17 ms·

I could do that in a weekend (2016)

338 points by spiffytech 6y ago

pandesal 6y ago
Great read. HN and reddit comments like the post title always irks me whenever a product is talked about in here or in reddit.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I would find it hilarious to throw a QA team at one of those weekend builds.
  - starpilot 6y ago
    Hey, now. I built a PHP CMS for my friend's university club website 12 years ago in a weekend. It had user accounts, profiles, user posts. That's pretty much proto-Facebook, right? I could just scale that up to a billion users, right? /s
- duxup 6y ago
  I think the HN comments about "what do they all do" are more often than not inquisitive ... or not entirely off the ball as far as "This product could be great if the company running it wasn't trying to be a unicorn and thus spending all that money with little more to show for it." I don't think those are unfair questions / concepts.
amelius 6y ago
> But in the comments on Alex's posts, multiple people respond and say that Lucene basically does the same thing Google does and that Lucene is poised to surpass Google's capabilities in the next few years. Let's first build a benchmark. Without it, you're basically in the dark.
- gipp 6y ago
  Well that's just reinforcing their point. Do you have any idea how much Google spends on creating some semblance of "search quality benchmarking" that actually means something? I'd venture it's way, way more than you imagine.
cwackerfuss 6y ago
A little line-height and content max-width could go a long way
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- scott_s 6y ago
  Because the content is just simple HTML, it's amenable to the reader view option available in most browsers.
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    You can put some simple CSS and still leave the simple HTML available to be styled by the browser's reader mode.
    - hombre_fatal 6y ago
      You're never going to please everyone. I've seen HNers complain about the opposite, that they have a large monitor for a reason and the web designer has wronged them by adding margins. Anyways, I think we're all big boys and girls who can figure out how to use reader mode or resize a window in 2020. That's the whole beauty of the web browser.
  - dwaltrip 6y ago
    It should have a sane default. The current default presentation is not sane.
    - clarry 6y ago
      Your user agent should have a sane default. The idea that every text document on the web should ship their own default is insane.
- thelazydogsback 6y ago
  No... Premature presentation is the root of all evil! :) This is content, not art.
michaelbuckbee 6y ago
To OP's point of "features are more complicated than they appear" I always like to point to the flowchart of Slack's notification logic. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6ROe0mU0AEmpzz?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6ROe0mU0AEmpzz?format=jpg
- saagarjha 6y ago
  This was actually less complicated that I had expected it to be.
  - nickff 6y ago
    Yes, it was something I'd never thought of before, but definitely simpler than I guessed before I clicked the link. That said, each time you add a conditional, you need to be increasingly careful about where you put it, and what other impacts it has. I would also imagine that there are a variety of other features which require similar flow charts.
  - evfanknitram 6y ago
    Yes, this is what my co-workers refer to as an if-statement.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      I mean, the chart is still useful to have, and it'd be a couple of methods probably had I written it. But it's not a huge state space, and most of the transitions are fairly reasonable.
      - Drdrdrq 6y ago
        I can imagine it was quite a lot of work to come to such a clean and relatively simple chart.
        hombre_fatal 6y ago
        Coming up with this chart from a generic ticket like "impl notifications" is one of the hardest parts of being a developer. Code is generally the easy part once you know exactly what you're doing.
dudul 6y ago
So yes. I'm a big fan of avoiding the hand waving and garbage like that when describing/specing a product's behavior. Features are always more complicated than the elevator pitch, there are edge cases, points of integration with the rest of the system, etc. So yes, things are almost always more complex than they appear. But also, no, I've definitely seen a lot of companies with an insane headcount simply to "do more in parallel" or "deal with the complexity of the system". Sometimes, having too many people to keep busy is really bad.
jgwil2 6y ago
Should be marked "(2016)"
gustavo-fring 6y ago
There is a lazy argument that ignores the difficulty and hard work of putting out not only a working but a good application out, but the other end of that is using Dan's argument (which is valid), to dismiss criticism. To wit, Google has 80k employees now, in 2010 it was at 10k and the number only drops as you go further back. I think it's pretty easy to say that Google was doing more impressive things at the beginning of the century, and certainly the climb was greater. Within the last five years, there was a moment when Google had 4 competing chat apps. This is pretty rank inefficiency. If you were to take 80k people (not all are engineers, obviously) and sit them down and ask them to use their talents to build separately, you'd end up with a lot more innovation and productivity, I'm pretty certain of that. The entire point of a minimum viable product is not that you have a complete, flawless app, but rather that you get something up you can iterate on quickly. That can be built in a weekend (I'm a slow worker, but I know people that can do crazy stuff in a night and interest). My personal criticism (and something I'm testing), is that our current processes are not harnessing all the gains in productivity we've seen over the decades, nor the ability to do that because it is very cheap to do so is not happening on a large scale. It's not totally apparent why it is happening, but it isn't. I realized late that people take this criticism personally and feel like you're saying they are stupid or don't work hard or it is all so easy, but I ask you to consider the nature of our industry and how easy things are to build and then ask you why we don't see real competition across so many products. The moats of many companies are perceived. The goal isn't to build Google in a weekend, it's to take the first step and give yourself an opportunity. edit: my numbers are off, it's 25k to 100k
- Silhouette 6y ago
