Is this comment made every time by hacker news people?
“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”
“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.