3 ms·

It isn't surprising at all. There's a reason why tech companies have insanely large engineering teams even though it feels to an outsider (and inept management)

by paxys 1y ago

It isn't surprising at all. There's a reason why tech companies have insanely large engineering teams even though it feels to an outsider (and inept management) that nobody is doing anything. It takes a lot of manpower and hours to keep a complex system working and up to date. Who validates the backups? Who writes the wikis? Who trains new hires? Who staffs all the on-call rotations? Who organizes disaster recovery drills? Who runs red team exercises? After the company has had repeated layoffs and fired, outsourced or otherwise pushed out all this "overhead" eventually there's no one remaining who actually understands how the system works. One small outage later, this is exactly the situation you end up in.

CobrastanJorji 1y ago
Yep. It takes way fewer people to operating a working system than to build a new one. And the nature of capitalism is that you will pare down your numbers until you have the absolute minimum staffing you need to keep the lights on. Then when everything explodes, you completely lack the know-how to fix it. Then the CEO yells as the tech executive who responds by demanding hourly updates from the two junior devs who operate the site, and nobody wants to admit that they aren't capable of fixing it, and nobody's gonna OK a really expensive "we're gonna spend a month emergency building a new thing" plan because nobody's okay with because a month is obviously way too much time you need to fix it right now, and then three months go by and here you are.
- spacebanana7 1y ago
  I get the opposite impression. Stale software organisations with steady operating products seem to use massive headcounts, whereas startups building new products often get by with relatively few people.
  - esseph 1y ago
    Startups don't have to run a software stack for decades, hardware refreshes or SKU updates and replatforms, dealing with multiple types of turnover and reogs, knowledge transfer, etc. Plus at least monthly if not daily, even hourly system patching. Planting a garden is one thing. Weeding it is another.
  - donnachangstein 1y ago
    > whereas startups building new products often get by with relatively few people 90% of startups fail within 5 years so probably not the best example of how to run things. The few that do "succeed" often carry over mountains of cruft and garbage code into perpetuity (for example Reddit).
- chatmasta 1y ago
  A friend of a friend told me about an organization that has a steady income from existing products maintained by just enough engineers to keep the lights on, while the other 80% of the organization is building the “new version” that no customer asked for and that nobody is currently paying for. There’s one product that is used by more than 80% of customers that’s maintained by 2 developers and that the CEO isn’t aware even exists.
  - jemmyw 1y ago
    Ya I've been there. I even tried pitching to management that a small team of us wanted to move to the legacy product and iteratively improve it because it had customers and revenue and we could make an impact while the new product was under development. They said no. I left about 6 months after. 9 years later the legacy product is still running. I can't find any evidence that they launched a new one.
coliveira 1y ago
Agreed, and that is a wonderful punishment to these companies.
- phatfish 1y ago
  Yup, it turns out all those Indian contractors/outsourced staff don't really give a shit.
  - gosub100 1y ago
    They're paid not to. Disagreement rocks the boat, they get fired and have 2 weeks to pack it up and fly home.
  - nebula8804 1y ago
    And yet somehow Twitter plods along.
    - wiether 1y ago
      I never understood this Twitter thing. - Everybody in their right mind agreed that, for what they were achieving, Twitter was completely over-staffed. Like most of the big tech co in this period. And like most of those co, they went through a leaning program with mass layoffs. - If the service is running fine with only 10% of the staff, it doesn't necessarily means that the 90% that got fired were useless. I can get a 6yo to heat their food using a microwave. Does it mean that the kid is a genius, or that the people who made the microwave did it in a way that allows a kid to operate it, even though it's a complex system at its core? - Comparing Twitter to an international eCom website is disingenuous. If "design Twitter" is a common system design interview question, it's not because the website is popular, it's because the basics are quite simple. Whereas, behind an eCom website, there's dozens of parts going on at any time, with hundreds of interoperability issues. You're not mainly relying on your main DB for your data, most of it is coming from external systems.
      - cloudsec9 1y ago
nebula8804 1y ago
[flagged]
levocardia 1y ago
I'm sorry but if an enterprise team can't at least get a stopgap ecommerce site up and running in a week, what are you even doing? Literal amateurs can launch a WooCommerce site from nothing in a weekend; two Stanford grads in YC can do a hundred-fold better than that. Yes, a big site is more complicated, maybe there will be some frazzled manual data entry in Excel sheets while your team gets the "real" site back up, but this is total madness.
- donnachangstein 1y ago
  > what are you even doing? Forensics, among a hundred other things. > Literal amateurs can launch a WooCommerce site from nothing in a weekend Selling low-volume horseshit out of your garage is in no way comparable to running a major eCommerce site. > two Stanford grads in YC can do a hundred-fold better than that. No they literally can't. > Yes, a big site is more complicated, maybe there will be some frazzled manual data entry in Excel sheets while your team gets the "real" site back up Great idea, we'll have Chloe in Accounts manage all the orders in a million-row Excel sheet. Only problem might be they come in at 50 orders a minute, but don't worry I hear she's a fast typist.
chatmasta 1y ago
Sure, but for every efficiently run company, there’s another with 80% of its engineers working on a “new vision” with zero customers, while the revenue-generating software sits idle or attended by one or two developers… And maybe this is intentional, rational strategy - why not reinvest profits in R&D? But just because an organization is large does not mean that it’s efficient.
ksec 1y ago
Which means it is an opportunity for most of these to be SaaS and not internal. I wish Shopify could help them to migrate to their own.

