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Comment by mikert89 | Hacker News Reader

im not buying that github is a unique engineering problem, harder than the rest of hyperscalars.

No one said it is unique. But if you take an infrastructure and engineering org that had been growing at 10% a year for a decade, you are going to have a different set of capabilities and practices in place. Adapting to a new reality of doubling every few months will predictably produce failures anywhere. GitHub is not unique in that regard.

ive spent 15 years in big tech companies, this problem is common and its why they pay engineers 500k-1M. this happens at meta literally all the time.

half of engineering in big tech is just rewriting a system to scale

microsoft is incompetent, they havent changed windows/excel/outlook in 30 years

Tell me about the time that an app at Meta grew at 10% a year for a decade and then began doubling every few months.

its probably happened on half the core teams, idk what you want me to say, it sounds like you dont have alot of experience

Don't dodge the question and attack the asker, that's rude.

Can you give an example?

Instagram, Facebook and even threads all had much more mundane growth rates and definitely no unexpected jumps like GitHub is experiencing. I'm sure if suddenly the solar system had 10 more earths with each about 10 billion people and they would all start using Instagram tomorrow we would have exactly the same growing pains and outages that GitHub has today.

Luckily for Meta agents are not yet as much into doomscrolling as humans are.

instagram growth rate != core service team in instagram growth rate

They have what amounts to an unlimited budget for AI spend. If it’s so fantastic, why can’t they let it crawl over every piece of their codebase, every metric, every log, and spot these problems before they occur?

“We misconfigured a sidecar” is something I would think AI could quite easily find and fix.

I don't know who you are responding to. I haven't made any statements about what AI can do for them. I would expect AI is making the situation worse, like it is in many dysfunctional tech organizations.

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