Until someone provided s counter-example the assumption is that yes, this is just what happens. We have entire industries of competing methodologies, some almost cult-like in their slavish devotion to "the one true process", and none have birthed any great successes. Why is that?
Nasa, budget is $19 billion. I can't find a public official record of their code size, but the IIS is approx 6 mil lines of code, and i don't think the other missions they did (all 33 unmanned space missions in total) are too far off, so lets give each an average of 5mil per mission. That's 165 million lines of code. And arguably, probably more difficult code than facebook's domain.
And all of the code for the NASA HR system, and budget management tools, and conference system, etc. The Facebook code base is not just the web pages you see and backend to serve them, but encompasses just about everything used to run the company. It is also built and maintained by a much smaller group of coders for a much more ambiguous target domain. (And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's.) I guess I have to question the relevancy of your counter-example.
>And no, I do not think that the NASA domain is in any way more difficult than Facebook's.
You might not think it, but you'd be wrong. Facebook was for several first years just a set of PHP crud pages and heaps of servers to run them well.
Since then they added their own compiler and such, but the core of what they do is serving web pages at scale.
All known problems, solved by tens of teams all over the world, even at larger scales (Google for one).
NASA's problem on the other hand is quite unique, any errors can cost lives, and their tasks frequently include totally novel solutions for totally novel problems related to space travel, guidance, simulations, materials science, and so on.
"Facebook was for several first years just a set of PHP crud pages and heaps of servers to run them well."
Personally, I think we've all got a piece of the elephant here. It is true that there are no known methodologies that could build Facebook at the speed it has been built without producing a globally-incoherent design. Anything that could produce a globally-coherent design would have slowed them down so much that they wouldn't have been such big winners in the first place. (So "globally incoherent" isn't much of a criticism here, really.)
On the other hand, there are options other than "a big set of PHP CRUD pages and heaps of servers" available to us now, too, and I expect those options to continue to advance in usability. Even the various projects that improve on PHP would bring more benefit if you could use them from day one instead of a retrofit.
Facebook didn't win because of the software, but because of marketing. At its inception, it felt exclusive. You were special of you got an invite.
The other social networks were open season. Facebook made some good design choices with the simple looking UI, and didn't offer the customisations MySpace had. But that's a design choice, not software engineering choice.
No one wins because of the software (code quality). They win on marketing and that software (UIx) doing a needed task people are willing to "pay" for.
HN tends to be rather myopic in that programmers exist to program. Nope. Programmers exist to use a tool to solve a real world problem. The best way to do that is with the minimal amount of design and time required to accomplish the task at the desired level of reliability. Very few projects require anything resembling the "code quality" talked about on HN - in most cases I would say trying to enforce such principles generally result in worse outcomes and folks would have been better off spending 1/10th the money on a 16 year old off elance.com and simply fixed problems as they came up.
Typically the thing that is done the quickest wins, even if the implementation would make you cry. The fact is from a business standpoint - it truly rarely matters. Very little is as critical as people think.
I've noticed the industry becoming vastly disconnected with this fact recently.
Probably true, but it's also important that they did not lose because of the software. There are lot of great ideas that have gone in the drain because of sloppy software.
Many successful companies run the worst software you will ever seen. Yesterday there was a post about MUMPS which got me flashbacks of clients that showed me software that ran their entire 100m+ euro / year factory mostly written in MS Access / Excel on a shared drive (with the lovely locking Windows does!) mostly (this particular client had some CRM and an ERP from Dutch companies 'laying on the shelf' but 'never got around to it'). One of the biggest EU factories that creates the belts for conveyor belts runs on the worst PHP code as ERP I have ever seen. Many sites that are not Google or Facebook etc run on hacked together crap in whatever language and tech and do fine.
Twitter was crap at the start, most software in electronics was beyond unusable until recently (in some systems) etc.
