Andrei Alexandrescu, a Facebook research engineer, on the (laughably) crummy tech they use to communicate;
The tools use our own technologies (talk about dog food) so they work, look, and integrate beautifully. Best part, if someone doesn’t like something, well, they can just fix it. (To wit, our email and calendar software is off-the-shelf and is the most unpleasant tool to deal with. Get this – we have a few people “specialized” in sending large meeting invites out, because there are bugs that require peculiar expertise to work around. Not to mention that such invites come with “Do not accept from an iPhone lest you corrupt the invite for everyone!”)
A few things spring to mind;
- Facebook has been looking for ways to displace email for at least years now, it’s really no surprise given that i) their own internal email systems suck, and ii) they prioritise their own innovation, that their email system would be a bit clunky,
- It’s a real surprise that they don’t have an internal/private facebook on which they could coordinate efforts and communicate. If chat, messaging and wall posts could somehow replace email in the near distant social media future, why aren’t they leading the charge with their internal workplace culture?
- Other tools like basecamp are designed to take care of the things email doesn’t do well (group planning, collaboration, shared tasks, documents and contacts). It would seem like a no-brainer to shift gears and stop wasting time fighting the email invite system.
Facebook wants to replace email, so it’s no real surprise their own email system sucks. If you’re going to commit to a goal (warts and all), may as well go 100%. It would be a shame to see all that dog food go to waste.
Via Noah Brier
