Hacker News Reader

Comment by _yb2s | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I'm just naive, but I'm always confused when I see such a high headcount for companies with such simple tech, the staff of Twitter (even after mass layoffs) confuses me also.

I feel like these companies are solving a relatively simple problem, and a single skilled engineer working full time could probably make and maintain a decent scalable solution.

View on HN

I mean feel free to make the next Twitter with a single Engineer if you think it is possible.

Twitter is a weird example. The next Twitter has to be at least as good as Twitter without the growing pains. The initial product didn't scale well and probably was written quickly by very few people.

The author didn't say "early Twitter" they said Twitter.

They claimed you don't need more than one Engineer to run a product like Twitter in their post so I said they should try.

Simple tech at scale rarely stays simple.

An exchange is not simple tech. It isn't a simple problem.

Isn't it "an exchange at scale is not simple tech". I'd imagine I could build an exchange to handle 100 users pretty quickly.

True sign of the arrogant software engineer, believing they can single-handedly recreate an entire company just because they went to school in one subject for 4 years.

Such vitriol! It's safer to assume they're inexperienced than arrogant.

Pretty much the definition of arrogance, being inexperienced and still thinking they can do the work of a hundred people

I work at one such company and I still think most of us aren't needed. I swear it's 90% red tape and BS holding everyone back. I know I can build things 30x faster outside of work, but I will also confess that it might not meet at the accessibility guidelines and i18n and be user tested and so forth.

every profession does this. Have you ever spoken to marketers about how important marketing is? or accountants? most people have a massively outsized idea of their own role to the point they wonder what other people even do.

The only difference with engineers is they can believe at least in theory they could create the backbone of some services, so they could have a shoddy mvp made in a few days which they assume just needs a "little" work to top it off, whereas others can't start without tech help, but massively underestimate how much tech work is required for their ideas.

If you dont believe me, hang around a startup space and see how people talk about trying to find technical cofounders

Reply on news.ycombinator.com