by paxys 1y ago

CobrastanJorji 1y ago

Yep. It takes way fewer people to operating a working system than to build a new one. And the nature of capitalism is that you will pare down your numbers until you have the absolute minimum staffing you need to keep the lights on. Then when everything explodes, you completely lack the know-how to fix it. Then the CEO yells as the tech executive who responds by demanding hourly updates from the two junior devs who operate the site, and nobody wants to admit that they aren't capable of fixing it, and nobody's gonna OK a really expensive "we're gonna spend a month emergency building a new thing" plan because nobody's okay with because a month is obviously way too much time you need to fix it right now, and then three months go by and here you are.

spacebanana7 1y ago
I get the opposite impression. Stale software organisations with steady operating products seem to use massive headcounts, whereas startups building new products often get by with relatively few people.
- esseph 1y ago
  Startups don't have to run a software stack for decades, hardware refreshes or SKU updates and replatforms, dealing with multiple types of turnover and reogs, knowledge transfer, etc. Plus at least monthly if not daily, even hourly system patching. Planting a garden is one thing. Weeding it is another.
- donnachangstein 1y ago
  > whereas startups building new products often get by with relatively few people 90% of startups fail within 5 years so probably not the best example of how to run things. The few that do "succeed" often carry over mountains of cruft and garbage code into perpetuity (for example Reddit).
chatmasta 1y ago
A friend of a friend told me about an organization that has a steady income from existing products maintained by just enough engineers to keep the lights on, while the other 80% of the organization is building the “new version” that no customer asked for and that nobody is currently paying for. There’s one product that is used by more than 80% of customers that’s maintained by 2 developers and that the CEO isn’t aware even exists.
- jemmyw 1y ago
  Ya I've been there. I even tried pitching to management that a small team of us wanted to move to the legacy product and iteratively improve it because it had customers and revenue and we could make an impact while the new product was under development. They said no. I left about 6 months after. 9 years later the legacy product is still running. I can't find any evidence that they launched a new one.

coliveira 1y ago

Agreed, and that is a wonderful punishment to these companies.

phatfish 1y ago
Yup, it turns out all those Indian contractors/outsourced staff don't really give a shit.
- gosub100 1y ago
  They're paid not to. Disagreement rocks the boat, they get fired and have 2 weeks to pack it up and fly home.
- nebula8804 1y ago
  And yet somehow Twitter plods along.
  - wiether 1y ago
    I never understood this Twitter thing. - Everybody in their right mind agreed that, for what they were achieving, Twitter was completely over-staffed. Like most of the big tech co in this period. And like most of those co, they went through a leaning program with mass layoffs. - If the service is running fine with only 10% of the staff, it doesn't necessarily means that the 90% that got fired were useless. I can get a 6yo to heat their food using a microwave. Does it mean that the kid is a genius, or that the people who made the microwave did it in a way that allows a kid to operate it, even though it's a complex system at its core? - Comparing Twitter to an international eCom website is disingenuous. If "design Twitter" is a common system design interview question, it's not because the website is popular, it's because the basics are quite simple. Whereas, behind an eCom website, there's dozens of parts going on at any time, with hundreds of interoperability issues. You're not mainly relying on your main DB for your data, most of it is coming from external systems.
    - cloudsec9 1y ago

nebula8804 1y ago

[flagged]

levocardia 1y ago

I'm sorry but if an enterprise team can't at least get a stopgap ecommerce site up and running in a week, what are you even doing? Literal amateurs can launch a WooCommerce site from nothing in a weekend; two Stanford grads in YC can do a hundred-fold better than that. Yes, a big site is more complicated, maybe there will be some frazzled manual data entry in Excel sheets while your team gets the "real" site back up, but this is total madness.

donnachangstein 1y ago
> what are you even doing? Forensics, among a hundred other things. > Literal amateurs can launch a WooCommerce site from nothing in a weekend Selling low-volume horseshit out of your garage is in no way comparable to running a major eCommerce site. > two Stanford grads in YC can do a hundred-fold better than that. No they literally can't. > Yes, a big site is more complicated, maybe there will be some frazzled manual data entry in Excel sheets while your team gets the "real" site back up Great idea, we'll have Chloe in Accounts manage all the orders in a million-row Excel sheet. Only problem might be they come in at 50 orders a minute, but don't worry I hear she's a fast typist.

chatmasta 1y ago

Sure, but for every efficiently run company, there’s another with 80% of its engineers working on a “new vision” with zero customers, while the revenue-generating software sits idle or attended by one or two developers… And maybe this is intentional, rational strategy - why not reinvest profits in R&D? But just because an organization is large does not mean that it’s efficient.

ksec 1y ago

Which means it is an opportunity for most of these to be SaaS and not internal. I wish Shopify could help them to migrate to their own.