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You can make most of the Big N sound silly like this. Amazon? Basically a warehouse. Netflix, YouTube? They just stream video. Facebook, Twitter? CRUD websites.

It all sounds like anyone can put something like that together, but try scaling up to billions of users.

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Exactly. And each one of these companies had built the business around a key idea. I interview a lot of candidates for data scientists, and one of my favorite questions is what makes one of these companies what they are.

For sure if you remove the scalability challenges and profits optimizations techniques, these websites aren't that exciting for engineers.

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