1. Judging how smart the people there are by their tech stack is like judging how much horsepower a car has based on how many miles it has.
2. Even humoring that assumption, you’re conveniently forgetting React, Hive (+Hbase, hipal), presto, rocksdb, Cassandra, graphql, oauth 2, open compute, phabricator, hhvm, buck, and that’s just the open source stuff.
I personally know many people that stayed / have stayed 9-10 years at Facebook, long after the IPO and long after vesting.
I think people really underestimate the value of sheer impact on end users. I know the news about FB hasn't been positive, but as an engineer a lot of people would jump at the opportunity to literally change the world every month.
Any other company in their shoes would have had a mass exodus. Chris was a big part of making employees feel like they shared a piece of the dream.
Whatever your thoughts about Facebook, the fact that some of the smartest people have worked, and continue to work at a company "beset by scandal" should give you pause.
I guess your takeaway from that story about my father is very different from mine. What I took from that was the extreme serendipity that my friend's parents happened to be in school with my dad, and that I happened to be friends with her in a different country, and that those people were still around to talk to me.
It's basically by sheer dumb luck that I managed to learn some of the most important things about the person I was once closest to in life.
Now of course, as you say, there's a way to do this well and a way to do this poorly. But that fact is, if we don't write it down it will be forgotten. We're just trying to do the easiest thing and write it down.
Hey guys - I work on Timeline here at Facebook and just wanted to chime in here. I've looked into a bunch of cases today where people were concerned their messages were showing up, but as has been pointed out in many places (e.g. techcrunch), there was no privacy violation here.
If you've kept your old emails around (woohoo gmail!), one thing you can do is go back and look for the notification email you got for a particular post that you suspect was a message. There's a date search widget that makes this easier. I suspect you'll find it was a wall post.
Another thing to note (for those that follow our technology), is that the backends for these two systems are entirely different. The messages backend is hbase-backed, designed for real-time communication more than history. The timeline backend is MySQL / C++ backed. Migrating data from hbase to MySQL would have to take months of effort.
I know that even though there was no bug here, this can be an alarming experience to see old posts surfaced like this. We're working on ways to make this interaction clearer so people aren't so surprised in the future. That said, please rest assured that your inbox is not on your timeline.