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Maybe I am too naive but what the heck are they overworking on? It's an app with some basic functionality. Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't de

Maybe I am too naive but what the heck are they overworking on? It's an app with some basic functionality. Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver a self-standing product that doesn't require teams working overtime to keep it running? I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers which are the only two things that jump to mind as being labor-intensive for a an app with millions of users

blowski 5y ago
Complexity expands to fit the available budget.
fatjokes 5y ago
They had an IPO and their user count spiked. The former requires a ton of work on the finance/management team (great writeup here on HN recently. The link evades me). The latter probably necessitated some rearchitecturing.
Symbiote 5y ago
Perhaps it's user moderation? But they have a lot of open positions, so there's apparently a lot more to this app than I realize: https://team.bumble.com/open-roles https://team.bumble.com/open-roles
afavour 5y ago
FTA: “Bumble has had a busier year than most firms, with a stock market debut, and rapid growth in user numbers.” I don’t think they’re implying that everyone is working overtime. Scaling up to accommodate a lot of new users isn’t always simple, we all know this. And a looming IPO means the pressure to get that scaling right first time is high (and has plenty of non-tech requirements to stress out employees too) A busy year like that combined with the effects of COVID means that a lot of people feel burnt out. A synchronised break also has benefits: with no-one working there’s much less chance you’ll be tempted to “just check emails quickly” and get sucked back in. I didn’t have a particularly intense workplace in the last year and I still feel pretty burnt out so I can sympathise.
SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
I don't know about your organization, but at mine utilization jumped like crazy when we all started working from home. People threw themselves into their work and stopped taking vacations. Not a lot of people have taken time to breathe in the last year. Was that focus and effort required? Probably not, but with nothing else to do and in a time of such economic uncertainty people did what they needed to make themselves feel better. I understand why the company would be burnt out.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  Plus, with nobody doing anything social or interacting with other humans, I've noticed far fewer people getting sick, or taking the occasional Friday off to get out of town at the last minute.
  - SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    Yeah - I haven't been sick since this whole thing started. I was honestly hoping that my recent second Pfizer shot would make me feel ill enough that I could feel good about taking a day, but no luck.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
I would bet customer support is the most labor-intensive part of the whole company, with devops a distant second.
standardUser 5y ago
They had their IPO a few months ago and I imagine all of their staff, not just engineers, were under a lot of pressure. And no one said they were working overtime, just that they were burnt out. Plus, when your company is in the news and your user base grows 30% in a matter if months, that's the time to strike while the iron is hot, which no doubt required a lot of work from all teams.
joegahona 5y ago
It references "burnout," not "overwork." I think there's a difference.
colesantiago 5y ago
> It's an app with some basic functionality. > I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers Please don't assume this. Just because you don't use the app and have no interest in the app or company does not mean you need to have a reductionist outlook on other people's work. Bumble has a great and in depth engineering blog [0] here that doesn't make it 'an app with some basic functionality.' [0] https://medium.com/bumble-tech https://medium.com/bumble-tech
- fatjokes 5y ago
  A bit O/T, but a few things from that blog jumped out at me: 1. I clicked the we're hiring link. Most roles are in EU (particularly UK and Spain). Is that for cost reasons? I know hiring engineers is cheaper in those two locations in particular. Or is it for EU/Badoo reasons? 2. Despite frequently playing up its female-led workplace, all but one of the blog posts are authored by men (based on photos and names). Is this reflective of their staff? The Badoo staff? The pool of people who like to write blog posts?
  - hodgesrm 5y ago
    UK is not a low-cost region for hiring. Employment taxes are high and the IT market in locations like London is very competitive. Rates are comparable to hiring in the US outside of outliers like Silicon Valley.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  > Just because you don't use the app and have no interest in the app or company does not mean you need to have a reductionist outlook on other people's work. Please don’t assume this. Parent comment’s question seems genuine.
  - colesantiago 5y ago
    > Parent comment’s question seems genuine. Why are you assuming genuineness when the parent mentioned this: 'an app with some basic functionality' 'I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers' 'Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver' 'what the heck are they overworking on?' This is enough to know that the parent is dismissing the effort and work of others to the point that they are expressing a reductionist viewpoint of the entire app and company, which is not ok.
savant_penguin 5y ago
