Ask HN: Is it normal for a company to need 6 FTE dev for a basic ecommerce site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it normal for a company to need 6 FTE dev for a basic ecommerce site?

2 pointsthrowawaynay5 comments

I had an interview with this company.

Their website is basically a mostly subscription-based ecommerce CMS, for physical products.

They have a lot of clients, but there doesn't seem no need anything remotely complicated on the website

The company is almost 10yo.

Does that make any sense to you?

Could it be terrible management/devs?

Or just some hidden complexity that I'm not seeing?

I'm pretty sure there is shopify websites more complicated than that made by one guy.

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The two key take always here are:

* lots of clients (their needs might differ considerably from each other. So it’s not unreasonable to assume an FTE per client or two)

* is there a dedicated design, et al team or are you, the developer, expected to wear multiple hats. Like CMS patch management, managing inventory updates, design / formatting the image assets etc.

Even CMSs like Magento can be a multi-person exercise to put live. And while there is down time between updates to the CMS (whether that is backend or frontend changes), that downtime could easily be absorbed by other clients in a multi-client eCommerce web shop.

So having 10 engineers doesn’t sound unreasonable but if you’re worried you should definitely ask what an average day is like in that role.

I work in a business that looks super easy on the outside yet full of case studies that could go into business books. Don't run on assumptions. Ask those questions. What a normal day for a dev looks like?

Can you meet the devs and discuss their workflow?

What's the backlog like?

These should give you some good indications

Depending on the extend of the project, it could be. Do the devs offer maintenance support, does the company use a "unique" ERP? Is there middleware involved to sync store and product info?

I am no webdev, but I would not want to develop such a project alone.

Or just some hidden complexity that I'm not seeing?

Yes, scheduling theory.

So many little features can add hidden complexity, whether or not it makes sense.

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