  Small businesses innovate. Big businesses consolidate. Figuring out how to maintain a small business pace of innovation while achieving the consistency and economies of scale of a big business is basically the tech industry's quest for the holy grail.
  - lowdose 6y ago
    Isn't that exactly what Amazon is doing?
Silhouette 6y ago
Someone with considerable but realistic skill could build a passable approximation of a lot of successful web apps in a weekend, and a very small team of good people could probably build a production-ready version in a month. It's the other 95% of what the original business did to become successful that usually gets overlooked.
grandridge 6y ago
Except when Uber and Lyft were kicked out of Austin, ride austin was up in a matter of weeks
- steveklabnik 6y ago
  Ride Austin is wonderful, but does not do the same thing that Uber and Lyft do. Namely: they're only in Austin. Additionally, from their own site: http://www.rideaustin.com/faq http://www.rideaustin.com/faq > How much has it cost to build RideAustin? > The tech community contributed technology to power the app that costs millions to develop - but it also took over $7 million in cash donations and significant in-kind services donations to make RideAustin what it is today. That is non-trivial.
- varjag 6y ago
  When a taxi company here contracted to build their own hailing app, it was done to the tune of €500-600K. Every bit as good as the big rideshare apps.
ascendantlogic 6y ago
There's always two things that these armchair quarterback software devs seem to miss: Scale and Money. Sure you can hack together a small Google clone using Elasticsearch in a weekend. Can you index all the worlds information and serve the worlds search needs with your little MVP? 99.99% chance no, even if you were given a few hundred engineers to scale it. Even if you could do it technically, where are you coming up with the money to do so? That's not seed-round or even series A round money to do that. That's series D, hundred+ million dollar swipes of a VC's credit card just to get off the ground. Microsoft threw billions at it with Bing and still never became more than an also-ran. The only place that seems to have a real chance is DuckDuckGo, and I'd be very interested to see how their story has played out up to this point. Google benefited greatly from growing as the web was growing. Trying to index the world's information in 2020 is an astronomical task compared to indexing the world's information in 98, 99 era.
- gustavo-fring 6y ago
  I've been playing armchair QB for 20 years, my QBR is 91. Nobody is seriously saying index all of the world's information in a weekend. They're saying that the tech to index the web and otherwise has increased in the last 20 years, which enables you to do more. Google isn't even a great example, considering how intensive it is at scale. There are a lot of apps, especially with user created content, that don't have that issue at all. Your argument is the other end of I can build Google in a day, it dismisses criticism by making it absurd.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    The "I could build it in a weekend" is certainly one extreme, but I think even people who say "I could build Google in 3 months" (or even 6 months, or a year), just don't get it. And yes, there are actually a decent amount of people who say, literally, "I could build that in a weekend". Not sure how many people say that about Google, specifically, but it comes up often enough. This post was also from 2016, and I do feel like it used to come up more often in years past than it does now.
    - 6y ago
saagarjha 6y ago
I'm obligated to post a reminder that sometimes your team is horribly bloated or incompetent or your choice of technology is wrong, so make sure you're actually doing useful things before feeling relieved that you're invincible. Sure, nobody is going to upend your business in a weekend, but there's been many, many examples of a company doing this and then someone working by themselves for a couple of months or years (usually, this is just someone who actually bothered to care enough to spend time on the problem) comes along and does far more than they thought was possible. Stay on your toes!
bluedino 6y ago
People make the mistake of saying "I could build GMail in a weekend!", when they really mean, "I could build a web-based email system in a weekend."
eloff 6y ago
I was recently reminded of this while reading posts on hn wondering why Lyft and Uber have thousands of engineers and what do they do all day. I wonder if this was reposted here for the same reason.
code4tee 6y ago
I like the post but it does somewhat miss the point of these comments when they’re made. It’s not usually someone saying they could rebuild the whole site / product / company in a weekend but rather challenging the value that everything beyond MVP is adding and all the staff that go into supporting everything beyond MVP. Companies tend to vastly over-complicate things and to support that end up having ever growing teams to support the ever growing over-complexity and feature bloat. I can’t tell you the number of times a team has said it takes so long to deliver something with 3x the number of engineers because they need more testing, backend and such but meanwhile the core product features that customers care about are delayed and not materializing. It’s not that these other things don’t matter but all the “other stuff” shouldn’t take priority over having a lean and mean product that works and people use. Thus it’s less “why does this company have 100 engineers” and more “why does this company not just exist as a far simpler and leaner product?”
- paxys 6y ago
  Simply because there is demand for that "other stuff" that you are writing off. Every user and organization has their own workflows and are looking for different things when they spend money on a piece of software. What you consider a core feature others may not use at all.
  - code4tee 6y ago
    What you describe is often part of the problem. Companies are often far to quick to chase after every feature request and endlessly customize product for each customer. Finding the balance between meeting true feature needs and ending up with a mess designed by committee is the ultimate art in product development.
- cmckn 6y ago
  > It’s not that these other things don’t matter but all the “other stuff” shouldn’t take priority... Totally agree with you; I think the sentiment behind "I could do that in a weekend" is that shipping the core functionality can be done quickly, and iterating on the "other things" can be done after launch in many cases. Not everything has to be as robust as possible on day one. Google didn't have BigTable, MapReduce, and Borg the day the search bar went live. Shipping features is my favorite part of the job, it'd be great to have those wins as often as possible and cross other bridges when we come to them.