I'm surprised by how much work at some companies should have been done automatically but instead it's some labor intensive excel+email workflow. Maybe there's some of that happening in there
base698 5y ago
This reads like someone who has never worked on anything. Here's something I totally made up but have experienced half a dozen times and caused it the other half dozen: Come in to an exciting new opportunity. The first week you recoil in horror the technical debt. It appears the previous maintainer/builder didn't know one or more of: basic system admin, testing, documentation, packages, coding design, database design, or security. The incidents start. The code is so interdependent it's terrifying to make even a small change. Fixing a bug in their custom json generator breaks a service you don't know exists and takes out billing. Yes they wrote their own. You lose the confidence of the team already there. Now you are too afraid to make changes. All you can do is toil or try to think about selling a rewrite. When one or both of those hit burn out you fire up LinkedIn and beg for mercy.
zimpenfish 5y ago
> I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers I should imagine there's a fair few customer support people along with at least a handful of content moderators - considerably more labour intensive than software dev/devops/sysadmin, I think. Obviously there's also comms teams, marketing, HR, finance, etc. I'd say these are probably also more labour intensive than dev/devops/sysadmin because they tend to involve a lot more human contact, etc.
michaelt 5y ago
Presumably they have a moderation queue, moderated by a bunch of low-paid workers who are highly stressed from looking at awful images full time?
dkarl 5y ago
If you look at their job openings, they're looking for experience re-engineering monolithic codebases to microservices, and they mention PHP experience or willingness to learn PHP to read their legacy codebase as a plus, so it sounds like their back-end engineers have a lot on their plate. Add in two mobile apps, plus all the technical, legal, and business challenges of operating on lots of different countries, plus recommendation algorithms, abuse detection, tons of marketing stuff I'm sure, constant running to stay in place in a crowded market, hell, that's just what I can think off of the top of my head never having worked in that space.
dogman144 5y ago
Concur with someone else on the thread*. Bumble’s security team is largely overseas (UK). For a US based, culture-forward company, to me this probably implies a lot of offshoring of eng talent at some point, in order to grow. Which in turn probably means growing pains moving from contract devs to a real, in-house product<>eng program.
gsibble 5y ago
I have seen massive teams churn out tiny features and move at a snail's pace.
hvidgaard 5y ago
There is this misconception that software development can be ultra lean and only really need a team of few handful of people if they're just sufficiently capable. It's knowledge work that is almost always in the complex domain, and as such it's far from simple. In fact it's the domain of unknown unknowns. So to have a product with millions of users with an online attack vector, that takes security and uptime serious, you need the following lead roles as a minimum: * Architect * Security * Test * Agile * Developer * Operation * Owner * UX Security, Test, Agile, Operation, Owner are at the very least full time posistions in their own right for a single service, then you need to add developers. Add requirements for new documentation and maintenance of old. You probably need some support roles too. An app with millions of users are likely to have multiple teams that have a subset of the full application. For every feature you want to develop or any significant refactorings, you need to involve at least architect, security, test and operations. My experience is that teams around 8-10 people can be really productive and run a service. If you really want to accelerate and be best in class you assign teams to specific parts of the service that makes sense. Could be signup, search, chat, ect. Then you probably want teams for analytics, ads and marketing, legal and before you know it, you have 50+ people working directly on a "self-standing product". All that said, if the code base is crap, and the organization of the employees are similar it's highly likely that alone is responsible for creating the additional workload compared to a better codebase and organizational structure.
- baud147258 5y ago
  For Agile role (assuming you mean a role like SCRUM master), it works way better if it's a productive team member (either developer, QA, doc writer...) that works part-time as the SCRUM master for the team, rather than a agile person who does only that, which usually feel disconnected from the actual concerns of the team.
  - hvidgaard 5y ago
    I'm not sure I agree. Some of the best Scrum Masters I've worked with was not developers, but peoples person with great process optimization skills. Some of the worst I've worked with have been developers or product owners that failed to separate their roles.
gizmo385 5y ago
This comment feels like it shares a lot of the attitude found in the "I could build this in a weekend"-style comments. Even things that seem relatively simple become quite complicated when scaled out internationally to millions of users.

blowski 5y ago

Complexity expands to fit the available budget.

fatjokes 5y ago

They had an IPO and their user count spiked. The former requires a ton of work on the finance/management team (great writeup here on HN recently. The link evades me). The latter probably necessitated some rearchitecturing.

