Facebook Devs Just Cost The World Millions Of Dollars In Lost Productivity
You know how you can prevent us from hating you? Don’t waste our time.
Facebook recently sent out a few changes to their comment plugin system. I’ll spare everyone the details, but the upshot is that for pages that use their old system but currently have no comments, they throw an annoying warning message onto your page for all users to see that the site needs to upgrade the comment plugin.
Every time Facebook makes some change like this, suppose it takes half an hour of a developer’s time to fix the problem (gross underestimate). Also suppose that the value of an hour of a developer’s time is $100 (another gross underestimate). Suppose also that there are 50,000 websites that use Facebook comments (yet another gross underestimate). The cost of upgrading that stupid little Facebook comment plugin is up to at least $2.5 million. This is likely an underestimate of one, maybe two orders of magnitude.
Keep up the good work, guys!
(This reminds me my old office, where people would inevitably wait for long periods of time in the lobby. I estimated the value of lost productivity.)
