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Ask HN: Why is Meta's Business Suite so broken?

6 points by andrecarini ↗ HN
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

9 comments

[ 9.3 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
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.

fernandomm
Not sure if this applies to you but I have to disable Adblock in order to use it without glitches/bugs.
DerekBickerton
> 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
A lot of businesses though are listening to the music in their heads, not the data or their customers. Particularly if those businesses are run by one person who doesn't have to take feedback from anyone.
matt_s
Quiet quitting sounds like a much more formal wording than morale is low and implies some sort of outright decision like a silent strike or something. I think when there are circumstances where possibly 50% or more of your total comp vanishes in a short period of time that your time at work becomes hard to focus, be motivated and deliver. Its likely similar to those that survive a layoff, its really tough to put in the effort and very distracting when morale is that low.

As much as I don't like FB/Meta the company, I hope they are doing something internally to treat their people right in the short term.

jsjsof
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
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
andrecarini
I agree it's a giant complex platform, but see a few of the issues I've been having in the last couple of days when interacting with Instagram through it:

- Can't publish posts with more than one picture. "An error has occurred".

- Scheduled posts that failed to publish (see above) sometimes disappear from the list, sometimes falls down to a "Failed" portion in the list.

- Wrong interface language (determined from IP geolocation?). Also no settings to change it.

- Phantom unread indicators (red badge showing X unread messages, but when you click it there's nothing...)

- Missing conversations (shows up correctly on the Instagram app, but they're not there on the web panel)

- Tagging profiles on a post sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, sometimes works but at the wrong picture coordinates.

- Tagging and @ autocomplete doesn't sort by relevance (you have to spell out the entire handle of the profile you want to post, as it autocompletes with random profiles I have never interacted before).

And those are just what I consider to be critical technical issues. There's also missing feature parity (can't publish stories with interactive stickers) and all-around performance problems (the portal is slow as molasses).

I've tried logging off, logging back in again, switching browsers (to one with a fresh profile), trying the Meta Business Suite app on Android. The problem is on Meta's backend.

Meanwhile, Meta's status page says there are no issues with the Business Suite. Yeah, sure.

ano88888
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