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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

I get the desire to look down on leetcode or on Facebook generally but do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers? They have billions of customers using their products all the time. This isn't done by useless people who know only LC and office politics. They have to solve technical problems that most other software engineers don't even know exist. Having incredibly influential open source projects (React, PyTorch) is just a cherry on top of everything else they're doing from a software engineering point of view.

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> do you really think that Facebook would be able to operate at this scale if they didn't have good engineers?

They clearly have engineers that are good, but he questions if the engineers are better than the good engineers found at any other run-of-the-mill company. They aren't exactly performing sorcery over there, just solving problems like every other software business.

That’s beyond question and if you are asking it you’re fooling yourself. You can take a look at the output of their engineers as an example (React, Native, Cassandra). We are talking billions. Your run of the mill software company isn’t building this kind of tech. You can hate on Meta all you want. But let’s not deny the facts.

This mischaracterization of the discussion is curious, but it is certain that no two companies have the same problems in need of solving. Of course certain technologies could only emerge out of a place like Facebook. Only a place like Facebook would have a need, particularly with respect to resources, to pour R&D into these technologies to solve their particular problems.

But that's not what we're talking about. The question posed was if Facebook's good developers are better than good developers at run-of-the-mill companies. That is not clear. People at Facebook, with an average tenure of only 2.3 years, have almost certainly also worked at run-of-the-mill companies so that already suggests that you can find good developers all over the place.

That developers at Facebook solved problems Facebook had doesn't prove no other developer could also solve Facebook's problems if they also worked at Facebook. Solving problems is literally the job of a developer, so it seems highly unlikely that all other developers outside of Facebook cannot also solve problems. Of course developers are only going to solve the problems in front of them.

I think it's a decent question, assessing tech talent is hard, oftentimes, building great things like React or Cassandra is also a matter of opportunity, working at big companies means you have hard problems that require you to spend time designing such systems. It's hard to say that others couldn't have similarly solved it, or even done it better.

That doesn't mean it's any less impressive of the people who did build all this, but I just don't think we need to compare, we can recognize the accomplishment on its own.

Could the fact that they have higher salaries have anything to do with it? Offer higher salaries and you'll attract stronger talent, regardless of the leetcode hoops they have to jump through.

Yes, of course higher salaries incentivize people to grind leetcode and tolerate office politics who otherwise might not.

The projects you cite don't require 100s of FTE engineers.

Due to the absurd amount of SWEs on Facebook, surely someone or a team happen to working there will score a huge FOSS hit sooner or later just due to the numbers.

Like I said, the open source stuff is a nice bonus. The main testament to Facebook's engineering level is that they're successfully shipping several of the largest scale software products ever to billions of people. And you certainly need a large engineering headcount for that.

WhatsApp didn’t need a big team. Just one counter example.

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