That actually makes a lot of sense, thanks for the pointer!
379 karma · joined April 19, 2014
I would contest the notion that a person who's been developing software for three years is in the middle of their career, though - even leaving the semantics aside, I see no way that's not a junior profile.
We are definitely going to consider all the suggestions in this thread, including hiring remote workers and increase our investment to stand out more.
In a way, what is making me doubt the tool is that I haven't received a single application that I could even consider interviewing - just clearly copypasted messages from developers on the other side of the world. I guess I'll see it through when we switch to other candidate search platforms in a few days...
As noted elsewhere in the thread, please keep in mind that salaries in Europe are generally much lower compared to the States :)
A salary of €40,000 results in a monthly take-home of about €2,540 (http://ie.thesalarycalculator.co.uk/salary.php) - plus pension, which is a fairly good salary in a city like Dublin for a developer at the beginning of his career (of course you would starve in SF with the same money!).
Sadly all I got so far are applications coming from India and China from people who clearly didn't read the ad and will just apply to anything.
This paragraph really gave me chills... A lot of insight about her thought process, and a bit terrifying in my opinion.
Aside from that, good luck with your efforts from a fellow Italian :-)
Just joking - thanks for the work you guys put in, this is definitely one of the most interesting place on the web :)
I've been using Mongo happily to provide online analytics solutions, but the advantage is mostly from the development side, not really from the performance side.
On the other hand, this kind of approach is great for attribute matching, which is usually a nightmare to do properly with a RDBMS.
We know from the provided data that their architecture can compile and serve a page in about 33ms. This includes everything that is not web servers, so we are certain that the actual time spent in the webserver will be lower.
Aside from that, we know that their webservers are nowhere near full CPU usage (they claim 15-20%). This also goes in the direction of not invalidating the use of 33ms as an upper bound. We would need to know more about why they have 9 webservers in the first place to get a better idea of what's going on (mostly how the I/O is behaving, I'd say).
Putting this assumptions together, we can safely assume that by shrinking the number of webservers from 9 to 3 wouldn't cause the page loading time to increase to more than 100ms (and it's likely going to be much smaller in most conditions).
Of course, this may be overlooking some piece of information we may be missing (the prime example still being I/O-related).
edit: I see now that in the original post I stated "roughly" 100ms, while it would have been better to say "at maximum".
edit: a few additional details - from a few years ago, alas http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/3/3/stack-overflow-arch...
If they are capable of rendering any question page in 33ms, it stands to reason they could use just 3 web servers and still serve content in roughly 100ms (which is fast enough that most people wouldn't notice).
My point is, without knowing what is the bottleneck for the web servers (we only know it's not CPU - I suspect it should be I/O) it's hard to make this kind of point.
Aside from that, I think I remember the original development team was already familiar with C#/.NET, and this drove the decision for the original stack.