Indeed the process of facebook code deployment is pretty complex:

https://www.facebook.com/publications/514128035341603/

And I assume they have extra requirements for interns to push code.

that is a fascinating article, thank you. i like the idea of 'push karma'.

You're welcome! I really liked the 'push karma' too.

I liked this idea too : "all engineers who contributed code must be available online during the push. The release system verifies this by contacting them automatically using a system of IRC bots; if an engineer is unavailable (at least for daily pushes), his or her commit will be reverted."

That way, they are be able to react very quickly in case of a problem.

But this isn't a magic bullet...a commit can't always be reverted without conflicts, and even if reverted there's no guarantee that it leaves the codebase in a correct state. (Guess I should read the article you're talking about.)

Yes, but the new intern would be able to read all the source and "secret sauces".

I doubt that an intern on Google would've access to the search codebase. I'd wager that only a handful of trusted employees have access to that codebase.

All Google code is stored in one master repository, for all products. An intern can look at the search code.

Not so. Search is specifically sequestered.

If you don't trust your employees why did you hire them? Besides, the source code isn't where FB's money is at, that would be their users.

> If you don't trust your employees why did you hire them?

On a small company, I agree. But on FB they're around 5k people. Let's say they have 3k engineers, that's a awful lot of people they're trusting with their source code

Google is also one source tree I think.

You are correct for the search codebase - it is separate from the main tree, as is a lot of the core ad placement code. If you aren't working on those projects, you don't have access.

So it is like the Coca Cola recipe? Only two people allowed to know it and not allowed to get the same flight? Yet everyone else able to mix and serve the syrup?