Sunday, October 20, 2019

"Facebook employees turn to rogue hacker from Hong Kong to learn what other [Facebook] teams are building"

CNBC:
Wong, a 25-year-old software engineer in Hong Kong, checks every new line of code any time one of her Android smartphone’s apps get an update. She locates new code, reverse-engineers it and finds new features before they are announced.

“I do it mostly for personal amusement,” Wong told CNBC. “If I see the feature, I check if there is any security vulnerability, and if it doesn’t, I tweet it.”

This knack for feature discovery has made Wong something of a Twitter celebrity.

...

“Employees only focus on their particular teams,” Wong explained. “It can get difficult to keep track of every single change. If I’m able to turn code into a screenshot and under 280 characters, I can help.”

Wong estimates she finds three new features per day. This week, for example, Wong has tweeted upcoming features from Pinterest, Uber and Slack, among others.