Meta developer tools: Working at scale
I think Meta's tooling is inferior to industry standard. I actually took a survey while I was there, and that wasn't the majority opinion, but frankly I think most outsiders would absolutely agree.Things like Eden were a great idea, but tools had all sorts of issues they gloss over (a virtual file system can be really slow if you have a ton of small files), dev environments would randomly fail a lot, really the only tool they had that nobody disliked was their log-searching thing (can't remember what it's called) but it was still lightyears behind something likes splunk.It was my conclusion that "Wow you have 15 people working on a dev-tool compared to a public company with 100 building the industry-standard version over 10 years with actual product managers and UI experts, no wonder ours looks like crap... wouldn't it be cheaper just to take .01% of your salary and buy standard dev tools"I guess "Clunky" is the word I'm looking for. "Blow it away and make a new one" was a phrase that happened with some regularity for dev-envs, repo-checkouts, etc. And iirc restarting your dev box took like >30min.---Side note - the other strangest thing was some of these tools people agreed were terrible (restart takes 30min). So you'd expect thousands of engineers to be swarming any system with any UI bug, edge-case, or whatever. But it just didn't work that way.