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> They couldn’t have cost much to keep running. It cost at the very least the salary of a software engineer, though most likely a lot more. Autodesk is not som
by eddythompson80 2y ago
> They couldn’t have cost much to keep running.
It cost at the very least the salary of a software engineer, though most likely a lot more. Autodesk is not some passion project of a group of volunteers who just want to keep it up. At large companies, I have seen few models of how to run public facing legacy services that don’t “align” with the company any more and as a result there is very little interest in them. They are all expensive in terms of personal and always a potential PR disaster to manage. Doubly so if it’s something that requires moderation like a forum.
You have the “there is a dedicated team for ‘legacy stuff’. They just inherit all dead end projects in the company”. If you are gonna have that model, that teams scope is ever growing, and so is their size. It’s not a shiny job either. “I maintain projects no one cares about” is not interesting or shiny and most good people will move to something else.
There is also the “since you started it, you own it now” approach. Where the virtual team that started a service, will sort of own it forever. It’s this thing that just hover over a team’s shoulder forever. Though “forever” usually means until a manager comes along who is loud enough about not wanting to deal with that shit anymore. It only causes issues when things go down, break, need updating, etc and they don’t want to work on that anymore.
There is the “the ownership of this random ass service will fall wherever we randomly draw and redraw random organizational lines. It’ll keep forever bouncing between random teams as no one cares about it, and no one wants it, and everyone argues that “it actually belong in fabric because it’s the only remaining consumer of their v2 APIs”, “fabric thinks this is more business layer because its main audience are end customers”, “business unit thinks it’s actually more UX as it’s running on the same domain”
And there is always the looming PR issue when an eventual issue happens, a ton of infighting over the lack of clear ownership and once they are over that, the person who has to fix it has no idea what this thing is and needs to get up to speed. Then you get a post on top of HN or Reddit or twitter etc saying “{Insert multimillion/billion dollar company random service} has been down for a week” and a lot of people like “seriously, they can’t figure out how to run that? I run one just for my ham group and it never goes down”
Why bother is usually the final approach.
- Salgat 2y agoIt's nearly free if they simply changed their archiving process from deleted to read-only with a giant red banner warning at the top. Both expend the same amount of effort to do.
- close04 2y agoThe entire deletion exercise was probably to thwart AI training related scraping but the fallout was greater than expected. "Old forum posts on some storage" are an insignificant expense for a company of that size in terms of storage/infrastructure, and even less significant as effort to manage the forum.
- reginald78 2y agoIronically it probably helped AI since the previously slurped up forum data is then only available when regurgitated from one of the models that was trained on it before it was taken down.
- selimthegrim 2y agoSsssh talk softly, you’l upset the senior engineer’s clever retirement plan
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoBuilding a read only mode into a product not designed with that in mind is more effort than deleting.
- vanderZwan 2y agoThis argument would make sense if you weren't talking about forums, where archiving is as simple as locking the entire forum. Heck you could even scrape + convert to static HTML like what they did with the original Processing forums. Which is run by volunteers.
- notachatbot123 2y agoYou would definitely need to convert to static HTML or the forum software would be exploited at some point in the future. Doing that while keeping URLs intact is not trivial. I totally get your point and am pro non-deletion, but it really is way less work to just delete it all.
- echoangle 2y ago> It cost at the very least the salary of a software engineer, though most likely a lot more. Why is that the very least? If keeping a forum running a full time job?
- TonyTrapp 2y ago> It cost at the very least the salary of a software engineer, though most likely a lot more. Autodesk is not some passion project of a group of volunteers who just want to keep it up. It's not a passion project, and that's why I find it very unlikely that they are not using some off-the-shelf forum software. I doubt Autodesk would be paying anything near a full software engineer salary for anyone working on the forum. Of course there will be some developer integrating the forum with the rest of their website, but that is hardly a full-time job. Moderation is probably also not done by engineers but by support staff that doesn't receive a salary at the level of an engineer.
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoAlso they made 5.4 billion last year, even if we assume it took the entire salary of a top shelf software dev, that's still barely a rounding error. Corporate cheapo strikes again.