kaspm

I know for a long time the engineering team was not very big, certainly not the "usual" size of a team with that much traffic (Instagram not withstanding). My guess is the team was simply keeping up with the normal expansion of complexity that comes with scale.

That said, I believe they are heavily recruiting at all levels so if you want to work for Reddit, apply now.

Hi, I have just joined The Baby Box Co. to use technology to help drive down infant mortality. If working on these kinds of problems interest you, we're hiring in Los Angeles. Please email me at jason (at) thebabyboxco.com.

The key here is that he had the financial backing to complete the project. Unclear whether the original poster has enough of a cash runway to keep even a team of 1 at a fulltime salary.

But this is the fundamental point of the article. It's very difficult to do marketing, communities, competitive analysis market research payroll and accounting when you have no money and no product. So what can non-technical co-founder bring to bootstrapping a SaaS platform with just ideas? May not be possible.

All of these answers are too simplistic. There's no single answer in what to learn to become a software engineer. If you have no development background, learning javascript, node, react is a way to start down the path then build your skills as you progress.

Personally, I recommend learning domain modeling and understanding entity relationships, primary and foreign keys then SQL. Great foundation for engineers at most companies.

See here's the thing... as a "seasoned" engineer who now has work-life balance, I was once a 20-something engineer working for pizza on crud apps in the office on Sunday, that time _is_ fun. It was super satisfying and fulfilling to learn new tech, create something, solve a business problem and get a raise and promotion because of it. Even doing that some weekends, I still had plenty of time to hang out with friends and fly drones (hack TiVos in my case) or whatever.

As I got older, got married, had kids, that time is now spent helping my kids grow up. I have other things that take precedence over it. Honestly, I still think it would be fun to hack out a project for work on a weekend. I just don't have that luxury anymore.

I like my life equally (or rather, I try to not constantly judge my life) now as I did then but it's different.

Hopefully your 40-year old employee brings something different to the table - domain expertise, ideas born of repetition, lack of mistakes, dedication to quality craft that is equivalent to the raw output of your 20-something.

This quote makes me picture the Black Mirror episode: Nosedive. I hope this is not the future of employee feedback.

I think s/he was saying that the article implied that, not the commenter. Commenter was complimenting the good turn of phrase.

I suspect the hits will keep coming [1]

[1] https://medium.com/@amyvertino/my-name-is-not-amy-i-am-an-ub...

It's great that Kalanick moved quickly but between this and the other incidents, I don't think it's going to be enough. Kalanick himself may have to resign. Given a good competitor in Lyft and the relatively low barrier to entry on the core business, it will be difficult to weather this storm.

I think we're already seeing this in regards to YouTube monetization, there are a few YouTubers at the top of the pyramid making money and their content is increasingly "professional" - albeit with an air of amateur needed to connect to audiences. But the rest of the pyramid has collapsed and with it the MCN industry built on the idea that there was monetization scale in crappy content.

This brings up a point I've thought about quite a bit with autonomous vehicles. I studied transportation planning in college and one of the tenants is that human drivers are on a spectrum between aggressive and conservative about finding efficiencies in high traffic situations. The canonical example is that if a lane next to you is going significantly faster, an aggressive driver will perform a (relatively) unsafe maneuver to cut off drivers in the faster lane and change lanes.

IIRC, significant research has been performed to identify whether the resulting lane change is net positive (frees space in the slower lane) or net negative (causes cut off car to slow down).

If autonomous vehicles prioritize safety over efficiency by stopping if there's an ambiguous intersection, will that have a net negative effect on traffic while all these self-driving cars slow down for each other.

It depends on the company but I would say the thing about Washington and this article makes this point well is that there are a significant number of people actively trying to prevent you from doing anything big because they disagree with your goal. In a company, that's less often the case, although I have seen it at larger places.

Agreed, without some context as to who is behind this survey I am reluctant to fill it out.

The replies to your comment took a turn to whether we will need programmers or we won't need programmers in the future, let me take it in a different direction.

I think what he's explaining is that for most (maybe all? no empirical evidence to back this up) programming and computer software in general is a means to solving a problem.

Operating Systems solve the problem of needing a foundation in which to develop higher-level tools that enable computing. Whether the higher-level problems are complex astrophysics calculations or hailing a ride, as you travel down the stack, each piece of software is solving some problem domain.

Point of this sentence is to say, as you move forward in your career, you (usually?) develop knowledge of an industry, a customer base, a constituency or some other problem domain in which you combine your skill in engineering with your knowledge of the domain.

If you don't do this, and you say "I can do anything but I have no special knowledge of any problem" then it's more likely a person with both problem-specific knowledge and engineering knowledge will be given the job.

However, there are so many problem domains in the world of computing, it's very easy to pick one or two that interest you personally.

I still have my first BASIC program for the TI-99 stored on a cassette in storage. My grandpa, who was an engineer at Parsons in Pasadena, bought it for me when I was 5 years old. My then 9-year old cousin then taught me how to program (Hi David, if you're reading this). We're both engineers now.

The program, incidentally, counts to 1,000,000 and outputs each number on the screen, it took 3 days to run.

