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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

40?!

Are they trying to prove the infinite monkey theorem, empirically?

I don't think really. Based on some discussion, it seems they are more adding a pile of new servers everyday, and they also seem to do a very good job at automating their process etc.

Can't be that good if they need 40 more keyboardists.

They do a lot of A/B testing. So you need to code each feature a few times to see which implementation results in more conversions.

It's not what a startup would do, correct, but they are swimming in money and this practice apparently gets them even more.

I don't think the number of servers you need is even loosely related to the number of devs you need.

You need more people to manage 1,000 servers than you do for managing just 10. Sure, you can automate processes, but as automation becomes more sophisticated it takes more time and resources to build and maintain. So, yes, the number of devs does not grow linearly with the number of servers, but maybe it grows logarithmically, or even slower. But it does grow.

Note they are looking for developers, not sysadmins.

Yes, 1000 servers translates to roughly 40 racks and you'd better have a team of sysadmins to babysit them.

Imho that doesn't have much to do with hiring 40 perl developers in one fellow swoop, though.

They are also looking for DBAs if your skills lean that way.

I've worked with them as an affiliate and they have a pretty good system. The travel industry as a whole is pretty fast moving.

I've worked with them as an affiliate too - and their XML service, in some cases, is very slow compared to their competitors - like orders of magnitude slow. I hope 40+ engineers can help them catch up with the rest. Although 40 seems like a crazy number.

I find IAN to be much slower than booking.com or Priceline, but maybe that was just a personal experience of mine and doesn't reflect the usual case.. hmm..

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