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Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team.

Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving?

I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for ranking works.

Fuck, even Google was a 20 year old algorithm.

We're building CRUD apps on what 20 years ago were $75 million dollar computers, not putting men on the moon with pocket calculators.

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Among many serious engineering projects at Facebook:

* HHVM (open source) - A PHP runtime and JIT compiler (http://www.hhvm.com/blog/)

* Presto (open source) - A distributed SQL query engine working on hundreds of petabytes of data (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-i...)

* Running graph algorithms on a graph with a trillion edges (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scaling-...)

* Open Compute (open source) - Custom designed data centers down to the motherboard (http://opencompute.org/)

Are (were) any of these essential for Facebook's success? I doubt it. They are by-products of Facebook hiring talented people after they already had a leading product.

Of course they are, facebook handles petrabytes of data. Their infrastructure will fall apart without such projects.

Yeah. OP has never worked near any of these companies. Writing some basic linear algebra routines in python doesn't mean you're doing the same work that Google has to.

Given that Facebook is motivated by profits, one must assume that these projects are, in fact, essential to the continued success of the product.

> one must assume that these projects are, in fact, essential to the continued success of the product.

In the same way that Google Reader, Google Wave, Google Base and dozens of other products were essential to continued success of Google for a while (before they were discontinued), just because they were developed at Google?

Almost all of these projects are the result of the size and scale of Facebook not the nature of the problem they are solving or their core business.

The nature of Facebook (or Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat) is a simple CRUD application that many people are capable of writing. The additional complexity is mostly due to the size of their user base.

As far as I am concerned, Evernote's core competency is their scanned document handling. Extracting meaningful information from bitmaps is not exactly an easy problem, but Evernote does it very well. Far better than a lot of other solutions I have looked at. Ultimately you need some CRUD to get the documents into that processing pipeline, but that doesn't mean it is just a CRUD app.

Now, we're maybe not talking cutting edge computer science research here, but I'm skeptical that the average programmer could put the same thing together in reasonable time. The algorithms involved are fairly complex and who knows what they had to discover on their own to achieve the desired results?

> Now, we're maybe not talking cutting edge computer science research here, but I'm skeptical that the average programmer could put the same thing together in reasonable time. The algorithms involved are fairly complex and who knows what they had to discover on their own to achieve the desired results?

How hard is it going to be for the "average programmer" to a) read a fucking research paper. b) optimize based on aforesaid paper to "achieve the desired results.". After all, every company in the bay who is anyone asks you enough C.S. fundamental questions.

I think you vastly overestimate the average programmer. Every company in the Bay area asks for CS fundamentals because they think they need a great tech team.

Though I agree most startups don't need amazing developers, some of the start-ups you listed do.

Evernote is far from a CRUD app, while the challenges of scale at Twitter were noticeable very early on. Facebook also had to overcome some serious scalability issues, though they were able to push those out to later in their growth.

AirBnb and SnapChat, you are probably correct about.

The thing about being a great brilliant tech team, to me, doesn't necessarily all come down to being the smartest technologists in the room. It's about being the best team for the chosen product. Developers who understand what they are building and why can influence and make good decisions for the long-term of the company, where others who may be smarter developers might not be able to see the long-term implications of some of their design decisions.

I disagree. Evernote, Airbnb, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could not be built without a great tech team.

Whether they solve new technical problems in the context of computer science is irrelevant to needing a great tech team to properly execute something like the aforementioned companies.

I think he means as a startup company you don't need the great tech team, you need the idea.

Yes, ability to execute is key, for the most part though you need people who are great with databases, rather than great at creating databases.

eg. Hire the guy that can optimize queries rather than the guy making PAXOS algorithms.

That's what I mean by great, and to be clear about startup I mean Facebook, et al, when they were at the stage of only having raised $5 mm, not Facebook post-IPO.

They may have not had 'hard' problems to solve as part of their core app.

But it seems as though, solving how to scale a CRUD app is a problem whose solutions are still being discovered.

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