Facebook – Not Your Typical Network Engineers

A few weeks ago I got an invite to attend a Facebook Open House event which just occurred yesterday. I usually receive invites to several of these types of events from different companies across Silicon Valley. Being an active developer and working in the high-speed networking field at the same time, I tend to attend many events focused on development but also infrastructure. I usually don’t have time to attend most events, but considering this was the first Facebook invite I had, I wanted to make an effort to attend to get not only a grasp of the technology and culture at Facebook but also get a vibe for the work-life and mentality of employees there.

Having signed some NDA verbage that I didn’t bother reading having walked through the door, I won’t go into details about specific technologies or work occurring at Facebook, although, I’m sure some of it is in the public domain anyway. I will just say what is typically already known – Facebook has been for the past several years and still is building out its edge network. The goal is to increase efficiency in everything they do while increasing performance.

The interesting thing here is that I was expecting to hear a bunch of network engineers talking about – well, networking. However, instead, I was pleasantly surprised to hear a bunch of network engineers talking about networking and coding and everything in between to help meet the end goal.

I’ve been saying this for years to some of my friends who dare not go outside the space of studying and learning about network protocols and architecture – networking alone doesn’t cut it anymore – you have to have a bigger toolbox and understand more of the whole picture because so much in effective communication from node to node is not just about network architecture and the underlying protocols. Things have been moving in a new direction for years now. Things are much more dynamic and the solution to a problem is usually intertwined in multiple technologies spanning across multiple domains. We’re seeing some of this now with the advent of software defined networking (SDN), although still in its early days and not yet practical at large scale. It should be noted, I am a little biased having started my career as a J2EE developer and moving to systems and networking later.

A lot of cool things can be done with the correct mentality and fusion of the right skill sets and the Facebook Network Engineering team is a group I’ve been impressed with. I got a lot of insite just from listening to them talk and asking a few questions. Sometimes it just takes a spark to get the engine started! In short, one takeaway is that the network engineers at Facebook are what the network engineers of the future should look like.