
Extreme Agility at Facebook - fogus
http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/51564-extreme-agility-at-facebook/fulltext
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dstorrs
Whenever I read things I like, I find myself thinking "This is interesting,
but is it relevant to a startup like ours? At what point does it _become_
relevant?"

If you haven't launched yet, working on scaling issues is a huge mistake.

If you have fewer than 1,000 users, working on scaling issues is a huge
mistake.

If you have a million users, working on scaling issues is a critical
necessity...but that's a high-class problem.

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davi
_Another aspect of the Facebook engineering team is how large the ratio of
active user to developer is. Currently it stands at 1.1 million users per
developer._

This ratio changes my model of how the world can work. I'm not sure how, yet.
I have to give it time to sink in.

~~~
brown9-2
Is this really accurate? Of Facebook's 900+ employees (according to Wikipedia,
I'm sure it's higher), only ~300 are engineers?

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graywh
And what are the other 600? I fail to see how they (as a whole) bring much
value to the company relative to the engineers. Could you image a startup of 1
lawyer, 1 manager, and 1 engineer?

~~~
jfarmer
Engineers don't (necessarily) have to scale with the number of users, but
things like customer support (Facebook calls it "user operations") do.

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grinich
_...less than 3 hours of down time in the past three years._

This is pretty incredible, any way you spin it.