You can of course lose because of sloppy software, but if your marketing is done well, I don't see why that would happen. There is an enormous overestimation how much people care about that kind of thing here on HN. From the first decade of the Windows versions to tons of Twitter outages after the launch to getting their computers hacked, passwords stolen, CCs stolen, privacy taken, slow as molasses systems, forced reboots, many crashes, bodged updates, forced updates, virus/malware scanners taking up 50%+ of your /still too expensive/ resources too much of the time, really bad iteration of the Facebook app at the moment (at least on Android), broken airplane booking forms, 404 support pages etc etc etc and yet no-one goes away because most people curse and move on to whatever. Unless your marketing is bad aka no-one uses it, it usually won't fail because of sloppy software.
If programmers at NASA make a serious mistake on say the space stations's code, people will die and billions of dollars of equipment will be lost. The same cannot be said for a social website which serves a bunch of content. NASA has way more on the line than Facebook.
Well, if someone at Facebook screws up and inadvertently reveals certain names or locations or the existence of particular groups within some countries people get arrested, tortured, and die. Last I checked NASA screw ups only kill a couple of people at a time. So you are right, they are not even close to comparable. See how easy it is to make false equivalences? I am familiar with the referenced article and if anyone in the software industry outside of few specialized areas tried to push a process like that they would need to start the endeavor by polishing their resume because they would soon be looking for a new job.
History is littered with counter-examples and great successes. Each generation of company is more efficient or solves more complicated problems than those before it. Facebook itself is an industry leader in open source innovation, which is why their product is so smooth. But not all companies specialize in hard tech, and all companies get old.
>I can't quite decide if you're being deliberately provocative or just misinformed.
Or maybe I genuinely disagree in your assessment that any of those technologies (apart from GraphQL, and that is still nowhere near major league) had any major "industry impact".
It's ad hominem; the author is being attacked to invalidate the argument, instead of attacking the argument itself. Which is never valid.
Appeal to authority usually takes the form of skipping making an actual argument for something and instead resting upon "X said so" and not explaining further. This is also not valid but is sometimes a shorthand for saying "X made argument Y," which can be valid if argument Y is valid (in which case the fact that X made the argument is purely incidental trivia).
Well, sure, they can. But don't you think someone who has been involved in a massive company would have more trenchant insights into massive companies?
You have right to criticize, but don't expect your criticism to be taken too seriously. There are two reasons for it: a.) you don't have frame of reference to compare whether facebooks result is better or worst then other companies b.) you don't know what tradeoff are necessary for making it work nor what it takes to achieve success.
Criticism of the government from someone who has experience running a large bureaucracy, negotiating, balancing groups with competing interests et cetera will rightly, other things equal, be taken more seriously than from someone whose experience of politics doesn't extend past ranting on Twitter.
Of course, other things may not be equal. If the latter person has sufficiently convincing arguments, can back them up with reference to sufficiently solid evidence, then these things may carry the point on their own merit.
Government criticism from people who have experience with running government or being in the politics tend to have much higher quality then criticism coming from sixteen years old high school class president.
So when it comes to the highest level of government, only those who have reached such heights may say a peep. Only criticism from former US presidents regarding Trump, please!
When random dude possibly with asperger gives advice/criticism on how to negotiate, reasonable government official will igore him - even if the criticism came in form of a blog. Likewise, succesfull activists ignore armchair advice from people on anonymous twitter. Not sure how is that controversial. Torwalds does not spend his time worrying about whether random bloggers agree with linux core style guide.
You did not demonstrated enough of knowledge/expeciance for me to take your criticism seriously is valid answer.
Criticism against governments by former governors should and is taken more seriously than criticism by some joe who's never had to wrangle a bureaucracy.
It's fallacious if you use it merely as "Authority X said so," no matter whether the authority is true or false. A fallacy happens when the conclusions do not follow from the premises of an argument. E.g. it doesn't follow from the fact that "Al Gore says that Global Warming is happening," that Global Warming is happening.
If, on the other hand, you say "Al Gore said Global Warming is happening, Al Gore's argument is premise A and B, therefore C" that's not fallacious because your argument doesn't actually rest on the identity of the authority, but the argument they made.
But all of this is irrelevant because it's not an appeal to authority. It's an ad hominem. The author is being attacked for not-being-an-authority.
Facebook's "code problem" is what really does happen in the real world with such humongous business enterprises.
But does it have to be this way?