3 ms·

Considering these guys were working with petabytes/day scale web stuff beforehand (guess that narrows down the previous employer...), I'm sure they'd know, and

by crdb 12y ago

Considering these guys were working with petabytes/day scale web stuff beforehand (guess that narrows down the previous employer...), I'm sure they'd know, and that quote was for part time work, not 16 hours a day. I know both personally, have seen their code and previous work, and trust them to have given a pessimistic estimate. If you have tight, modular code following good practices (e.g. a relational backend, not an ORM), you have experience doing it before, there's no micro-manager, and with a clearly defined, functional spec, you can build robust things that scale well relatively quickly. We're not talking about a new Facebook here, merely copying 80% of the functionality of an existing product for a launch in markets with no competition, as greenfield. Also, it's not like a site like that would reach a million users in a couple of months, nor would it win design awards, but why should it? It just needs to process transactions accurately and list a bunch of shops across a few countries. I do think that the global market for programming talent is like that for real estate here in Singapore: I pay around 2 grand a month, and my neighbours across the street something like 8-10 for the same space. It is what it is. You'd be amazed how "cheap" it can be to hire a greybeard these days, sometimes less than twice a fresh Stanford grad...

tracker1 12y ago
Not only that, but simply keeping an existing system from crushing itself under its' own weight... Knowing how/where you can effectively add caching, or even pre-aggregated data into an existing system can be the difference between a system going under, and being able to keep the single-instance database server from collapsing your business while a new system can be established.
jnbiche 12y ago
I'm pretty skeptical, too. At Google or Facebook (or wherever they were), they were working on a small slice of a massive pie. Building a complex site like Opentable from scratch is a different creature altogether. Two months "part-time" seems pretty optimistic. >It just needs to process transactions accurately and list a bunch of shops across a few countries. Yes, I hear this kind of off-the-cuff assessment frequently from potential clients, and I turn them down if I'm not able to help them see the complexity often involved. After all, opentable is a restaurant reservation system for the entire world. >You'd be amazed how "cheap" it can be to hire a greybeard these days, sometimes less than twice a fresh Stanford grad... This is true, and the open ageism among SV companies makes me incredibly sad.

by crdb 12y ago

tracker1 12y ago

Not only that, but simply keeping an existing system from crushing itself under its' own weight... Knowing how/where you can effectively add caching, or even pre-aggregated data into an existing system can be the difference between a system going under, and being able to keep the single-instance database server from collapsing your business while a new system can be established.

jnbiche 12y ago

I'm pretty skeptical, too. At Google or Facebook (or wherever they were), they were working on a small slice of a massive pie. Building a complex site like Opentable from scratch is a different creature altogether. Two months "part-time" seems pretty optimistic. >It just needs to process transactions accurately and list a bunch of shops across a few countries. Yes, I hear this kind of off-the-cuff assessment frequently from potential clients, and I turn them down if I'm not able to help them see the complexity often involved. After all, opentable is a restaurant reservation system for the entire world. >You'd be amazed how "cheap" it can be to hire a greybeard these days, sometimes less than twice a fresh Stanford grad... This is true, and the open ageism among SV companies makes me incredibly sad.