Yishan Wong says goodbye to Facebook
@thebigk
•
Oct 24, 2024
Oct 24, 2024
1.5K
Source: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2010/03/24/longtime-facebook-engineer-yishan-wong-departs/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Longtime Facebook Engineer Yishan Wong Departs • TechCrunch</a>
Wong joined Facebook in late 2005 as a software engineer after a prior 4.5 year stint as senior engineering director at PayPal.
Wong played an instrumental role in Facebook’s (frequently lauded) internationalization efforts – he came up with the idea for crowd-sourcing translations and is credited as an inventor on #-Link-Snipped-# related to those initiatives. As Director of Engineering, he also oversaw the Ads and Payments teams, where the self-serve ads system that makes Facebook so much money today was built – though the ill-fated Beacon project was also developed on his watch.
Furthermore, the Platform team and what one would now refer to as the Applications team (photos, events, groups, notes, inbox, chat, etc.) also reported to Wong for some time, and he spent a lot of his time assisting in the recruitment of people (he’s the original author of #-Link-Snipped-#, for example) and mentoring new managers who joined the company over the years. Most recently, he was involved on mobile-related developments at Facebook, including the Location efforts that are currently in the works.
Quote from his blog:
Wong joined Facebook in late 2005 as a software engineer after a prior 4.5 year stint as senior engineering director at PayPal.
Wong played an instrumental role in Facebook’s (frequently lauded) internationalization efforts – he came up with the idea for crowd-sourcing translations and is credited as an inventor on #-Link-Snipped-# related to those initiatives. As Director of Engineering, he also oversaw the Ads and Payments teams, where the self-serve ads system that makes Facebook so much money today was built – though the ill-fated Beacon project was also developed on his watch.
Furthermore, the Platform team and what one would now refer to as the Applications team (photos, events, groups, notes, inbox, chat, etc.) also reported to Wong for some time, and he spent a lot of his time assisting in the recruitment of people (he’s the original author of #-Link-Snipped-#, for example) and mentoring new managers who joined the company over the years. Most recently, he was involved on mobile-related developments at Facebook, including the Location efforts that are currently in the works.
Quote from his blog:
From late 2006 to early 2009, I was privileged to hold a variety of management positions in Facebook Engineering, ranging from manager of various teams to director of engineering. During that time, the engineering department grew from about 30 to around 200 engineers. It was an era that roughly spanned the launch of News Feed, Facebook Platform (the first F8 conference), the launch of our self-serve advertising system (now a major contributor to our positive cash-flow), internationalization of the site, and Facebook Connect. We went from being a niche college social network with less than 10M users in 2006 to a global phenomenon with over 250M users by early 2009. It was a period of time during which the company grew from being a small startup (under 100 employees) to a medium-sized company (800+ employees).
