An Inside Look at Facebook’s Approach to Automation and Human Work

https://hbr.org/2015/06/an-inside-look-at-facebooks-approach-to-automation-and-human-work

by riqbal • 11 years ago

93 32 11 years ago

s_kilk• 11 years ago

The paywall is popping up with a message "You've hit your limit of 5 free articles as an anonymous user this month.", despite the fact I haven't been reading anything on HBR for as long as I can remember.

Dewie3• 11 years ago

Ditto.

i0nutzb• 11 years ago

Incognito mode does the job for me. Have you tried?

dingdingdang• 11 years ago

Someone, OP maybe, post a mirror please.

drussell• 11 years ago

Those having trouble reading, try copying the title into a web search and going direct from there and/or using incognito mode.

fishnchips4• 11 years ago

I would not say that FB compares favourably to Google in terms of infra, and I worked for both, in infra. Culture is way more relaxed though, especially if you're not into cults.

ProAm• 11 years ago

Can you speak more about this? Id be interested in some of the details (you dont have to throw either under the bus, just curious about the nitty gritty stuff)

nickpsecurity9• 11 years ago

I don't work for either but I do follow their projects a bit. I'd say you can start by comparing things like Hadoop or HDFS to things like Google File System and their Spanner-based F1 RDBMS (strong consistency + NoSQL scale). There's clearly a difference in talent or applying it to solve toughest problems at least. Both companies try to work around problems too hard to solve but Google seems to solve the hard one's more often.

r721• 11 years ago

Mirror: https://archive.is/57N99

gumby2• 11 years ago

Unusually for the HBR there is a lot of interesting stuff in there. For example having the compiler team mixed in with the front end development team.

tomnipotent• 11 years ago

The compiler team wasn't mixed in. The front end team developed a compiler within its own team over a multi-year period - this was in response to the question "Do you still separate the teams working on innovations from the teams maintaining today’s core business?"

gumby2• 11 years ago

That's what I meant. Sorry I wasn't clear.

nickpsecurity9• 11 years ago

The one technician for 25,000 servers part stands out the most to me. That's quite an achievement. Seems like they're ahead of supercomputers in management efficiency. Another along these lines is AOL's "lights out" datacenter [1] that they ignore for long periods of time except for efficient, batch jobs of maintenance.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/aol-shrinks-its-lights-out-data...!

lnkmails• 11 years ago

This blog post is interesting and it's good to see some numbers (one technician per 25,000 servers). Also, it touches upon one interesting aspect - "When do you automate a thing?". It would be interesting to know the actual metrics they use. Shameless plug: http://stackstorm.com/ is very similar to FBAR and is helping customers reap the benefits of automation. We share the vision and we are completely open source. Feedback is appreciated. (I am a full time developer with StackStorm.)

epowell2015• 11 years ago

Folks interested in this kind of approach may want to join the Event Driven Automation meet-up in the Bay Area. Facebook is discussing FBAR and hosting an upcoming one (already "sold out"). LinkedIn is speaking at the next one (in SF 6/18) http://www.meetup.com/Auto-Remediation-and-Event-Driven-Auto...

akeck• 11 years ago

My intuition is that there's a Moore's Law-like labor rule for IT labor due to its high cost and the explosion of computing power:

"Every 18-24, an organization must be able to manage an order of magnitude more servers (virtual and physical) with the same number of staff."

An Inside Look at Facebook’s Approach to Automation and Human Work

Related Stories