[qxi]

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?

Worked for us at Twitch.

[spamizbad]

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?

[diminoten]

Oh come on, you know the performance profile of a streaming service is wildly different from a mobile ridesharing app...

Their surges are nothing like yours.

[Alupis]

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.

[glass_of_water]

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.

[Alupis]

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.

[jhall1468]

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.

[geezerjay]

> 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.

[sjg007]

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.

[stefan_]

Well, yeah, I would expect a mobile ridesharing app to have many many many order of magnitudes less server infrastructure than a streaming service.

It feels like you could fit half a Lyft into live low-latency transcoding and redistribution of just the top 10 streamers feeds on Twitch.

[stale2002]

Umm, everyone I know is trying to move off of any existing bare metal boxes that we have.

Source: also work at Twitch.

Oh, or are you making fun of using Bare metal?

[PhoenixReborn]

> 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.

[mylons]

true, true.