Why not employ an hybrid architecture of bare metal for base load augmented by cloud-based infrastructure for peaks, constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) for greener pastures?
What sort of promotion metrics did your peers experience? Are we talking lateral moves, with more interesting technologies, or are we talking about movement into leadership with significant pay bumps? Also: based on this experience, what's the best technology to invest in and then abandon completely because nobody else wants to deal with it?
It still stands... $8mm monthly is over 350 full time engineers making $250k annually (ya that doesn't cover hardware, but it just illustrates the point). That would be a 22% increase in Lyft's total number of employees.
If you have engineers making less than $250k annually, then you have a lot more staff. $8mm monthly is a LOT...
Amazon's clearly making a profit after $8mm monthly.
But it's not like Lyft would suddenly have 350 full time engineers developing new features. A large chunk of those engineers would be working on building and maintaining infrastructure that AWS provides.
The point stands... 350 engineers is an army of engineers... for $8mm monthly, it wouldn't be unreasonable to achieve 500+ engineers depending on salaries.
Lyft could definitely build and maintain their own infrastructure for this kind of money... probably do it better (customized to their needs) and cheaper.
All of that is ignoring payroll taxes (for your new, very large staff), shifting all of your tax-deductible operational expenses into tax limited capital expenses.
Businesses don't flagrantly throw around money just to upset people. There are huge advantages to offloading non-primary business costs to other businesses.
Netflix is doing this too. I think we can assume not all of them are just idiots that haven't figured out they could build this themselves.
> Businesses don't flagrantly throw around money just to upset people.
But businesses do throw around money for the wrong reasons, and keep on doing so if that's the status quo. No one gets fired for buying IBM.
> Netflix is doing this too.
IBM stuff was bought by a lot of people.
> I think we can assume not all of them are just idiots that haven't figured out they could build this themselves.
That statement is very misguided and misses the problem. For example if you built your infrastructure around a specific solution then you also end up building a team of professionals whose livelihood is tied to a specific supplier of said infrastructure.
> But businesses do throw around money for the wrong reasons, and keep on doing so if that's the status quo. No one gets fired for buying IBM.
Businesses are wasteful because that's the natural status of a bureaucracy. They aren't throwing away money on infrastructure because they are unaware, they are spending more than they potentially have to because infrastructure isn't their core business.
> IBM stuff was bought by a lot of people.
That's such a tired argument. Just because they could save money doesn't mean it's a good idea, and with Enterprise pricing from Amazon combined with tax advantages, you honestly have no idea how much "cheaper" it really is.
> That statement is very misguided and misses the problem. For example if you built your infrastructure around a specific solution then you also end up building a team of professionals whose livelihood is tied to a specific supplier of said infrastructure.
No, the fact that you think this is a "problem" is the problem. Do you honestly think dev ops guys couldn't figure out how to use a different tool? By your own logic, you also shouldn't build data centers because you end up building a team of professionals whose livelihood is tied to managing your own infrastructure.
> Businesses are wasteful because that's the natural status of a bureaucracy. They aren't throwing away money on infrastructure because they are unaware, they are spending more than they potentially have to because infrastructure isn't their core business.
That's not true at all. The "isn't their core business" argument is meaningless and absurd. Any company, big or small, does not want to waste 300M dollars on something they don't need, whether it's their core business or not, particularly when said company is still far from turning a profit.
> That's such a tired argument. Just because they could save money doesn't mean it's a good idea
You are aware you're stating that baseless assertion on a discussion on how a company which is burning through cash and looking for investors is needlessly wasting 300M on infrastructure costs.
> No, the fact that you think this is a "problem" is the problem.
Needlessly spending 300M dollars is a problem in every single business in any corner of the world. I have a hard time understanding how someone can throw around the baseless assertion that this sort of inefficient while operating at this particular scale is not a problem, and pointing out this problem... is the problem? That's crazy.
Probably they will do a lot of optimization once they go public. That will improve financials over a year which will help the stock unless it comes at the expense of growth. The name of the game is growth that’s what gets you the high multiples.
> constructed via a polyglot union of taped-together tools and lubricated by the daily tears of a hundred college hires only to regret it after the engineers who designed it have successfully used it as a springboard for promotion and departed with their accumulated arcane knowledge (and vested shares) for greener pastures?
I think the parent was pretty clearly sarcastic and suggesting that this was a bad idea.
Odin works really well but but only because it integrates so tightly with with the rest of the internal tooling. Without Apollo (another internal tool) to manage and orchestrate the deployment of packages that need Odin's secrets, it's a lot clumsier to use.
> In Michigan, I could easily offer everyone residential 500mbps to the home via fiber for $50/month and cover all costs, no problem. But only after we already had a few thousand customers. The cost for your very first customer is somewhere north of $50k/each, and prices don't become reasonable until your in the thousands.
Sounds like you could benefit from and ICO to gauge interest and raise the capital necessary for infrastructure development ;)
I work at Amazon too. Last year I wanted to collect compensation information about tech industry professionals (software engineering or PM) in Seattle. I created an anonymous Google Form and sent it out among my circle of friends.
I feel like this is something that traditional watch designers have known about for a long time. A modern adventuring watch is packed with a slew of chrono/navigation features, yet they're all accessible through the bezel or buttons around the case.
Worked for us at Twitch.