Unit testing at Facebook?
I'm considering moving to FB, but my co-worker told me, that there is no unit testing and code quality culture at Facebook, like what we have here at Google, they just submit their code with no style review or unit testing. This is a big deal for me, as I forgot how to work with crappy looking and untested code. I don't believe my colleague. Anyone working at FB, is this true? Do you unit-test your code, also do you have tools to make sure it is not broken due to external dependency changes? Is there a style guide which is strongly enforced? 15 yoe🌲fiddy
Not from fb but You cant unit test for external dependency changes.. that would be integration testing..
Yes, this is in addition to unit tests.
I highly doubt they can get away without unit testing. That is insanity. You could have pockets of teams with bad coding standards but clubbing entire company in this bucket seems unfair
Hahahahahahahhahahahahahahahhahha. Boy do I have news for you.
Yeah. Lol. Everything OP heard is mostly true. Except in some low level infra projects like data stores there is hardly any testing. Somehow we make it on prayers, monitoring, quick reaction and a type of hacking skill.
My fb friends confirmed. Whoever wrote thorough tests are not moving fast enough!
Not true. There are unit tests.
3 of them
It took me a while, but after sifting through the codebase, I can confirm I found at least one unit test in there so we're solid.
If these are things that are important to you, then Facebook is probably not the company for you. Quality on that scale varies across that company. However people that are pedantic really don't do well here, stay at Google. (I've worked at both BTW, and wouldn't go back)
Yes, these are important to me, also I'm pedantic. Could you please elaborate more on why I better stay and why you wouldn't go back to G? Thanks.
Because I'm not pedantic :). I care more about function than form, which is pretty universal at Facebook. Basically, it takes too long to accomplish things at Google. I had projects that took 3 years at Google I could accomplish at Facebook in a year or less. I used to run 3-4 projects in parallel at Google while they waited for something else to happen. My last major project at Google, and admittedly, it was very large and high... risk?, over half of our time in software dev was spent in unit tests. None caught much of anything, but some systems tests I cooked up in a few days caught a bunch of problems. Anyway, I spent a long time at Google, and I appreciate a lot of things about the company, but I believe a lot of people are wasting their talents there.
OP, can you share the reason to join fb, not that you leave google.
Learned a lot of stuff at G. Want to start learning new stuff again and work with and get to know new people. Also a higher comp.
Apply to a prestigious tech oriented trading firm, like Jane Street. JS primarily uses OCaml. They value elegance, testing, intellect, and objectively measure results. You’ll definitely have something to learn. And they can offer much more than Google or Facebook. (Although most of your TC is from the annual bonus)
Google was a little heavy on the unit testing for my taste. However Facebook takes it nearly to an opposite extreme. Most tests I do see are integration tests, but it's fairly rare to see a lot of systems with good test coverage. They get away with this through good deployment methodologies. It works fairly well, but it certainly feels wrong coming from Google. The code at Facebook and Google is dog shit in my experience. Testing your dog shit code doesn't really change anything.
Dogshit code? Even with the best engineers they're hiring?
No design, just roll shit code into production and see if it causes serious damage to your own services. If it breaks other services, that is someone else's problem #embraceforimpact
Highly doubt that