme serendipity that my friend's parents happened to be in school with my dad, and that I happened to be friends with her in a different country, and that those people were still around to talk to me.
It's basically by sheer dumb luck that I managed to learn some of the most important things about the person I was once closest to in life.
Now of course, as you say, there's a way to do this well and a way to do this poorly. But that fact is, if we don't write it down it will be forgotten. We're just trying to do the easiest thing and write it down.
This seems really cool! I installed it yesterday to try it out - I really want something like this.
Your on-boarding is really good. However, when it comes time to create an account, I need to create a username and password. Can't I just create the account with facebook? I already gave you access?
I found it very hard to see what's actually going on. The images on the cities are so big that they obscure the context. The "history bar" is confusing (I figured it out eventually), but I thought it was some glitching, and it made it look unprofessional.
I feel lots of data is missing: you pulled from FB but I didnt see evidence of my facebook history.
My use case is to have "reminders" of my life. I'd love if you can pull data from lots of places, in particular my email. The email headers in my gmail probably include where I was at all times over the last decade. Can you include that in some way? If you can pull the photos from my dropbox account, you'd probably have a complete look at my life for the last 10 years at least, but my phone only goes to 2012. (Everalbum does a good job with this).
Anyway, awesome idea, looking forward to trying it again.
Hey, thanks for your thoughts. The other team member here.
1. Onboarding: thanks, we thought really hard about what to do there.
2. Images on the cities too big--can you clarify that one, you mean on the intro map you will see an image that is not necessarily representative of your entire time there as you'd like?
3. FB data missing--is that still the case? It's possible you looked while it was still importing where you were expecting content. Basically everywhere you go in the app, Days (when you posted), Cities, Places, People should have data from Facebook if the intro map indicated that the import was working. Feel free to send us a message to feedback@echo.works to follow up if that still looks broken.
4. Reminders: Great ideas, noted. We have also noticed that when we're missing Fabric, the best ways to remember what we were up to are our calendars, emails, and messaging.
Hi, good looking product :) I don't have an iPhone so I can't try it.
Did I understand correctly: You synchronize your various accounts (Fb, Instagram, 4square/Swarm ) and Fabric will do the same thing as the Foursquare "Time machine" [1]
But in addition it would also correlates Instagram pictures and whatnot?
Basically you're a low-friction & more modern LiveTrekker[2] (a 2012 app)?
This is neat, but it looks like a huge privacy issue, why would someone want his entire life recorded? Is it visible to all your friends?
I see one scenario I would like it:
Let's say I turn it on when I go on a road trip from August 1st to August 15th, to share the experience with my family and friends, can I decide to share only this August 1st to August 15th period with my family?
1. Have not checked out the foursquare or LiveTrekker stuff you mention--will do, thank you.
2. Nothing is visible to anyone, but yourself. Just like your text messages, Facebook messages, or email.
This is a large question in tech that we are only a part of--how do we build tools going forward in this environment of ever more granular and structured data, so that we can enjoy the benefits of better memory without introducing new issues.
As I mentioned already, we are not a social network exactly because of that, and the industry as a whole has been working actively to address such concerns as soon as they show up. Another example is the end-to-end messaging encryption being adopted by the messaging apps.
Anyways, we're very cognizant of that kind of issue and will continue to address them proactively.
3. The temporary sharing issue with family--it is indeed a fun scenario we have heard suggested before. For the time being, we're staying away for the reasons just discussed.
Hey, tried the app. The UX left me confused. I have used life logger apps before [before they were bought and shut down] and need a good one desperately. I gave it access to my photos and still nothing shows up. Also the oAuths dialogs are not native prompting me to enter credentials which I don't have the patience to do. :)
Hey guys - I work on Timeline here at Facebook and just wanted to chime in here. I've looked into a bunch of cases today where people were concerned their messages were showing up, but as has been pointed out in many places (e.g. techcrunch), there was no privacy violation here.
If you've kept your old emails around (woohoo gmail!), one thing you can do is go back and look for the notification email you got for a particular post that you suspect was a message. There's a date search widget that makes this easier. I suspect you'll find it was a wall post.
Another thing to note (for those that follow our technology), is that the backends for these two systems are entirely different. The messages backend is hbase-backed, designed for real-time communication more than history. The timeline backend is MySQL / C++ backed. Migrating data from hbase to MySQL would have to take months of effort.
I know that even though there was no bug here, this can be an alarming experience to see old posts surfaced like this. We're working on ways to make this interaction clearer so people aren't so surprised in the future. That said, please rest assured that your inbox is not on your timeline.
I know that even though there was no bug here, this can be an alarming experience to see old posts surfaced like this. We're working on ways to make this interaction clearer so people aren't so surprised in the future.
You ought to be doing more than that, actually. Having been an early user of Facebook, I can assure you that people viewed wall-to-wall and other types of posts differently from how they view wall posts now. No one expected their data to be exposed this way, so for practical purposes, this is tantamount to a bug or data breach from the user perspective.
Disabling this immediately for old posts or allowing users to opt out would be the right thing to do.
So you're suggesting that they replace the perception of a bug (data showing up when it shouldn't) with an actual bug (data not showing up when it should)?
What a thoughtful response. I can imagine that you're having a very difficult day over there. Keep up the good work.
Personally, I'm sad that all of my private messages have been so mundane that if they got out, it would be no big deal. I just looked through and I didn't find any meaningful dirt at all. What a shame.
Here is an idea: don't dig up people's old forgotten posts shared to the smaller past FB network and repost them publicly to new members without explicit opt-in. That's paparazzi tabloid behavior.