forrestthewoods 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox The devil is always in the details.
valachio 6y ago
The author's website is an example of a product that is "done in a weekend". It is very annoying to this post on a 28" monitor... the text runs from left to right with no margin spacing.
- dpcan 6y ago
  There's not even a <body> tag. It just has some header information and jumps right in to the text, but he took the time to add Google Analytics. It's so bizarre.
  - robocat 6y ago
    You do know that the <body> tag is optional in HTML5? From MDN: The <body> tag “may be omitted if the first thing inside it is not a space character, comment, <script> element or <style> element. The end tag may be omitted if the <body> element has contents or has a start tag, and is not immediately followed by a comment.” However, in this particular case the body starts with a space character, so it should have a body tag. A minimal valid HTML5 document looks like: <!doctype html> <meta charset=utf-8> <title>blah</title> <p>I'm the content
- dmart 6y ago
  A certain set of people take enormous pride in using unstyled HTML like this. (See "Motherfucking Website" [0]) The problem is it's not 1994 anymore, monitors are no longer 800 pixels wide, so it looks like shit and is impossible to read. It's well accepted that 70-90ish characters per line is best for readability, and instead now on an average monitor unstyled HTML gives you like 250. [0] https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
  - oxalorg 6y ago
    I solve this problem using a bookmarklet [0] which automagically applies sane css to websites like these. It’s insane that it’s 2020 and some people still refuse to use CSS haha [0]: https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
crnkofe 6y ago
I've heard plenty of comments like that. People often trivialize things they don't understand. As a developer I tend to focus on that one feature I know how to build and ignore the rest. Or in other words - it's easy to bake a bread loaf but running a bakery is much more complicated.
kstrauser 6y ago
I wholeheartedly agree, to a point. Sometimes hideously complex things look so easy because really smart people came up with a particularly elegant solution, so any rando off the street sees it and figures they could reproduce the thing. However, I worked for a company who had a whole team of engineers and QA people working for months on what was basically a Django CMS, but with a large dose of "not invented here"-driven writing of everything from scratch. I'd finally gotten tired of it, so I spent a weekend at home implementing it in Django and being done with it. I did learn two very important lessons, though: - The other stakeholders really did not like someone demonstrating a working prototype of something they'd been doing unsuccessfully for months, and I got a thorough chewing out for disrupting their processes. - I really didn't want to work for such an organization, and was much happier after moving to a smaller, more nimble company.
- potta_coffee 6y ago
  I came to a new company and built a working prototype of something in a few weeks that apparently, a whole team had failed to do in more than six months of struggling. I didn't know that the project had already been attempted. Some people really didn't like me after that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- munchbunny 6y ago
  From my experience, when I'm working on real world problems of nontrivial sizes and I see a big chunk of well organized, like a really well organized service, almost always it's because that was the latest cleanup/refactoring effort that happened after many years when the problem space was a moving target, and finally it stopped changing long enough to come up with a clean abstraction. The cleanest code I've ever written has always been on the second or third try. Write it once, test it against the real world, then rewrite it to take the new discoveries into account. It's too bad we rarely have the luxury of breathing room to rewrite things.
  - 6y ago
CarVac 6y ago
I never have this problem because it always takes me solid weeks to properly design and implement a single new feature in my photo editor's user interface. Sure, I could slap something shitty together in a weekend, but then you have a shitty UI and people complain about open-source software UI enough already.
buboard 6y ago
This is overly simplistic. There is plenty of great services that can be done in a weekend. And some very elaborate engineering projects with tiny traffic. When people wonder "why they need so many programmers", sometimes they are right. They hired them to stop them from building competitors.
- chillacy 6y ago
  > They hired them to stop them from building competitors If that were true, wouldn't you have to hire every developer who could possibly build your app in a weekend to succeed at that? It just takes one to start a new competitor. Building a new competitor is more than just a matter of code, there are often network effects, a lot of marketing, and often still a cost to switch from a less than optimal but good enough solution to an optimal one.
  - buboard 6y ago
    > every developer who could possibly build your app well haven't they? a competitor doesn't need to be a copycat. like how, e.g. google bought deepmind
  - Rury 6y ago
    You're not wrong, but neither is the OP. Sometimes big companies simply buy out startups so they can maintain market dominance - whether they be direct competitors or new emerging markets. You see this with Facebook buying Oculus in 2014, Microsoft buying Skype in 2008, Google buying Waze in 2013, Apple buying Shazam etc. Also this is not privy to the tech industry. Large companies of all sorts of industries use the growth by acquisition strategy.
empath75 6y ago
Most of the big sites were built by a couple of coders in a few weekends. Google was online a few months after the page rank paper was published. Twitter took a small team a couple of months for the initial release. Zuckerberg famously wrote facebook in a couple of weekends. Most of the explosive growth of those companies was built on essentially weekend projects by a handful of coders, or even one person. You absolutely can write a billion dollar app in a weekend. If you have the right idea at the right time, with the right connections.
- opportune 6y ago
  The entire point of the article is that the long tail of things to do grossly outweighs the happy-path MVP...
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
