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Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

We've scaled infra ops from 3 to 7 people in the past few weeks. Our very first VP was a VP Infra Ops, because that's the thing we have to get best at to succeed as a business.

Note that we grew the whole company from 25 to 60 over the last six months.

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No offense but it's kind of wild to me that y'all had 3 infra operations people out of 60 hires.

As someone who had to do SRE-style work in a smaller company for a long time despite obsetnsibly being a backend dev, the institutional knowledge you get from "real" SRE people is so valuable, and makes me a bit hopeful for the future.

It was really 7 out of 60, but yes. We ran into two problems: 1) the infra ops jobs is pretty intensely difficult here and 2) actually building an infra ops _org_ instead of just hiring individual engineers and overloading them seemed important.

You might want to slow down on hiring, more people doesn't equal to solving the problem faster or better. It could be better to queue new sign ups to your service for a while, even if it's painful.

You've been around for a decade, I'm not giving you pity points. Can you provide what we want or not?

Not right now, no. We've been running this product for about 2.5 years.

So who's product have I been using?

https://fly.io/about/

Oh yes, I should edit. We launched this product a little over 2.5 years ago. We built a bunch of different things no one really wanted before that.

You should edit, but that's not my puppet to control, I only use this one.

So yeah, you've built a ton of shit nobody wanted as a product, been there, done that. You've convinced me fly doesn't fit business, we're done.

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