How’s Facebook Work? They Don’t Know! | Cali. Pay Law | NASA RISC-V Launch

Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: Facebook engineers admit they’ve no idea what Meta stores (or where), California requires job ads quote salaries, and RISC-V will power future NASA spacecraft.

1. Meta’s ‘Strange Engineering Culture’

First up this week: Nobody’s really sure how Facebook works anymore. “The code is its own design document,” confessed an engineering director.

Analysis: They moved fast—and they broke things

This is what happens when you don’t design up front. Sprints and Scrum are super, but agility can’t be an excuse not to document designs. As I said last month: Agile Sucks.

Sam Biddle: Facebook Engineers Don’t Know Where They Keep Your Data

“Facebook’s sprawl has made it impossible to know”
In March, two veteran Facebook engineers found themselves grilled about the company’s sprawling data collection operations in a hearing for … the Cambridge Analytica scandal … a transcript of which was recently unsealed. [The] engineers, with … two decades of experience between them, struggled to even venture what may be stored in Facebook’s subsystems.
…
“I don’t believe there’s a single person that exists who could answer that question,” replied Eugene Zarashaw, a Facebook engineering director. “We have a somewhat strange engineering culture compared to most where we don’t generate a lot of artifacts during the engineering process. Effectively the code is its own design document often.” [He] and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within [and] an unknowable machine.
…
Facebook’s sprawl has made it impossible to know. … The company never bothered to cultivate institutional knowledge of how each of these component systems works, what they do, or who’s using them. … The systemic fogginess of Facebook’s data storage made answering even the most basic question futile.

Are they serious? kixiQu can’t believe it:

Where legal compliance and security are concerned, “It is just layering and organic growth,” is not something you get to say. If we were speculating about such a thing on a coffee break, maybe we’d get the kind of answer given here, but if a single reference doesn’t exist for something that is necessary for compliance, people get paged until it does.
…
Figuring out how to meet new requirements that weren’t around when systems were begun is, IMO, fully just part of the job. … Following the law is table stakes. … It is a choice to vacuum up user data. … It is not unavoidable. … It’s an embarrassment that this is being presented as a Hard Problem.

But this Anonymous Coward draws the obvious conclusion:

Welcome to Agile! BDUF—Big Design Up Front—is the enemy of the whole “Move fast and break things” philosophy that is incorrectly applied to software development by companies like Facebook.

2. Job Ads Must State Pay Range in California

Home to countless DevOps shops, California will force salaries to be published in job ads—by law. It’s hoped the added transparency will shrink the pay gap between genders and races.

Analysis: A state that’s untouchable like Eliot Ness

On a dark desert highway: Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top. I’ll even kiss a sunset pig.

Jessica Guynn: California passes law requiring companies to reveal pay

“California joins other cities and states”
The state Legislature passed a law Tuesday requiring all employers in the state to post salary ranges for open positions. … California Gov. Gavin Newsom has until Sept. 30 to sign or veto.
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What’s behind the national push for pay transparency? Pay equity. A California study found that women made $46 billion less than men in similar positions in 2020. People of color were paid $61 billion less than white workers.
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California joins other cities and states in enacting laws to force employers to hand over more compensation information. … Federal legislation … was blocked last year by Senate Republicans who said the Paycheck Fairness Act would primarily benefit trial lawyers, not women.

Simple solution: Post a salary range of $1 to $1,000,000. That won’t work, according to olliej:

The bill requires you to provide the labor department with records supporting your claimed ranges upon request. … You’d presumably have to demonstrate that all people were doing the same job which would be a problem for employees vs. managers vs. execs, etc.

Equality aside, will the law help DevOps people? tip pc thinks so:

It’ll certainly help job hunters know whether to bother applying or not. I hate those recruiters who aren’t candid about salary ranges. My first question is, “How much?” Then, “Where?”
…
If they don’t want to answer Q1 then it’s bye-bye from me. … Knowing the salary from the start saves all of us time.

3. RISC-V to Power Future NASA Spacecraft

Open source instruction set architecture RISC-V will be the basis of the next generation of NASA’s High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC). The “core CPU” will be designed by SiFive, based on the RISC-V ISA.

Analysis: RISC-V power beats POWER power

It’s a significant boost for the RISC-V International non-profit and fans of the technology. The stage is set for a handover of power from POWER—in the shape of the RAD750 used in spacecraft such as Perseverance and the JWST.

Liam Tung: NASA selects RISC-V chip designer SiFive to help replace its aging and over-designed spaceflight computers

“Important win for the open-source RISC-V”
NASA announced in June that its HPSC project would develop new flight-computing technology that will feature “at least 100 times” the computational capacity of current spaceflight computers, which were developed almost 30 years ago. … The chief problem with older spaceflight computers is that they’re over-designed.
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According to SiFive … the X280 has demonstrated the 100-times speed increase required for NASA’s HSPC and is good for applications requiring high throughput, single-thread performance under power constraints. … These CPUs need to be resistant to radiation damage, operate with minimal power, and turn off when not needed.
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[It’s an] important win for the open-source RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) standard, which was invented by University of California Berkeley professors David Patterson and Krste Asanović 12 years ago. [It’s] different to the closed ISAs of Intel’s x86, which dominates PCs and servers, and ARM instructions licensed by Arm Ltd.

Important indeed. omegalulw is a big fan:

I absolutely love that NASA is doing this and encouraging the RISC-V ecosystem. … An open source alternative for hardware with the kind of reach that Linux has in software.

But why not ARM? This Anonymous Coward knows why:

Way back in the 00’s to very early 10’s, ARM were very keen to get involved in the space industry. They did quite a lot of internal R&D, paid for entirely on their own dime, and had a dedicated Sales Manager, Product Manager and dev team for the space industry.

Despite their best efforts, they never won a single contract. … ’Round about 2012-2013 IIRC, ARM effectively gave up on the space industry.

The Moral of the Story:
Long live the King

You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

This week’s longest of long views: NASA