The Pragmatic Engineer

The Pragmatic Engineer

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The Pragmatic Engineer
The Pragmatic Engineer
The Scoop #55: Things are picking up at Meta
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The Scoop #55: Things are picking up at Meta

Also: Instagram Threads going head-to-head with Twitter, the old concept of ‘slotting’ at Google and OpsGenie was down again.

Gergely Orosz's avatar
Gergely Orosz
Jul 06, 2023
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The Pragmatic Engineer
The Pragmatic Engineer
The Scoop #55: Things are picking up at Meta
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The Scoop is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends I observe and hear about within Big Tech and at high growth startups. Have a scoop to share? Send me a message! I treat all such messages as anonymous.

Today's topics are:

  1. Things picking up at Meta. I spoke with engineers inside the company and learned that several things are suddenly improving, policy-wise. What are these changes? Exclusive.

  2. Meta’s rapid bounce back. In just 6 months, Meta’s valuation went from its lowest in 7 years, to trending up to an all-time-high valuation. What can we take from this dramatic turnaround? Analysis

  3. Twitter vs Instagram Threads: two different approaches to throttling. Twitter throttled access to its platform, most likely to optimize its infrastructure costs. Meanwhile, Meta launched Threads, a rival to Twitter with no signup or other throttling in place. Two approaches: and there will likely be only one winner in the text-first social media segment. Analysis.

  4. The old concept of ‘slotting’ at Google. Until 2010, Google used a concept called slotting when hiring senior engineers. I talked with an engineer who was in the last batch of this process on what it meant, and why it was discontinued. Exclusive.

  5. OpsGenie was down – again. A year ago, real-time paging service OpsGenie was down for two weeks for hundreds of companies. Could the reason for the latest outage be a very similar reason to that of last year? If so, why would Atlassian not invest in making its “mission critical” services like OpsGenie more robust? Analysis.

  6. How does bad weather damage fiber cables? Azure had a regional outage thanks to an intense storm in the Netherlands. But how can strong winds cut through fiber cables? I found first-hand evidence. Beware falling trees.

The Scoop sometimes delivers first hand, original reporting. I’m adding an ‘Exclusive’ label to news that features original reporting direct from my sources, as distinct from analysis, opinion, and reaction to events. Of course, I also analyze what’s happening in the tech industry, citing other media sources and quoting them as I dive into trends I observe. These sections do not carry the ‘Exclusive’ mark.

1. Things picking up at Meta

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