I wonder about this as an efficiency thing. Instead of search, let's use a charity as an example. Why does XYZ charity need a zillion people? Why does it spend so much on TV ads? The answer tends to be that hiring more people and advertising more brings in more net dollars. You add and add until the marginal cost of another ad/hire/whatever matches the marginal gain. It makes total sense for the charity to do this, but as a potential donor, now less of your dollars go to the thing you care about and more go to admin, advertisers, etc. It's like friction in the system. To compete with you, now other people have to spend on ads, and the whole ecosystem is less efficient. I think there's an analogy here for for profit companies. Maybe if instead of adding a tiny marginal dollar for BigCo, you could add a big marginal dollar for SmallCo, and society's per capita productivity is lower? I can't pinpoint whether the analogy works for companies, but I suspect it does.
yingw787 6y ago
God. I remember reading this a year ago. I've been working on TinyDev for about...two months longer than I thought I would have, and I still have probably a month left to go before it's completely ready. Just the amount of ops work you need to do in order to lock down your stack is absolutely insane. That's assuming you invest in ops work in the first place, which many places don't, hence technical debt and war rooms and fires and the slowness of project management resulting in massive backlogs and the like. I'm going to do a writeup hopefully up this weekend on backend level to VPC level work, just so that I can lock in my learnings. What I can say now is, the only easy day was yesterday.
dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314
lordnacho 6y ago
"except that when you talk to companies that handle their own billing, they can point to individual features that increase conversion by single or double digit percentages that they can't get from Stripe or Braintree" Kinda intrigued as to what that means? What features in the billing increase conversion by percentage points, but are not available via an outsourced payment provider like Stripe?
- heavenlyblue 6y ago
  They lose customer data and then end up in newspapers.
twhb 6y ago
To make this website readable in Chrome, load the page, type “javascript:” into the URL bar (it can’t be copy-pasted there), paste the following paragraph after that text, hit enter. document.body.style.cssText = 'max-width: 35em; margin: 0 auto; padding: 1.5em; line-height: 1.4;'; 0; In Safari, Firefox, and Edge, I recommend just using reader mode.
renewiltord 6y ago
The community solved this generations ago with one phrase: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code." I guess now that we know it's more than just the program, the startup adage equivalent is "Talk is cheap. Show me the product."
pazimzadeh 6y ago
Except that Google didn't become #1 by having better support for Arabic and Japanese than Yahoo/Lycos/Dogpile.
ineedasername 6y ago
I could have written this blog post in a weekend. (I know, downvotes incoming. Worth it)
bjornsing 6y ago
It’s not trivial to build google.com? No shit, Sherlock.
freepor 6y ago
The other is "why so many employees." As if one guy writes Salesforce in a weekend and then that's all there is to it.
encoderer 6y ago
There is a simple recipe: 1 part arrogance. 1 part optimism. 1 part naïveté. Do not over mix. Bake half way.
pierremenard 6y ago
The article seems to argue that 1) there is no viable search competitor to Google, therefore 2) search must be a much harder problem that takes more engineers than we expect, therefore 3) it's hard to reproduce Google's success because you can't actually do what 10^n engineers do in a weekend. I think that's plausible, but it needs to be emphasized that search could very well be not that hard, but no one has overtaken Google because they have inferior marketing, distribution, present too high of a switching cost, etc. Just because Google has a bunch of engineers solving that problem (and reproducing what Google does seems complex for correct reasons pointed out in the article) doesn't mean that the engineers are actually adding that much marginal value. My guess is that even if Google invested less in search engineering, and didn't solve real time indexing and some other edge cases this well, it would still be leading the field.
- biggestdecision 6y ago
  Part of the challenge of competing, is that it's so easy for Google to adopt good features from other search engines. I'm not sure what to call these, but you know the rich results Google searches provide these days? Like showing the definition of a word, or a snippet of data from Wikipedia off to the side of the main search results. It's a useful feature, and it was first developed by DuckDuckGo not Google. But it didn't matter, because it was so easy for Google to adopt a feature like that into their own product.
Pxtl 6y ago
This article would be better if be didn't use Google indexing Twitter as an example, since I can never ever find tweets I remember on Google.
hyperpallium 6y ago
About non-algorithm competitive advantages. It's easy to switch search engines, so google invests madly: Capital - massive capital investment in data centre around the world, for low latency, particularly for Google Suggest. Capital is an enormous barrier-to-entry for web startups. Google made search capital-intensive. PR - consumer habit, supported by those myriad projects that position google in consumer minds as "leading tech company". It matters that you are the best; it matters that decision makers know you are the best. Data - being first gives you a headstart, but competitors will catch up if you don't run at least as fast (and ways to improve that consumers care about - more running track). If you can something you have to do this that competitors lack, it's easier. So google madly collects data, and uses it to e.g. NLP of queries Backend - Sergy did a lot with little hardware in the beginning, and that has continued, I believe including their own silicon. All that gives google time to rival better search - and money buy it.
titzer 6y ago
It's all fun and games until it's time to scale, which comes with the need for monitoring, versioning, scaled rollouts/rollbacks, DoS protection, replication and distribution, and the long tail of bugs.
scoot_718 6y ago
Except I actually could build StackOverflow in a day. Less than that actually, just need some fiber and coffee.
JackFr 6y ago
I was in a meeting where someone from the business side complained that we were taking too long developing the feature and said “I wrote the same thing at my last company and I did it in one night while watching TV.” My boss paused for a minute and then asked “What were you watching?”