Symbiote 5y ago

Perhaps it's user moderation? But they have a lot of open positions, so there's apparently a lot more to this app than I realize: https://team.bumble.com/open-roles https://team.bumble.com/open-roles

afavour 5y ago

FTA: “Bumble has had a busier year than most firms, with a stock market debut, and rapid growth in user numbers.” I don’t think they’re implying that everyone is working overtime. Scaling up to accommodate a lot of new users isn’t always simple, we all know this. And a looming IPO means the pressure to get that scaling right first time is high (and has plenty of non-tech requirements to stress out employees too) A busy year like that combined with the effects of COVID means that a lot of people feel burnt out. A synchronised break also has benefits: with no-one working there’s much less chance you’ll be tempted to “just check emails quickly” and get sucked back in. I didn’t have a particularly intense workplace in the last year and I still feel pretty burnt out so I can sympathise.

SketchySeaBeast 5y ago

I don't know about your organization, but at mine utilization jumped like crazy when we all started working from home. People threw themselves into their work and stopped taking vacations. Not a lot of people have taken time to breathe in the last year. Was that focus and effort required? Probably not, but with nothing else to do and in a time of such economic uncertainty people did what they needed to make themselves feel better. I understand why the company would be burnt out.

InitialLastName 5y ago
Plus, with nobody doing anything social or interacting with other humans, I've noticed far fewer people getting sick, or taking the occasional Friday off to get out of town at the last minute.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  Yeah - I haven't been sick since this whole thing started. I was honestly hoping that my recent second Pfizer shot would make me feel ill enough that I could feel good about taking a day, but no luck.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

I would bet customer support is the most labor-intensive part of the whole company, with devops a distant second.

standardUser 5y ago

They had their IPO a few months ago and I imagine all of their staff, not just engineers, were under a lot of pressure. And no one said they were working overtime, just that they were burnt out. Plus, when your company is in the news and your user base grows 30% in a matter if months, that's the time to strike while the iron is hot, which no doubt required a lot of work from all teams.

joegahona 5y ago

It references "burnout," not "overwork." I think there's a difference.

colesantiago 5y ago

> It's an app with some basic functionality. > I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers Please don't assume this. Just because you don't use the app and have no interest in the app or company does not mean you need to have a reductionist outlook on other people's work. Bumble has a great and in depth engineering blog [0] here that doesn't make it 'an app with some basic functionality.' [0] https://medium.com/bumble-tech https://medium.com/bumble-tech

fatjokes 5y ago
A bit O/T, but a few things from that blog jumped out at me: 1. I clicked the we're hiring link. Most roles are in EU (particularly UK and Spain). Is that for cost reasons? I know hiring engineers is cheaper in those two locations in particular. Or is it for EU/Badoo reasons? 2. Despite frequently playing up its female-led workplace, all but one of the blog posts are authored by men (based on photos and names). Is this reflective of their staff? The Badoo staff? The pool of people who like to write blog posts?
- hodgesrm 5y ago
  UK is not a low-cost region for hiring. Employment taxes are high and the IT market in locations like London is very competitive. Rates are comparable to hiring in the US outside of outliers like Silicon Valley.
elliekelly 5y ago
> Just because you don't use the app and have no interest in the app or company does not mean you need to have a reductionist outlook on other people's work. Please don’t assume this. Parent comment’s question seems genuine.
- colesantiago 5y ago
  > Parent comment’s question seems genuine. Why are you assuming genuineness when the parent mentioned this: 'an app with some basic functionality' 'I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers' 'Is software dev in such a sad state that you can't deliver' 'what the heck are they overworking on?' This is enough to know that the parent is dismissing the effort and work of others to the point that they are expressing a reductionist viewpoint of the entire app and company, which is not ok.

