3 ms·

An example would be nice as I cannot think of any.

• jasode 10y ago
  Basically most of the companies mentioned in Founders at Work.[1] There are several common themes to why all those companies had to put in crazy hours but one theme that sticks out is the "oh shit, the user count is growing like crazy and we've got to scale out our servers to handle the exponential workload like YESTERDAY or we're going to DIE!" It happened to the Youtube engineers, Google, Napster, Etsy, etc. It's a stressful combination of fighting fires and adding capacity at the same time. For horizontal scaling re-architecting & re-engineering, there is no commercial off-the-shelf or open-source software that let's you install it in one afternoon such that all programmers can just work 40 hours a week without a hiccup. Today, you can't just install a distributed database like Cassandra and fire up more AWS instances and assume those newer technologies that the previous Founders at Work didn't have will prevent your employees from putting in 80 hour weeks for months. Going from a single instance database to handle 10k to 100k users to a sharded distributed db to handle 100 million is not going to be a 40-hour a week job for startup employees. If any companies have done it with zero overtime, please write a blog highlighting your user traffic growth, database sizes, and migration strategy. That would be a very impressive achievement. [1] http://www.foundersatwork.com/interviews.html http://www.foundersatwork.com/interviews.html
  • samastur 10y ago
    You are right, thanks. I have misunderstood it as being a race against some other company/team.