How Precision Time Protocol is being deployed at Meta

Why do so many tech companies seem to be releasing “secret sauce” for free lately? I see a lot of posts lately detailing how inner production systems work at large companies, and while I’m grateful, I’m curious why the higher ups think it’s worthwhile to release this information.

Facebook in particular is very open about its data center, see https://www.opencompute.org/

See “Commoditize Your Complement” - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ , https://www.gwern.net/Complement

> Why do so many tech companies seem to be releasing “secret sauce” for free lately?

Is it really their "special sauce" though? Do these types of releases actually give away how these companies make money?

In this particular case, telling the world how to get to nanosecond levels of timekeeping doesn't really help any competitors take away Metabook's revenues or profits.

Maybe it's the usual reasons that we see companies releasing stuff, not only secret sauce?

I think usually it's for company PR for various purposes (counteract bad press, attract new hires, etc.).

Sometimes to generate a bigger hiring pool that knows the stuff you're releasing. (And the open source story about crowdsourcing contributions, which sometimes might be worth the costs.)

I've also seen it around partnerships and customer collaborations and competition. Including to "commoditize your complement", or to kill one thing with what they'd rather use. (And, in industry/tech standards, corporate representatives often have motivation to try to bias the standard to their employer.)

In some cases, it's for individual employees' careers. Think how academic and some R&D jobs want research publications, or how some companies want people who do "talks".

Sometimes also for getting code/docs public, so employees can still use it when they leave.

The question for 2023 is "How many companies will be investing in this without a clear revenue stream?"

It's quite likely we're entering a period where the current baseline performance of core infrastructure will be considered "good enough" and companies won't employ people to work on these general improvements.

PTP isn’t secret sauce. Routers I worked on were doing PTP in like 2009. 1588 was standardized in 2002.

OTOH if there turns out to be some other way of making money on nanosecond timekeeping, then keeping it secret will help them get into that market before competitors can.

This is just spending "potential money" for engineering talent advertisements.

1) it makes the engineers happy to be able to speak about the interesting projects they are working on and give back to the wider community.

2) it serves as a venue for attracting other talented candidates who are likewise minded on working on technical problems.

3) when I was employed of FB it was a relatively flat hierarchy, which is to say there weren’t that many higher ups to convince that this should be done.

How FB and Google make money isn't secret either. They have a lot of people looking at their web pages and apps, they record a lot of prior interactions with the ads these people see, they train giant models in near-realtime to predict ad quality, serve the ads that maximize expected profits in an ad auction, and record the subsequent clicks, views, and attributed conversions to convince advertisers to keep spending.

It's an effective marketing campaign for "you should work here" - VERY effective.

And lots of this stuff is NOT secret sauce, it's basic business building-blocks that they need. It's not the advertising formulas.

I'm sure FAANG is very VERY happy that they can just run Linux everywhere and don't have to pay Sun or Microsoft a massive per-CPU fee for everything they do.

There is no 'secret sauce' here. The real 'secret sauce' stays secret. The goal of articles such as this one is mainly recruiting, of the 'look at what we're doing here, you should totally want to work here' variety, and it is very effective.

Unless they’re playing 4-D chess and the goal is to make competitors lose time implementing CAP theorem databases, nanosecond precision and React, while they’re pulling ahead.

I think you'd normally be right, but Meta just laid off 10k+ people, and is currently in a company wide hiring freeze until at least Q1 of 2023. Much of the rest of FAANG is either doing one or both as well.

In Meta's case, they fired a lot of "boot campers" as well, some only a few days into their job and before they had a team. Some returning interns even had their offers rescinded.

Not to sound cynical, but this article feels more like "let us release this to show impact and keep our jobs." Or damage control for their engineering hiring image.

"Positive press" is just preemptive damage control.

And anyone knows that a "company wide hiring freeze" is surprisingly thawable in cases where it needs to be.

People are still getting hired at Facebook/Meta, they're probably just targeting specific people or hiring in cheaper countries now

Resume building for people to get their next job?

Lots of these companies opened up the ability for internal engineers to write tech blogs for the purposes of recruiting since the FAANGs were all in competition with one another. Presumably, the VPs haven't gotten around to closing the pipeline yet.

I suspect performance metrics

Many higher-level engineering positions have performance reviews with metrics that include some sort of industry expertise or external collaboration.

> 1588 was standardized in 2002.

offtopic but this sentence is beautiful to me.

It's likely that this article was in the works well before the layoffs. Depending on field it can take a ridiculously long time to get a tech blog post approved at Meta.

There was the TICTOC workgroup, PWE3 for psuedowires on MPLS and whole labyrinth of IEC standards not to mention closed ring optical network clock syncs from SONNET/SDH. I suppose its secret sauce for social media software.