savant_penguin 5y ago

I'm surprised by how much work at some companies should have been done automatically but instead it's some labor intensive excel+email workflow. Maybe there's some of that happening in there

base698 5y ago

This reads like someone who has never worked on anything. Here's something I totally made up but have experienced half a dozen times and caused it the other half dozen: Come in to an exciting new opportunity. The first week you recoil in horror the technical debt. It appears the previous maintainer/builder didn't know one or more of: basic system admin, testing, documentation, packages, coding design, database design, or security. The incidents start. The code is so interdependent it's terrifying to make even a small change. Fixing a bug in their custom json generator breaks a service you don't know exists and takes out billing. Yes they wrote their own. You lose the confidence of the team already there. Now you are too afraid to make changes. All you can do is toil or try to think about selling a rewrite. When one or both of those hit burn out you fire up LinkedIn and beg for mercy.

zimpenfish 5y ago

> I doubt that all of their staff is doing DevOps or maintaining servers I should imagine there's a fair few customer support people along with at least a handful of content moderators - considerably more labour intensive than software dev/devops/sysadmin, I think. Obviously there's also comms teams, marketing, HR, finance, etc. I'd say these are probably also more labour intensive than dev/devops/sysadmin because they tend to involve a lot more human contact, etc.

michaelt 5y ago

Presumably they have a moderation queue, moderated by a bunch of low-paid workers who are highly stressed from looking at awful images full time?

dkarl 5y ago

If you look at their job openings, they're looking for experience re-engineering monolithic codebases to microservices, and they mention PHP experience or willingness to learn PHP to read their legacy codebase as a plus, so it sounds like their back-end engineers have a lot on their plate. Add in two mobile apps, plus all the technical, legal, and business challenges of operating on lots of different countries, plus recommendation algorithms, abuse detection, tons of marketing stuff I'm sure, constant running to stay in place in a crowded market, hell, that's just what I can think off of the top of my head never having worked in that space.

dogman144 5y ago

Concur with someone else on the thread*. Bumble’s security team is largely overseas (UK). For a US based, culture-forward company, to me this probably implies a lot of offshoring of eng talent at some point, in order to grow. Which in turn probably means growing pains moving from contract devs to a real, in-house product<>eng program.

gsibble 5y ago

I have seen massive teams churn out tiny features and move at a snail's pace.

hvidgaard 5y ago

There is this misconception that software development can be ultra lean and only really need a team of few handful of people if they're just sufficiently capable. It's knowledge work that is almost always in the complex domain, and as such it's far from simple. In fact it's the domain of unknown unknowns. So to have a product with millions of users with an online attack vector, that takes security and uptime serious, you need the following lead roles as a minimum: * Architect * Security * Test * Agile * Developer * Operation * Owner * UX Security, Test, Agile, Operation, Owner are at the very least full time posistions in their own right for a single service, then you need to add developers. Add requirements for new documentation and maintenance of old. You probably need some support roles too. An app with millions of users are likely to have multiple teams that have a subset of the full application. For every feature you want to develop or any significant refactorings, you need to involve at least architect, security, test and operations. My experience is that teams around 8-10 people can be really productive and run a service. If you really want to accelerate and be best in class you assign teams to specific parts of the service that makes sense. Could be signup, search, chat, ect. Then you probably want teams for analytics, ads and marketing, legal and before you know it, you have 50+ people working directly on a "self-standing product". All that said, if the code base is crap, and the organization of the employees are similar it's highly likely that alone is responsible for creating the additional workload compared to a better codebase and organizational structure.

baud147258 5y ago
For Agile role (assuming you mean a role like SCRUM master), it works way better if it's a productive team member (either developer, QA, doc writer...) that works part-time as the SCRUM master for the team, rather than a agile person who does only that, which usually feel disconnected from the actual concerns of the team.
- hvidgaard 5y ago
  I'm not sure I agree. Some of the best Scrum Masters I've worked with was not developers, but peoples person with great process optimization skills. Some of the worst I've worked with have been developers or product owners that failed to separate their roles.

gizmo385 5y ago

This comment feels like it shares a lot of the attitude found in the "I could build this in a weekend"-style comments. Even things that seem relatively simple become quite complicated when scaled out internationally to millions of users.