“We ran into these huge problems, and didn’t have generalists who could go up and down the stack,” I'm sure this is a cherry picked quote, but it surprises me

“We ran into these huge problems, and didn’t have generalists who could go up and down the stack,” I'm sure this is a cherry picked quote, but it surprises me that he thought the technologists he hired had to do with any of their problems other then performance. Sites like Reddit/Digg/HN live and die by the community they frame. The communities seem to accept an unusually high down time. As Reddit started becoming more mainstream it benefited from segmentation. HN, has benefited from a foundation of considerate users, which are given more privileges then newer users. Digg allowed bad users to dilute good users until good users broke down and decided to seek refuge outside of the site.