Why is Meta's Business Suite so broken?

Question

You'd imagine that one of the largest companies in the world with billions to invest and the most capable software engineers would be able to maintain a decent authoring and management portal for advertisers and content creators: aren't those critical to Meta's revenue?Instead, their website [1] is so full of bugs, glitches, incomplete features and instability that I wonder just what is going on behind the scenes. Are the third-party tools paying Meta to keep their own tools broken?[1] business.facebook.com

DerekBickerton · Accepted Answer

> that I wonder just what is going on behind the scene
It could be quiet quitting, but I don't attribute that conspiracy to every failed software business. Maybe it's just the recent news that TikTok is eating Facebook's lunch and that their stock has tanked, or that the Metaverse is a risky bet, or it could be simply ignorance of user's needs. Facebook being a data hungry giant, you would think they have insight into how & why people use their products.
What I would suggest is writing a blog post describing all your pain points, and distribute the link to every relevant FB employee you can find on social media. You might not get everyone listening, but it will perk up a few ears.

PaulHoule · Answer

I think people have the misguided idea of looking to FAANG for best practices, but mostly these are monopoly companies that have very high profits and little competition. Quality of their products is beside the point and they can afford to hire an excessive number of very expensive developers in the homeless capital of the world because... they can!Nobody would point to Epic, Cerner, Salesforce, Adobe or Microsoft for "best practices" and they shouldn't do that for Facebook either.

jsjsof · Answer

What makes you think people who pass leetcode interviews write high quality code?Interviews are about being fast with a working solution. Guess what that does to a product.

romanhn · Answer

I think you're underestimating the complexity and surface area of the suite. There are hundreds of teams and 1000+ engineers (likely thousands) contributing to the Ads Manager alone. It's a beast, and considering how critical it is to the business, everything requires layers of approvals and is one of the few areas in the company where "move fast and break things" doesn't fly. That said, when I was at FB I saw a lot of churn in Ads teams (meaning whole teams created and dismantled all the time), so it wouldn't surprise me if there is a bunch of unowned/unmaintained code left over that still hangs around in production

ano88888 · Answer

Mata's business suite is a giant pain to use. It is quite strange that they couldn't make it better as it is quite obvious

fernandomm · Answer

Not sure if this applies to you but I have to disable Adblock in order to use it without glitches/bugs.