Must admit I've stopped after the firtst, but: With thousands of programmers, what real features have been released to facebook.com? I often ask myself what those thousands of programmers do, as a user (I know not customer in this case) I can't see it. All of them mobile? Ads? Image recognition? With thousands of programmers should't the output be (5 people dev teams, one feature a month) hundreds of features/stories per month? Could users live with that?
I'd also think commits are not a productivity metric.
A lot of our manpower goes into designing, implementing, and maintaining highly scalable systems and tools that allow the actual product teams to do their work. And of course there are plenty of teams that are simply focused on improving the scalability of existing features.
It's hard work to scale something as complex and inter-dependent as Facebook when you're operating at the scale of almost a billion monthly active users.
That still leaves the question about what features are there?
It's not like you can search for people with common names, or organize your own profile in any meaningful way, or search it. You can add stuff to the stream and that's that. I remember when they rolled out the timeline, and what a joke that was/is..
I get it, scaling is hard. Do you get that scaling is only required when stuff is completely broken? If facebook was a protocol and free code, there would be no scaling problem, there would just be a lot of servers. So yeah, they don't fucking understand the internet and like money, so they create problems for themselves which they then solve.
Awe-inspiring! That still leaves us with a set of features no CMS would be caught dead with.
Features can sometimes only be visible in the aggregate. If facebook improves ranking of stories in a way that improves time on site and their user engagement metrics by 5% that will likely be invisible to nearly all users. Same for their ads. Plus they would be running many A/B tests, some making it onto the site, others only ever being seen by a small percentage of their users. Chat, integration of acquisitions, billing, APIs, 3rd party integrations, future products, etc.
I'd also think commits are not a productivity metric.