> more than 600 software developers
Does anyone have a sense for how this breaks down? I would never have guessed so many full-time employees were necessary to maintain a CMS.
Does anyone have a sense for how this breaks down? I would never have guessed so many full-time employees were necessary to maintain a CMS.
When I was at NYT in 2021 there were like ~300 software developers. Which still seems like a lot but they have legacy COBOL (converted to java) systems to interact with the ancient printing press technologies around the world, a payments team instead of stripe, a lot of folks working on different apps ( cooking, audio, games, etc), data scientists working on the algorithms, an in house CMS with a lot of steps, probably tooling for all their podcast work, software for the customer support agents when people have issues, and the list goes on.
I'm still trying to figure out how to start up Aristo (ex-CIS) correctly. What a messy codebase...
Just open this (gift) article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/09/opinion/immig...
There was clearly a non-trivial amount of frontend development work necessary to build the dynamic visualization in this article. This has nothing to do with CMS's. The work has nothing to do with persisting data anywhere. It has nothing to do with backend anything. It's all frontend work to get a visualization in a browser. Absolutely nothing do with CMS's.
They have a much higher bar for quality and boutique solutions than almost any organizations.
Well they also run Cooking and Games, which has gotten pretty big. I imagine they have some hand in audio too.
They run their own services, such as messaging and ad delivery, too.
IIRC, they basically developed things like D3 and Backbone back in the day (or paid the maintainers)
“I run my basement website with in my spare time? Why can’t one of the most popular websites in the world run on gum and a few paper clips”
Traffic is not the primary driver of staffing. For a simple app, it is relatively straightforward to use commodity cloud offerings to scale to large volumes of traffic. Even something as simple as Heroku + a CDN can take a small team a long way.
But the NYT is not a simple app. I'm not even willing to accept that their CMS needs could be handled with an off-the-shelf CMS without modification. Without having worked there, I can see:
- CMSs for text/images, audio, video content - syndication for audio content - custom? subscription system - some kind of interface to the printing system - bespoke game studio - Web dataviz studio
plus all the stuff needed to run a company as big as the NYT, which will include lots of integrations between things like payroll, accounting, 3P ad networks, reporting, HR software, etc.
I haven't even included the people who might make use of the copious data generated by the business.
These things add up fast.
> Twitter (though not doing well as a business)
That's a heck of a caveat! Most businesses aim to do well as businesses, so current Twitter is not a great model.
Hacker News isn't exactly the kind of website for many millions of Internet users to engage with. Its interface and features work well for the kind of niche it serves, which is much smaller compared to many other websites. HN (at least the user-facing parts) seem to run on mostly the same code for years, where NYT likely needs to build many interactive, one-off features for the flavor of the day topic.
> Twitter (though not doing well as a business) was overloaded with tech employees.
I read this a lot and maybe it has a truth to it, though I remember before the Great Layoff of 2023 there was a time when Twitter was trying (and AFAICT often failing) to grow its business. One example is that they've tried (and failed) short-form videos way before Tiktok started. Today's Twitter seem to be in maintenance mode, and operates with less people.
Maybe it was 'overloaded' in the sense that it was the kind of business that could never grow and shrinking it down to the size where it can be profitable and squeezing it hard was the way to go, that I cannot know.
If anything, the cloud to onprem migration was best and maybe only move from Elon that made sense.
So yes, 10 skilled people could run a site that large (and do). But you can’t run a company to recruit and manage that team over decades. “Well just find 10 smart and motivated people who work well together and can be given autonomy to do the right thing and hope they give us what we want” is not an actionable management plan.
The answer is almost always: Cloud Costs, Kubernetes and Resume-driven architectures.
Legacy companies have armies of consultants building pretty decks with little end-product to show for it. Never questioned. Every industry has a certain amount of slack built in. Large institutions (big Hollywood, govt, defense, medical services) have oodles of bureaucracy. Tech looks like a paradise in comparison. Yes, tech workers should seek to be more efficient. But, when viewed from comparative lens, tech is in the top tier of efficient industries.
Personally, I am not sold on tech unions. But, tech workers have uniquely low leverage within their profession. Tech lacks paid overtime or paid on-calls. Engineers are routinely expected to work evenings for meetings with off-shore teams. There is limited mobility because unlike doctors or lawyers/ engineers/ hard-tech engineers.... SWEs are frequently managed by non-SWEs. The manner in which remote work was revoked is a canary for the lack of lobbying power among tech workers.
Yes, tech workers are paid upper-middle class wages. But, the quality of life afforded by the profession has gone for a plunge since the 2022 layoffs. Companies have revoked all the pros of covid (flexible & remote work replaced with mandatory in office days and 9-5 hours). But, they've kept all the negatives of covid (work never ends, notification on all devices, global teams, smaller offices, fewer in-office perks). It's like companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
To that end, I empathize with any tech coalition that wants to lobby for better 'worker rights'. Union strikes may be a suboptimal way of doing this. But, it's better than nothing.