338 points by spiffytech 6y ago

Great read. HN and reddit comments like the post title always irks me whenever a product is talked about in here or in reddit.

MattGaiser 6y ago
I would find it hilarious to throw a QA team at one of those weekend builds.
- starpilot 6y ago
  Hey, now. I built a PHP CMS for my friend's university club website 12 years ago in a weekend. It had user accounts, profiles, user posts. That's pretty much proto-Facebook, right? I could just scale that up to a billion users, right? /s
duxup 6y ago
I think the HN comments about "what do they all do" are more often than not inquisitive ... or not entirely off the ball as far as "This product could be great if the company running it wasn't trying to be a unicorn and thus spending all that money with little more to show for it." I don't think those are unfair questions / concepts.

amelius 6y ago

> But in the comments on Alex's posts, multiple people respond and say that Lucene basically does the same thing Google does and that Lucene is poised to surpass Google's capabilities in the next few years. Let's first build a benchmark. Without it, you're basically in the dark.

gipp 6y ago
Well that's just reinforcing their point. Do you have any idea how much Google spends on creating some semblance of "search quality benchmarking" that actually means something? I'd venture it's way, way more than you imagine.

cwackerfuss 6y ago

A little line-height and content max-width could go a long way

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
scott_s 6y ago
Because the content is just simple HTML, it's amenable to the reader view option available in most browsers.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  You can put some simple CSS and still leave the simple HTML available to be styled by the browser's reader mode.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    You're never going to please everyone. I've seen HNers complain about the opposite, that they have a large monitor for a reason and the web designer has wronged them by adding margins. Anyways, I think we're all big boys and girls who can figure out how to use reader mode or resize a window in 2020. That's the whole beauty of the web browser.
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  It should have a sane default. The current default presentation is not sane.
  - clarry 6y ago
    Your user agent should have a sane default. The idea that every text document on the web should ship their own default is insane.
thelazydogsback 6y ago
No... Premature presentation is the root of all evil! :) This is content, not art.

michaelbuckbee 6y ago

To OP's point of "features are more complicated than they appear" I always like to point to the flowchart of Slack's notification logic. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6ROe0mU0AEmpzz?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6ROe0mU0AEmpzz?format=jpg

saagarjha 6y ago
This was actually less complicated that I had expected it to be.
- nickff 6y ago
  Yes, it was something I'd never thought of before, but definitely simpler than I guessed before I clicked the link. That said, each time you add a conditional, you need to be increasingly careful about where you put it, and what other impacts it has. I would also imagine that there are a variety of other features which require similar flow charts.
- evfanknitram 6y ago
  Yes, this is what my co-workers refer to as an if-statement.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I mean, the chart is still useful to have, and it'd be a couple of methods probably had I written it. But it's not a huge state space, and most of the transitions are fairly reasonable.
    - Drdrdrq 6y ago
      I can imagine it was quite a lot of work to come to such a clean and relatively simple chart.
      - hombre_fatal 6y ago
        Coming up with this chart from a generic ticket like "impl notifications" is one of the hardest parts of being a developer. Code is generally the easy part once you know exactly what you're doing.

dudul 6y ago

So yes. I'm a big fan of avoiding the hand waving and garbage like that when describing/specing a product's behavior. Features are always more complicated than the elevator pitch, there are edge cases, points of integration with the rest of the system, etc. So yes, things are almost always more complex than they appear. But also, no, I've definitely seen a lot of companies with an insane headcount simply to "do more in parallel" or "deal with the complexity of the system". Sometimes, having too many people to keep busy is really bad.

jgwil2 6y ago

Should be marked "(2016)"

gustavo-fring 6y ago

There is a lazy argument that ignores the difficulty and hard work of putting out not only a working but a good application out, but the other end of that is using Dan's argument (which is valid), to dismiss criticism. To wit, Google has 80k employees now, in 2010 it was at 10k and the number only drops as you go further back. I think it's pretty easy to say that Google was doing more impressive things at the beginning of the century, and certainly the climb was greater. Within the last five years, there was a moment when Google had 4 competing chat apps. This is pretty rank inefficiency. If you were to take 80k people (not all are engineers, obviously) and sit them down and ask them to use their talents to build separately, you'd end up with a lot more innovation and productivity, I'm pretty certain of that. The entire point of a minimum viable product is not that you have a complete, flawless app, but rather that you get something up you can iterate on quickly. That can be built in a weekend (I'm a slow worker, but I know people that can do crazy stuff in a night and interest). My personal criticism (and something I'm testing), is that our current processes are not harnessing all the gains in productivity we've seen over the decades, nor the ability to do that because it is very cheap to do so is not happening on a large scale. It's not totally apparent why it is happening, but it isn't. I realized late that people take this criticism personally and feel like you're saying they are stupid or don't work hard or it is all so easy, but I ask you to consider the nature of our industry and how easy things are to build and then ask you why we don't see real competition across so many products. The moats of many companies are perceived. The goal isn't to build Google in a weekend, it's to take the first step and give yourself an opportunity. edit: my numbers are off, it's 25k to 100k

Silhouette 6y ago
Small businesses innovate. Big businesses consolidate. Figuring out how to maintain a small business pace of innovation while achieving the consistency and economies of scale of a big business is basically the tech industry's quest for the holy grail.
- lowdose 6y ago
  Isn't that exactly what Amazon is doing?

