Documenting what you're willing to support (and not)
17 comments
·July 12, 2025Pxtl
Reading this I'm mostly shocked that groups had the power to throw boxes onto their outward-facing infrastructure and she had to handle that reactively. Like, it's not "requisition a public network server" but rather "you just jam it out there and we'll either baby it or boot it". That's crazy loose for a major corp.
RhysU
Also, document what "support" means.
"That's supported" has no universal interpretation beyond physically describing a tabletop atop legs.
Absent a clear/consistent definition, people interpret "support" in the most favorable way possible from the seats in which they sit. Then, all around sadness ensues.
bravesoul2
> At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it would be like it had always been there. Enough people went through the revolving doors of that place such that six months' worth of employee turnover was sufficient to make it look like a whole other company. All I had to do was write it, wait a bit, then start citing it when needed.
Like!
paol
> a giant social network. You know, the one with all of the cat pictures
This really doesn't narrow it down.
> and later the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism.
Still not helping.
loloquwowndueo
Maybe she didn’t really want to tell you which one it is :)
zdc1
The funny thing with social networks is they all have both of these cohorts, so long as you go down the right rabbit-holes and engage with the right content creators
jraph
Rachel worked at Facebook for some time a while ago. She's been consistently mentioning the cat pictures to refer to it in her blog.
I suppose this way of referring to it is also meant to belittle it.
I assume the "the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism" part is more a dig than something to narrow down.
grishka
Yeah, might be Twitter, but might as well be Facebook. Though I'm leaning towards Twitter
stingraycharles
I interpreted it as the Rohingya / Myanmar genocide and Facebook’s role in it, and the CambridgeAnalytica scandal that (allegedly) enabled Trump to get elected.
leosanchez
> genocide thing
I can only think of one social network when I hear that word. Are there others?
tehjoker
As of 2023, it's all of them promoting a pro-genocide narrative, particularly Twitter these days is promoting outright pro-genocide accounts in my feed from people I don't follow, but I think the author is referring to the Rohingya genocide case in Myanmar.
BigChemical
[dead]
znpy
> I used to be on a team that was responsible for the care and feeding of a great many Linux boxes which together constituted the "web tier" for a giant social network. You know, the one with all of the cat pictures... and later the whole genocide thing and enabling fascism. Yeah, them.
I love how people are so willing to criticise companies that paid their salary but not their willingness to ignore the issues in the name of the fat paycheque.
This is clearly a reference to Meta, and in that sense the writing has been on the wall for years.
I wonder if the author feels or takes any responsibility in directly enabling that genocide and that fascism with their direct work.
But hey, a fat paycheque is a fat paycheque.
philipwhiuk
Maybe she left when it transitioned from cat pictures to fascism.
ivape
I would say you were less of a douchebag for taking those gigs once upon a time than now days.
Related, the concept of the "golden path" advocated by Charity Majors: https://charity.wtf/2018/12/02/software-sprawl-the-golden-pa...
> 1. Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers
> 2. Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance).
> 3. Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components … but if they don’t, they’re on their own. They will have to support it themselves.