Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KaiserPro | Hacker News Reader

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Take a new site for example

Its just text and pictures on a web page. The new york times re-invented a database out of kafka to power theirs (mind bogglingly stupid)

The Guardian re-wrote their CMS at least 4 times, at a cost of well over 50 million, if not more. Thats before they got to re-doing the layout.

The FT spent 6(!) years rebuilding their entire stack, (150 tech staff for 6 years. a good percentage contractors. > £70million)

All of it is just fucking text on a fucking web page. All that effort to add fancy gizmos for hosting, optimising for framework x, which has a half life of 6 months, adding animation to drop downs. Just a spectacular waste. They are still re-platforming every 9 months, each of the 5 major teams.

All of that money could have been put into content, advertising for customers, collaborations & events.

Most news sites can get away with a static, highly cached system (I mean look at the Daily mail, the page is slow, static and looks like shit, yet its the biggest new paper site online)

So form a business perceptive, its spaffing money up the wall for no real gain.

I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. At the end of the day, it's all ego driven development. Nobody wants to think that their job has already been solved, and what's left is mundane and boring [engineering wise]. And so the business ends up with using a distributed log to handle a data set that could fit on a big thumb drive.

can confirm. media companies spent the last decade alternating between redesigns and cms migrations in a circular path that went nowhere while fb & goog ate not just their lunch but their breakfast and dinner too. the vast majority of it was driven by engineering-management-career resume-building and was actively detrimental to the editorial/content-production/journalism side of the house.

> [T]he vast majority of it was driven by engineering-management-career resume-building and was actively detrimental to the editorial/content-production/journalism side of the house.

Why didn't the non-technology side prevent this if it was so clearly detrimental? I can't imagine that the technology side of a media concern has that much influence over the company's overall priorities.

because editorial say: "we want the website to do x" the tech team say ok we'll need 100 staff, and six months.

then, after delivery, the tech team "we need 50% more staff to do this thing, its really good, it'll save 25% in our hosting costs"

Editorial then say: "sure, deliver this feature as well"

This continues, and then deadlines are missed. So tech say: "We have so much tech debt we need to re-architect" which allows ego/CV driven design.

I've tried to reply to this three times and its hard to without writing a book.

The shortest possible answer is that investors/owners/boards were watching what happened to sites like reddit/huffpo/bi/instagram/tumblr and salivating out of control at the word "billion". They believed that if they starved their editorial operations and bet most of the cashflow on growing their tech teams that "user generated content" would make up the difference. It was very simple math that said "media companies are valued at 10x profits, tech companies are valued at 10x revenue, lets do whatever we can to give the appearance of being a tech company not a media one".

Within those companies tech departments it became open season for CTOs, VPEngs, DevOps Directors and sr/lead/architect devs to engage in a peer-to-peer-ddos of architectural and tech-fad-chasing ones-up-manship. Because the only penalty for it all turning out to be too much was having to grow your headcount.

In 2016/2017 it all finally collapsed. Most of the companies have faded to layoffs and/or acquisitions. Many have basically frozen and given up on their tech stacks in-place. A large number have abandoned ship to wordpress (where imho they should have been all along).

Sometimes I wonder what the general state of "the media" or "journalism" would be now if 80% of that money had gone to hiring content creators, or even just paying the same number of content creators the 30% more it would take for it to be an adult job not a early-20-something job. An awful lot of the salaciousness and outrage-stoking in media right now is a byproduct of the actual jobs being very young people sitting in place all day garnering all their information from social media feeds and trying to hit their 2 - 5 posts (sorry 'articles') a day quota. We all think we're critiquing journalistic institutions when we point it out but really we're just yelling at kids. Blaming them for not being able to achieve the standards we're used to with 3 hour to deadline in their permalance gig, when what we got used to was written by mid-career people with benefits who had all day and sometimes week.

Media isn't stoking outrage culture, its clinging to it as the last source of pennies left before the nothing.

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