How facebook ships code

Stumbled on a fascinating post about how facebook ships code. This level of detail is rare from an organization as big as this.  This is a very long piece... but here are a few lines from it to entice you to click on it.

From framethink

as of June 2010, the company has nearly 2000 employees, up from roughly 1100 employees 10 months ago.  Nearly doubling staff in under a year!




the two largest teams are Engineering and Ops, with roughly 400-500 team members each.  Between the two they make up about 50% of the company.




product manager to engineer ratio is roughly 1-to-7 or 1-to-10




all engineers go through 4 to 6 week “Boot Camp” training where they learn the Facebook system by fixing bugs and listening to lectures given by more senior/tenured engineers.  estimate 10% of each boot camp’s trainee class don’t make it and are counseled out of the organization.




after boot camp, all engineers get access to live DB (comes with standard lecture about “with great power comes great responsibility” and a clear list of “fire-able offenses”, e.g., sharing private user data)

any engineer can modify any part of FB’s code base and check-in at-will




very engineering driven culture.  ”product managers are essentially useless here.” is a quote from an engineer.  engineers can modify specs mid-process, re-order work projects, and inject new feature ideas anytime.




during monthly cross-team meetings, the engineers are the ones who present progress reports.  product marketing and product management attend these meetings, but if they are particularly outspoken, there is actually feedback to the leadership that “product spoke too much at the last meeting.”  they really want engineers to publicly own products and be the main point of contact for the things they built.




resourcing for projects is purely voluntary.




• a PM lobbies group of engineers, tries to get them excited about their ideas.


• Engineers decide which ones sound interesting to work on.


• Engineer talks to their manager, says “I’d like to work on these 5 things this week.”


• Engineering Manager mostly leaves engineers’ preferences alone, may sometimes ask that certain tasks get done first.









Engineers handle entire feature themselves — front end javascript, backend database code, and everything in between.  If they want help from a Designer (there are a limited staff of dedicated designers available), they need to get a Designer interested enough in their project to take it on.  Same for Architect help.  But in general, expectation is that engineers will handle everything they need themselves.