Silhouette 6y ago

Someone with considerable but realistic skill could build a passable approximation of a lot of successful web apps in a weekend, and a very small team of good people could probably build a production-ready version in a month. It's the other 95% of what the original business did to become successful that usually gets overlooked.

grandridge 6y ago

Except when Uber and Lyft were kicked out of Austin, ride austin was up in a matter of weeks

steveklabnik 6y ago
Ride Austin is wonderful, but does not do the same thing that Uber and Lyft do. Namely: they're only in Austin. Additionally, from their own site: http://www.rideaustin.com/faq http://www.rideaustin.com/faq > How much has it cost to build RideAustin? > The tech community contributed technology to power the app that costs millions to develop - but it also took over $7 million in cash donations and significant in-kind services donations to make RideAustin what it is today. That is non-trivial.
varjag 6y ago
When a taxi company here contracted to build their own hailing app, it was done to the tune of €500-600K. Every bit as good as the big rideshare apps.

ascendantlogic 6y ago

There's always two things that these armchair quarterback software devs seem to miss: Scale and Money. Sure you can hack together a small Google clone using Elasticsearch in a weekend. Can you index all the worlds information and serve the worlds search needs with your little MVP? 99.99% chance no, even if you were given a few hundred engineers to scale it. Even if you could do it technically, where are you coming up with the money to do so? That's not seed-round or even series A round money to do that. That's series D, hundred+ million dollar swipes of a VC's credit card just to get off the ground. Microsoft threw billions at it with Bing and still never became more than an also-ran. The only place that seems to have a real chance is DuckDuckGo, and I'd be very interested to see how their story has played out up to this point. Google benefited greatly from growing as the web was growing. Trying to index the world's information in 2020 is an astronomical task compared to indexing the world's information in 98, 99 era.

gustavo-fring 6y ago
I've been playing armchair QB for 20 years, my QBR is 91. Nobody is seriously saying index all of the world's information in a weekend. They're saying that the tech to index the web and otherwise has increased in the last 20 years, which enables you to do more. Google isn't even a great example, considering how intensive it is at scale. There are a lot of apps, especially with user created content, that don't have that issue at all. Your argument is the other end of I can build Google in a day, it dismisses criticism by making it absurd.
- kelnos 6y ago
  The "I could build it in a weekend" is certainly one extreme, but I think even people who say "I could build Google in 3 months" (or even 6 months, or a year), just don't get it. And yes, there are actually a decent amount of people who say, literally, "I could build that in a weekend". Not sure how many people say that about Google, specifically, but it comes up often enough. This post was also from 2016, and I do feel like it used to come up more often in years past than it does now.
  - 6y ago

saagarjha 6y ago

I'm obligated to post a reminder that sometimes your team is horribly bloated or incompetent or your choice of technology is wrong, so make sure you're actually doing useful things before feeling relieved that you're invincible. Sure, nobody is going to upend your business in a weekend, but there's been many, many examples of a company doing this and then someone working by themselves for a couple of months or years (usually, this is just someone who actually bothered to care enough to spend time on the problem) comes along and does far more than they thought was possible. Stay on your toes!

bluedino 6y ago

People make the mistake of saying "I could build GMail in a weekend!", when they really mean, "I could build a web-based email system in a weekend."

eloff 6y ago

I was recently reminded of this while reading posts on hn wondering why Lyft and Uber have thousands of engineers and what do they do all day. I wonder if this was reposted here for the same reason.

code4tee 6y ago

I like the post but it does somewhat miss the point of these comments when they’re made. It’s not usually someone saying they could rebuild the whole site / product / company in a weekend but rather challenging the value that everything beyond MVP is adding and all the staff that go into supporting everything beyond MVP. Companies tend to vastly over-complicate things and to support that end up having ever growing teams to support the ever growing over-complexity and feature bloat. I can’t tell you the number of times a team has said it takes so long to deliver something with 3x the number of engineers because they need more testing, backend and such but meanwhile the core product features that customers care about are delayed and not materializing. It’s not that these other things don’t matter but all the “other stuff” shouldn’t take priority over having a lean and mean product that works and people use. Thus it’s less “why does this company have 100 engineers” and more “why does this company not just exist as a far simpler and leaner product?”

paxys 6y ago
Simply because there is demand for that "other stuff" that you are writing off. Every user and organization has their own workflows and are looking for different things when they spend money on a piece of software. What you consider a core feature others may not use at all.
- code4tee 6y ago
  What you describe is often part of the problem. Companies are often far to quick to chase after every feature request and endlessly customize product for each customer. Finding the balance between meeting true feature needs and ending up with a mess designed by committee is the ultimate art in product development.
cmckn 6y ago
> It’s not that these other things don’t matter but all the “other stuff” shouldn’t take priority... Totally agree with you; I think the sentiment behind "I could do that in a weekend" is that shipping the core functionality can be done quickly, and iterating on the "other things" can be done after launch in many cases. Not everything has to be as robust as possible on day one. Google didn't have BigTable, MapReduce, and Borg the day the search bar went live. Shipping features is my favorite part of the job, it'd be great to have those wins as often as possible and cross other bridges when we come to them.

