[asien]

> I think FB, Goog, etc. could lay off thousands with no adverse effects and in fact an increase in velocity, quality, and quantity of new features/products.

You can add Airbnb,Netflix,Uber they often attend conference to describe their architectures.It’s obvious most of these people have no idea what they are doing have no clear direction. They are just havin’ fun will trying to navigate corporates politics. Even the stuff that is published online it’s scary to see their is no technical leadership what so ever.

To be fair I’ve worked in fortunes 500 as well, 60% of the workforce can be replaced with automation.

Since it’s cheaper and less risky they just keep hiring people for repetitive tasks , it compensate the technical debt.

[jiggawatts]

There was a post here recently where a Netflix employee was proudly showing off their log processing system. Which was collecting the equivalent of nearly 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time.

In my mind, that's just bonkers, and no amount of handwaving could justify it.

[mistrial9]

> Which was collecting the equivalent of nearly 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time.

to clarify could you say the same thing, in a different way?

[Petersipoi]

For every minute that someone streams Netflix, 2 MB of data is logged. So if 1,000 people are using Netflix simultaneously, they're generating 2 GB of logs per minute.

[exdsq]

Warning: NPM packages are out of date x 1000000

[asien]

> 2 MB of logs per minute of user streaming time.

2MB/minute is 33KB/second.

How is that impressive?

[jaywalk]

I think it's impressive that they somehow found 33KB/second worth of data to log for each stream. I can't even imagine the amount of useless shit that must be logged to get to that number.

[westpfelia]

This is where I'm at. Like thats honestly not much log data. But what are they actually logging? I imagine there is a LOT of repetitive data.

[seti0Cha]

Detailed logging can function as an on-demand APM. Not a bad idea if you have the bandwidth and storage for it.

[zwily]

I think the impressive thing is how much data that is for each user-minute. What could they possibly be storing in 33KB for each second of Netflix you stream?

[bpicolo]

That's per user. So a million (or ten, 50...) active users means a lot more per minute.

[schmeckleberg]

i think you and the above poster are in vehement agreement. ingesting 2 MBs of logs per minute is impressive in its pluperfect unimpressiveness.

maybe the presentation was called "Timmy's first named pipe" or "Sally explores /etc/logrotate.d"

[FredPret]

That’s a LOT of text to describe me sitting on my couch. 2MB per minute is far more than the most detailed biography in existence.

[exdsq]

220m users. Let’s imagine 50m are streaming concurrently. That’s 100TB an hour in logs lol. They could be storing an entire petabyte of logs a day. My friend did some data center stuff for the large hadron collider and wasn’t hitting these data ingestion states, and these are just to record me binging the office.

[ummonk]

The comment said "log processing system". Sounds more like it's a stream and not stored logs.

[eightysixfour]

2 MB/per minute/per stream at Netflix scale is crazy.

[lbriner]

There is a lot of tokenism in hiring. A Fortune 500 might be marketing a new "push to AI" or whatever and want to seem legit by hiring loads of people, quickly realising that it doesn't work like that but at least it looks good on paper.

FANNG type companies are more likely to do a big hire after doing a big raise. Imagine someone has given you $300M, what do they expect? Now you have the money, we want more features = more sales = more ROI. How do we do that? By hiring a load more people and again learning that it doesn't work like that. Leave it a year or 2 and the same investors complain about burn rate so you lay them off.

[matwood]

Just a note, that ABNB did a huge layoff at the start of the pandemic which allowed them to come out the other side a much stronger company. Actually highlights your point.

[meowtimemania]

Was it the layoff that made them a stronger company or was it the market improving?

[matwood]

Both. When money is free flowing it's easy to avoid hard decisions (in business money hides many mistakes). Companies may continue to fund projects that should be cut or hire instead of optimizing a process. Prioritization alignment meetings end with everything is a priority.

In ABNBs case, business going to almost zero overnight was a forcing function to a level not often seen. After being forced to lean up and prioritize, they were well positioned for the market to improve.

[Apocryphon]

Seems the problem is that these massive companies hit a threshold in size and then everything is about self-perpetuation by creating large moats, even ones that don't make sense, hence you have teams and entire departments engaged in boondoggles that are wastes of time and resources.

Imagine Facebook pouring untold manpower and money into developing original content such as cloning HQ Trivia, for its also-ran streaming content that no one watches. Or even Facebook Reel, which mostly just reposts TikTok and Instagram material. Or the entire hopeless arena that is cloud gaming, where all of these tech companies are involved in with no service that has really taken off yet.

I suppose if the regulatory environment was to correctly deter these companies from staying so big and content and engaged in wasteful behavior, there would be actually more companies, and all of those people in the companies you mention would be distributed across smaller, nimbler, more customer-focused firms, with more competition and thus better choices for consumers. That's the theory, anyhow.

[captaincaveman]

Yeah but which thousand ...