[thesz]

Early Stack Overflow, in 2008, was an effort of mostly one engineer (Jeff Atwood) and scaled on that single man power to the tens of thousands of users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Overflow

It is NOW that Stack Overflow may have more than one engineer working on it.

[altmanaltman]

I think you're getting caught up on the wrong thing here. The issue isn't that monoliths can scale. The issue is the inherent flaw in their logic within the confines of the post.

Netflix also didn't appear into existence with an army of engineers. It also scaled from a few engineers to what it is today. Which means you can scale using both depending on your setup. That cannot be the reason why you pick one arch over another. The reason has to do with your own setup, your company, and the application's specific context, all of which the author is missing.

Broadly, it feels like decision making without context/understand the why behind the decisions.

The specific comment has nothing to do with how Github or Stack Overflow scaled etc.

[thesz]

We do not know whether Netflix had microservices from the start, even at the start of their video-on-demand service.

In my daily job I see an effort to bring distributed system into a more monolith one, because it is just easier to debug.

[altmanaltman]

The comment is not based on Netflix or Stack Overflow. Just the person making the decision not having any consistent basis in their reasoning. There is a reason why they are self-admittedly not very good at their job.

I have explained it enough, not sure what you're missing at this point.

[thesz]

  > not sure what you're missing at this point.

We are talking with audience reading our comments. You think you are talking to me but you are talking to much wider audience.

Everyone, including me, are making some assumptions when we are writing something. When it is technical, it is easy to verify - obtain source code, run it, check results. When it is somewhat managerial, it is much harder to verify.

For example, original post emphasizing Stack Overflow being scaling monolith (pun intended) may refer to the point of time when SO were run by basically one man, yet scaling.

You dismiss it, that's okay. You do not answer my or OP points, that's okay too.

Our readers are smart enough to judge OP (and ours) points on their merits.

[altmanaltman]

> Our readers are smart enough to judge OP (and ours) points on their merits.

If we go solely by that criterion, the upvotes on the original comment do prove that people are smart enough to judge the points on their merits. It was good talking to you and to a much wider audience through you.