forrestthewoods 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox The devil is always in the details.

valachio 6y ago

The author's website is an example of a product that is "done in a weekend". It is very annoying to this post on a 28" monitor... the text runs from left to right with no margin spacing.

dpcan 6y ago
There's not even a <body> tag. It just has some header information and jumps right in to the text, but he took the time to add Google Analytics. It's so bizarre.
- robocat 6y ago
  You do know that the <body> tag is optional in HTML5? From MDN: The <body> tag “may be omitted if the first thing inside it is not a space character, comment, <script> element or <style> element. The end tag may be omitted if the <body> element has contents or has a start tag, and is not immediately followed by a comment.” However, in this particular case the body starts with a space character, so it should have a body tag. A minimal valid HTML5 document looks like: <!doctype html> <meta charset=utf-8> <title>blah</title> <p>I'm the content
dmart 6y ago
A certain set of people take enormous pride in using unstyled HTML like this. (See "Motherfucking Website" [0]) The problem is it's not 1994 anymore, monitors are no longer 800 pixels wide, so it looks like shit and is impossible to read. It's well accepted that 70-90ish characters per line is best for readability, and instead now on an average monitor unstyled HTML gives you like 250. [0] https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- oxalorg 6y ago
  I solve this problem using a bookmarklet [0] which automagically applies sane css to websites like these. It’s insane that it’s 2020 and some people still refuse to use CSS haha [0]: https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark

deleted 6y ago

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crnkofe 6y ago

I've heard plenty of comments like that. People often trivialize things they don't understand. As a developer I tend to focus on that one feature I know how to build and ignore the rest. Or in other words - it's easy to bake a bread loaf but running a bakery is much more complicated.

kstrauser 6y ago

I wholeheartedly agree, to a point. Sometimes hideously complex things look so easy because really smart people came up with a particularly elegant solution, so any rando off the street sees it and figures they could reproduce the thing. However, I worked for a company who had a whole team of engineers and QA people working for months on what was basically a Django CMS, but with a large dose of "not invented here"-driven writing of everything from scratch. I'd finally gotten tired of it, so I spent a weekend at home implementing it in Django and being done with it. I did learn two very important lessons, though: - The other stakeholders really did not like someone demonstrating a working prototype of something they'd been doing unsuccessfully for months, and I got a thorough chewing out for disrupting their processes. - I really didn't want to work for such an organization, and was much happier after moving to a smaller, more nimble company.

potta_coffee 6y ago
I came to a new company and built a working prototype of something in a few weeks that apparently, a whole team had failed to do in more than six months of struggling. I didn't know that the project had already been attempted. Some people really didn't like me after that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
munchbunny 6y ago
From my experience, when I'm working on real world problems of nontrivial sizes and I see a big chunk of well organized, like a really well organized service, almost always it's because that was the latest cleanup/refactoring effort that happened after many years when the problem space was a moving target, and finally it stopped changing long enough to come up with a clean abstraction. The cleanest code I've ever written has always been on the second or third try. Write it once, test it against the real world, then rewrite it to take the new discoveries into account. It's too bad we rarely have the luxury of breathing room to rewrite things.
- 6y ago

CarVac 6y ago

I never have this problem because it always takes me solid weeks to properly design and implement a single new feature in my photo editor's user interface. Sure, I could slap something shitty together in a weekend, but then you have a shitty UI and people complain about open-source software UI enough already.

buboard 6y ago

This is overly simplistic. There is plenty of great services that can be done in a weekend. And some very elaborate engineering projects with tiny traffic. When people wonder "why they need so many programmers", sometimes they are right. They hired them to stop them from building competitors.

chillacy 6y ago
> They hired them to stop them from building competitors If that were true, wouldn't you have to hire every developer who could possibly build your app in a weekend to succeed at that? It just takes one to start a new competitor. Building a new competitor is more than just a matter of code, there are often network effects, a lot of marketing, and often still a cost to switch from a less than optimal but good enough solution to an optimal one.
- buboard 6y ago
  > every developer who could possibly build your app well haven't they? a competitor doesn't need to be a copycat. like how, e.g. google bought deepmind
- Rury 6y ago
  You're not wrong, but neither is the OP. Sometimes big companies simply buy out startups so they can maintain market dominance - whether they be direct competitors or new emerging markets. You see this with Facebook buying Oculus in 2014, Microsoft buying Skype in 2008, Google buying Waze in 2013, Apple buying Shazam etc. Also this is not privy to the tech industry. Large companies of all sorts of industries use the growth by acquisition strategy.

empath75 6y ago

Most of the big sites were built by a couple of coders in a few weekends. Google was online a few months after the page rank paper was published. Twitter took a small team a couple of months for the initial release. Zuckerberg famously wrote facebook in a couple of weekends. Most of the explosive growth of those companies was built on essentially weekend projects by a handful of coders, or even one person. You absolutely can write a billion dollar app in a weekend. If you have the right idea at the right time, with the right connections.

opportune 6y ago
The entire point of the article is that the long tail of things to do grossly outweighs the happy-path MVP...

