Hacker News Reader

You read about all these companies that are having issues hiring great engineers, yet when I check their product it seems to be just another DB driven site with social sprinkled around it.Please enlighten the non-engineers like myself, what is it that great engineers do at companies that are working on a website (ecommerce, social network, social media tools etc...)

View on HN

I can't speak to social networks or social media tools, but I can assure you that ecommerce has a lot of difficult problems to solve. To a first approximation, it's easy to throw up a LAMP site and sell random crap. Once you get beyond this and start trying to squeeze out profits by building and executing on various optimization problems, things get significantly more complex. Companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart have invested huge amounts of money into esoteric research to optimize supply chains, fulfillment processes, inventory control, promotional returns, energy usage, expected customer value, etc, etc, ad infinitum.

I do not think Amazon, and Wal-Mart had state of the art infrastructure when they first started.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com