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My mistake. Please forgive my usage of HN cliche #318. (Though you appear to be in violation of cliche 284) But my question stands. What the hell is Yahoo doin

My mistake. Please forgive my usage of HN cliche #318. (Though you appear to be in violation of cliche 284) But my question stands. What the hell is Yahoo doing nowadays? Yahoo Finance and search can't take that many folks to run. Maybe it's Yahoo Weather?

timcederman 4y ago
It's a shame you're continuing with your snark - if you work in tech, I'm sure you could use your imagination on the myriad of ways that many employees could still be generating value, or you could even do a quick search and satisfy your own curiosity. More recent: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yahoo-makes-money-yhoo.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yah... Older, but more clearly laid out: https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/ https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/
irrational 4y ago
What about Twitter? How in the world did it take that many people to run a single website?
- piva00 4y ago
  How much do you know about the machinery running that single website? If you can't answer this question then the reduction in your assumption of how simple it is falls flat. How many large orgs with hundreds of millions of users have you worked for? Derive from that experience how many people it takes to run their systems...
  - irrational 4y ago
    I've been working on a single website for a Fortune 50 company more than 20 years. For the first 12 years years it was just me. I built the entire thing from the ground up. Provisioned servers, installed software (database, web server, application server, etc.), hardened software, optimized software, designed database schema for hundreds of tables, wrote tens of thousands of sql scripts, optimized queries, wrote server side software, wrote apache config file, built front end, etc. After 12 years they hired another developer and the two of us have been the only ones working on it since. Now, our website isn't used by hundreds of millions of users, but it has been used by millions of users and we get about a million unique users each day. Obviously it will take more than 1 or 2 developers to create and maintain a website of Twitter's size, but 10s of thousands of developers? That seems pretty crazy.
  - kwhitefoot 4y ago
    How about taking the question at face value and attempting to answer it instead of questioning the assumptions behind it?
- busterarm 4y ago
  We really should be questioning how companies are allowed to grow that large before generating a profit. If your company's revenue expenditure starts growing to around 1% of the GDP of a small city and you're still LOSING money, at what point and how much employee-risk needs to be taken on for you to prove your business model? Also crazy that any of these employees ever felt secure. headcount in the thousands to tens of thousands and operating in the red? That's chum in the water.

timcederman 4y ago

It's a shame you're continuing with your snark - if you work in tech, I'm sure you could use your imagination on the myriad of ways that many employees could still be generating value, or you could even do a quick search and satisfy your own curiosity. More recent: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yahoo-makes-money-yhoo.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yah... Older, but more clearly laid out: https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/ https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/

irrational 4y ago

What about Twitter? How in the world did it take that many people to run a single website?

piva00 4y ago
How much do you know about the machinery running that single website? If you can't answer this question then the reduction in your assumption of how simple it is falls flat. How many large orgs with hundreds of millions of users have you worked for? Derive from that experience how many people it takes to run their systems...
- irrational 4y ago
  I've been working on a single website for a Fortune 50 company more than 20 years. For the first 12 years years it was just me. I built the entire thing from the ground up. Provisioned servers, installed software (database, web server, application server, etc.), hardened software, optimized software, designed database schema for hundreds of tables, wrote tens of thousands of sql scripts, optimized queries, wrote server side software, wrote apache config file, built front end, etc. After 12 years they hired another developer and the two of us have been the only ones working on it since. Now, our website isn't used by hundreds of millions of users, but it has been used by millions of users and we get about a million unique users each day. Obviously it will take more than 1 or 2 developers to create and maintain a website of Twitter's size, but 10s of thousands of developers? That seems pretty crazy.
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  How about taking the question at face value and attempting to answer it instead of questioning the assumptions behind it?
busterarm 4y ago
We really should be questioning how companies are allowed to grow that large before generating a profit. If your company's revenue expenditure starts growing to around 1% of the GDP of a small city and you're still LOSING money, at what point and how much employee-risk needs to be taken on for you to prove your business model? Also crazy that any of these employees ever felt secure. headcount in the thousands to tens of thousands and operating in the red? That's chum in the water.