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

I wonder about this as an efficiency thing. Instead of search, let's use a charity as an example. Why does XYZ charity need a zillion people? Why does it spend so much on TV ads? The answer tends to be that hiring more people and advertising more brings in more net dollars. You add and add until the marginal cost of another ad/hire/whatever matches the marginal gain. It makes total sense for the charity to do this, but as a potential donor, now less of your dollars go to the thing you care about and more go to admin, advertisers, etc. It's like friction in the system. To compete with you, now other people have to spend on ads, and the whole ecosystem is less efficient. I think there's an analogy here for for profit companies. Maybe if instead of adding a tiny marginal dollar for BigCo, you could add a big marginal dollar for SmallCo, and society's per capita productivity is lower? I can't pinpoint whether the analogy works for companies, but I suspect it does.

yingw787 6y ago

God. I remember reading this a year ago. I've been working on TinyDev for about...two months longer than I thought I would have, and I still have probably a month left to go before it's completely ready. Just the amount of ops work you need to do in order to lock down your stack is absolutely insane. That's assuming you invest in ops work in the first place, which many places don't, hence technical debt and war rooms and fires and the slowness of project management resulting in massive backlogs and the like. I'm going to do a writeup hopefully up this weekend on backend level to VPC level work, just so that I can lock in my learnings. What I can say now is, the only easy day was yesterday.

dang 6y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314

lordnacho 6y ago

"except that when you talk to companies that handle their own billing, they can point to individual features that increase conversion by single or double digit percentages that they can't get from Stripe or Braintree" Kinda intrigued as to what that means? What features in the billing increase conversion by percentage points, but are not available via an outsourced payment provider like Stripe?

heavenlyblue 6y ago
They lose customer data and then end up in newspapers.

twhb 6y ago

To make this website readable in Chrome, load the page, type “javascript:” into the URL bar (it can’t be copy-pasted there), paste the following paragraph after that text, hit enter. document.body.style.cssText = 'max-width: 35em; margin: 0 auto; padding: 1.5em; line-height: 1.4;'; 0; In Safari, Firefox, and Edge, I recommend just using reader mode.

renewiltord 6y ago

The community solved this generations ago with one phrase: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code." I guess now that we know it's more than just the program, the startup adage equivalent is "Talk is cheap. Show me the product."

pazimzadeh 6y ago

Except that Google didn't become #1 by having better support for Arabic and Japanese than Yahoo/Lycos/Dogpile.

ineedasername 6y ago

I could have written this blog post in a weekend. (I know, downvotes incoming. Worth it)

bjornsing 6y ago

It’s not trivial to build google.com? No shit, Sherlock.

freepor 6y ago

The other is "why so many employees." As if one guy writes Salesforce in a weekend and then that's all there is to it.

encoderer 6y ago

There is a simple recipe: 1 part arrogance. 1 part optimism. 1 part naïveté. Do not over mix. Bake half way.

pierremenard 6y ago

The article seems to argue that 1) there is no viable search competitor to Google, therefore 2) search must be a much harder problem that takes more engineers than we expect, therefore 3) it's hard to reproduce Google's success because you can't actually do what 10^n engineers do in a weekend. I think that's plausible, but it needs to be emphasized that search could very well be not that hard, but no one has overtaken Google because they have inferior marketing, distribution, present too high of a switching cost, etc. Just because Google has a bunch of engineers solving that problem (and reproducing what Google does seems complex for correct reasons pointed out in the article) doesn't mean that the engineers are actually adding that much marginal value. My guess is that even if Google invested less in search engineering, and didn't solve real time indexing and some other edge cases this well, it would still be leading the field.

biggestdecision 6y ago
Part of the challenge of competing, is that it's so easy for Google to adopt good features from other search engines. I'm not sure what to call these, but you know the rich results Google searches provide these days? Like showing the definition of a word, or a snippet of data from Wikipedia off to the side of the main search results. It's a useful feature, and it was first developed by DuckDuckGo not Google. But it didn't matter, because it was so easy for Google to adopt a feature like that into their own product.

Pxtl 6y ago

This article would be better if be didn't use Google indexing Twitter as an example, since I can never ever find tweets I remember on Google.

hyperpallium 6y ago

About non-algorithm competitive advantages. It's easy to switch search engines, so google invests madly: Capital - massive capital investment in data centre around the world, for low latency, particularly for Google Suggest. Capital is an enormous barrier-to-entry for web startups. Google made search capital-intensive. PR - consumer habit, supported by those myriad projects that position google in consumer minds as "leading tech company". It matters that you are the best; it matters that decision makers know you are the best. Data - being first gives you a headstart, but competitors will catch up if you don't run at least as fast (and ways to improve that consumers care about - more running track). If you can something you have to do this that competitors lack, it's easier. So google madly collects data, and uses it to e.g. NLP of queries Backend - Sergy did a lot with little hardware in the beginning, and that has continued, I believe including their own silicon. All that gives google time to rival better search - and money buy it.

titzer 6y ago

It's all fun and games until it's time to scale, which comes with the need for monitoring, versioning, scaled rollouts/rollbacks, DoS protection, replication and distribution, and the long tail of bugs.

scoot_718 6y ago

Except I actually could build StackOverflow in a day. Less than that actually, just need some fiber and coffee.

JackFr 6y ago

I was in a meeting where someone from the business side complained that we were taking too long developing the feature and said “I wrote the same thing at my last company and I did it in one night while watching TV.” My boss paused for a minute and then asked “What were you watching?”