Facebook Engineer: 'I Push More Code By 9 AM Pacific Than Most People Do In A Lifetime'

Facebook is a complicated website that requires constant maintenance. The man in charge of that day to day maintainance is engineer Garo Taft.

Taft explains to Michael Hickins of the Wall Street Journal that he personally "pushes out more code by 9 AM Pacific than most people do in a lifetime." And that's just at the start of his day, "that’s [just] 2% of what I’m going to do in the next couple of hours,” Taft says.

This means that he is deploying more changes and bug fixes to Facebook's back end than most engineers ever come across.

Because of Facebook's massive one billion user audience, it releases updates to its code twice per day to ensure that the website stays up to date.

Taft has to make sure that the code being pushed out doesn't take the website down with it. He uses a proprietary tool that can monitor exactly when there is an issue and who made the mistake. This tool helps him perform his job much more efficiently.