I would add that the disruptive innovation also cannibalizes your existing market business in addition to being something that customers do not want now but will want in the future. If you build something that customers do not want now but will want in the future and it does NOT impact your existing business, that's also just regular old innovation.

I would like to know this too! Say my team has 40 people on it. Every month at least, someone asks what do "40 people do?" and I take them through it 2-4 people at a time across several lines of business maintaining and improving lots of software.

Would be amazing to see some people break down their teams publicly!

Yeah okay. I think there is a very large group of developers who work in just such an environment: developing web applications that have a "production" version whether they are public internet or internal to companies where the previous version would literally _never_ be consumed. The reason to track a increment in that kind of environment is as a code to align feature requests to a particular release (usually by date), this is useful for all sorts of internal tracking questions like: was this feature I requested live by 4/1/2016.

I personally dislike using semvar for these instances (my own opinion only) because it feels overcomplicated as you stated. I also learned a long time ago that _any_ kind of date designator was a recipe for answering why the "April" release was actually live on June 1st ;). Recently, I've dropped back to Git SHA-1 which has alignment to a specific version of code released AND can be tracked by date and deploy tools.

So I agree with the thesis, disagree with the solution, but still think ryan_lane did not effectively refute it above.

That's a fair counterpoint to the article but your example above only demonstrates the library case. You should provide an example that demonstrates the value of semver in a CD, always-on top-level application to give information about schema, cache and configuration incompatibilities.

to defend the author here, I think they were very clear that semver may not make sense for a very specific type of CD, always-on application. The article supports the thesis as stated in text, but the title is too broad.

This is likely an organizational, rather than a technical problem. Having worked for large media organizations, often different parts of the site are different deployable applications that share only a hardware device or small nginx or haproxy layer if they're on the same subdomain. It may be that in order to enable SSL on all parts of nytimes.com you need to affect ssl termination at a higher layer on a number of different servers/deploy locations which requires time and testing.

It's also possible that terminating the SSL and then passing through unsecured traffic lower in the stack is not ideal due to where the different parts of the site are hosted - e.g. passing traffic unsecured back and forth between private DC and public cloud.

Note: All speculation based on having implemented SSL migrations at large media companies.

Based on some of the other commenters, depending on the industry there may NOT be people with industry experience because of the layoffs and hiring ramps of the 80s and 90s at certain types of companies, people in the middle never gained the 20 years of experience in that field

An interesting grass is always greener perspective. I have an impression that if you studied C and embedded programming, switching into a Google environment and working on the web is much easier than if you started with Web/HTML and tried to switch into embedded systems.

I took the web route and always dreamed about tackling C and embedded systems. I did some hobby work to learn it but without doing it every day at work, tough to keep it going.

There are those of us, of a certain age, for whom the "web" was at best a novelty while we were in school. Even through the original .com bubble, becoming a web programmer wasn't the same as "CS". EE and CS were disciplines for which you got hired at Microsoft (gold standard at the time), Oracle, Western Digital, HP (on the decline), etc. It wasn't that cool.

Then Google happened. Google elevated the Web into a real software engineering platform, and suddenly this novelty thing we were doing was taken over by the hardcore CS graduates.

Our friends and family were like "why don't you go work for Google" and we had to explain how what Google does and what we do are different.

I think that for some people, especially those who have worked in Web their whole careers, the desire to work in that kind of product environment is very appealing. So I would say this person is probably legit in their desire to work at Google.

I have no opinion on whether working at Google is worth it or not. But even if you end up not liking it, I suspect just being there opens a ton of future doors. It's a win-win if this guy is successful.

Perhaps "media" is too broad a term. I think there's a concentration of certain types of industries - entertainment video, gaming, ecommerce, adtech, automotive, some fintech, some social media.

What there isn't a lot of is "engineering", "cloud", "enterprise" technology. The GitHubs, Herokus, AWSs of the world are not yet here in LA. For those of us who are engineering focused, we generally do tech for companies that don't "sell" technology to other engineers, that's focused in SF and Seattle. Not any less valid just a different audience.

Worked in Tech in Los Angeles since 2000. Although lesser known as "tech" companies, there are several companies that have large investments in serious technology in LA:

Disney NBCU (specifically Fandango, parts of former M-Go) Ticketmaster/Live Nation eHarmony Edmunds.com The Honest Company

Other Tech companies left off the list: Hulu Yahoo (much smaller than before) AOL Hyperloop One and Faraday Future are coming up

It's possible that

> As for me personally, it’s been quite a journey over the past few years, taking a broad-based set of projects and initiatives and growing a focused business that is on a strong trajectory. And I’ve decided this is the right juncture to step aside from my CEO role.

could mean "I've been fired because although we're spinning this as a market failure, I didn't have any viable plans to make it successful"

Usually if they are voluntarily stepping aside, they've got the next thing lined up.

Does anyone who has worked in software for any period of time not realize this? Computers are dumb they (generally) repeat the same tasks reliably _compared to humans_. Occasionally there are system failures but most failure are caused by code or configuration changes, especially when they interact with inputs and systems in untested ways.

I believe it's spelled "Stroustrup"