How Precision Time Protocol is being deployed at Meta

This is incredible. If I knew I'd be working on things like this (as opposed to optimizing ad revenue or "user engagement" by A/B testing button copy), I'd possibly consider working at Meta.

There's other places that are working on this although they probably don't pay as much as Meta. CERN and a few other european physics projects having been using this to create the white rabbit project over the last decade or so ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rabbit_Project ).

If this is the only thing stopping you, you should apply and tell the recruiter you would like to work in infra. People that don't want to work on product stuff don't get "roped into it", I know people who have worked at Meta/FB for years and have never touched user-facing code or ads stuff.

At Meta you choose what team you want to work on during a 3 month “bootcamp” period, very different from Google, Amazon, etc. There’s enough teams solving hard distributed system problems that you’re guaranteed to never need to think about button copy

> Meta/FB for years and have never touched user-facing code or ads stuff

Does that really matter in the end? If you're against writing code for ads/optimizing for quick dopamine hits, is it really so different to be writing the code that shows the ads vs the code that sets up the infrastructure to serve the ads? Or even infrastructure to support the developers who write the code for the ads?

If you don't want to support the ad-driven internet, don't work for companies who's entire business model is extracting as much data from users as possible in order to show the "right" ads.

Yeah that's exactly my concern!

I want to contribute to building cool things, and building a really cool component becomes much less inspiring if it's only used to steer nuclear missiles. (dramatic but not unreasonable example)

You can also be directly hired onto a team, skipping bootcamp (some roles).

You could apply to work on the research infrastructure (for instance for AI)

And instead of writing infrastructure for the developers who write code for ads, you now write AI software/do AI research for a company in order to attract enough talent so they can hire developers to write infrastructure for the developers who write code for ads?

Or you know, just don't work for companies who tend to collect as much user data as they can?

you skip team selection, not bootcamp. every engineer and EM go through bootcamp

In good times, yes, there are more roles than bootcampers. In bad times (now) there are more bootcampers than roles...

This is the same as joining the Sinaloa cartel as a transportation and logistics expert specializing in detection evasion research and development. So many exciting and hard problems to focus on!

Hm, the number of teams that work on these distributed systems is smaller than I think you believe exists at Meta, though I suppose it depends on the type of system being built. Even the internal post on this topic links to a note from last year that talks about the 3 teams in the core systems area that needs to work directly with PTP.

The vast majority of people will probably end up working on product-related team compared to infrastructure-related teams.

But at least you're contributing to science

Oh, sure.

We're doing some interesting things with time sync at AWS, and we are doing so at scale for millions of customers around the world, unlike the small scale stuff that Meta has announced here. Most recently, our team recently announced the Amazon NTP Pools service at time.aws.com.

We've got more cool stuff we are working on.

If we can get past this hiring freeze problem, we still have a couple of slots we need to fill. If you know a lot about time sync and the NTP and PTP protocols, and you have a passion for building some of the biggest impact systems on the planet, let me know.