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Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

blog.railway.app

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Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#21

Post by fancyremarker »

theonething wrote: post #17

Can anyone comment on the security implications of using a service like this, render.com, fly.io, etc vs. rolling your own infra on AWS EC2 and friends?

It's possible for a PaaS to improve your security posture by implementing many of the security controls you'd otherwise be responsible for yourself. Every PaaS provider has a Shared Responsibility Model, like this one from AWS [0], and a good PaaS can eat up much of what would otherwise be your responsibility as an AWS customer: network architecture, secure configuration, IAM, system access (and auditing), intrusion detection, etc.

On the other hand, many PaaS providers obfuscate their security implementation, and ultimately your data could be compromised by their mistakes. Things you should look for when evaluating PaaS providers:

- How are resources, networks, etc. separated/isolated per customer?

- What are YOUR security responsibilities on the platform?

- How transparent is the provider about their security controls? Do they have security whitepapers, SOC 2 reports, etc. that are transparent and legit? Better yet, can they prove to you in the product how security controls are being implemented?

Disclaimer: I'm the CEO and founder of Aptible [1], a PaaS specifically built to meet and prove security requirements for companies in regulated/high-compliance environments.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/shared-responsibility-mode...

[1] https://www.aptible.com/

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#22

Post by ipaddr »

I checked out the open positions. There were more positions open than total employees. Are those real positions you are looking to fill or always open positions that rarely result in an actual job?

I asked this because the interview process has this step where you ask the candidates to do a project and than go over it with someone. One of these little projects is design our api or build a github issue viewer frontend/backend. You still have 4 more rounds after someone invested all that time.

The amount of effort to work here seems high and the chances of the position existing and you filling it is so low. I feel bad for the many looking for work.. do you invest 10+ hours in a process where a job may not exist in the first place and the company brags about the goal of one person servicing a million

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#23

Post by ryanSrich »

nitsuaeekcm wrote: post #16

What an impressive company. A good reminder that, even in a market with umpteen competitors, success comes down to execution. Hope they keep up the good work.

Railway does look impressive. However, as someone in the market for a Heroku alternative - I’d say there really aren’t any Heroku competitors. At least nothing directly comparable. The thing that keeps me (and I’m sure other small business owners) tied to Heroku is just how much they take care of for you. I literally never ever want to think about my infrastructure beyond initial setup. Heroku, to my knowledge, is the only provider that allows me to do this while servicing more than 100,000 users.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#25

Post by glenngillen »

ipaddr wrote: post #22

I checked out the open positions. There were more positions open than total employees. Are those real positions you are looking to fill or always open positions that rarely result in an actual job? I asked this because the interview process has this step where you ask the candidates to do a project and than go over it with someone. One of these little projects is design our api or build a github issue viewer frontend…

I can’t speak for the Railway team, but I am hiring at an early stage startup myself. There is absolutely no way we’d extend offers for all of the roles we have open if a candidate arrived for all of them next week. Growing that much so quickly would be a disastrous onboarding experience for most of the new hires and potentially risk our ability to build a consistent culture with the team. So we’ll hire whichever candidate(s) successfully complete the process first and then pause the other roles until we’re ready to onboard more people.

Then there’s also the reality at this stage you need people who can wear multiple hats. And there’s a bunch of roles where your ideal candidate doesn’t have a neat pre-established label. So sometimes we’ll post the exact same role with different titles to try and make sure it gets the attention of someone who most strongly aligns with one of those job titles.

At a previous place we worked remotely, and so the same job would be posted as both remote and then also as a dozen different specific city locations too. But if we were hiring multiple of any roles you wouldn’t multiply that, you’d just post the one listing(s) and keep it open until all the positions were filled.

A jobs page is a marketing artefact for potential hires, it’s not a financial reporting/forecasting tool.

TLDR: don’t make any assumptions from a job board about how many roles a company is realistically hiring for.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#26

Post by jorts »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #24

Those numbers are absolutely meaningless. I work at Amazon and most teams do not have a single support engineer despite serving hundreds of millions of customers. The number of employees in the position X is absolutely meaningless.

It depends on the type of product. If you're selling to consumers versus businesses, engineers versus HR, how mission critical your product is, etc... Given they're selling a mission critical piece of infrastructure it's a high ratio.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#27

Post by kazanz »

ndneighbor wrote: post #10
swatcoder wrote: post #6

Congratulations on achieving this milestone and probably keeping your customers very satisfied along the way, but I eagerly look forward to the future where everyone is so sick of virtual assistants, bots, and knowledge bases that a low ratio is what gets celebrated as a growth milestone rather than a high ratio. Automated triage is great for digital companies that want to scale cheaply, but not so great for the peop…

Honestly, you hit the nail on the head on what drives me. Before this I was a PM, and way even before that- I was an Infra Engineer. I think that brick-wall of contact when working on some Enterprise tool was what got me. ESPECIALLY so when there was a bug blocking my company and it felt like no one cared. When I first joined- this is why I would take great pains to respond to everyone extremely quickly. When I reali…

Agreed. Where I work now (Hivelocity) is a breath of fresh air. There are so many support techs, that every ticket is answered within minutes. It's definitely not cheap to do, but the customers are always happy when they can get almost instant support for their dedicated servers.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#28

Post by nirvdrum »

daydream wrote: post #18
swatcoder wrote: post #6

Congratulations on achieving this milestone and probably keeping your customers very satisfied along the way, but I eagerly look forward to the future where everyone is so sick of virtual assistants, bots, and knowledge bases that a low ratio is what gets celebrated as a growth milestone rather than a high ratio. Automated triage is great for digital companies that want to scale cheaply, but not so great for the peop…

When I have a problem with a service my ultimate goal is to get it solved - as fast as possible. If I can solve my problem though an automated support channel that’s actually better! Because I don’t need to wait for a human to do something. Computers don’t sleep, take lunch breaks, etc. The problem with google/Facebook/etc isn’t that they don’t have human support. It’s that when your account gets locked out there’s n…

I don't think many people will disagree. But, Google has been doing it longer than almost anyone and has an amazing technical team and it's still an incredibly frustrating experience. By all means, keep investing in the technology. But have a plan B that can solve the problem.

For better or worse, slow, biologically constrained humans can often understand and solve problems when given the authority to do so. (I'm well aware there are horrible human support options.)

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#29

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

theonething wrote: post #17

Can anyone comment on the security implications of using a service like this, render.com, fly.io, etc vs. rolling your own infra on AWS EC2 and friends?

A digital ocean server and caddy should be all you need unless your app has millions of users.

Re: Serving 250k developers with one support engineer

#30

Post by trevor-e »

urbandw311er wrote: post #20

Not sure this is something I’d be bragging about. What happens when you do eventually have a major outage and need to rapidly provide reassurance and tailored support to hundreds of people. Like when Atlassian deleted thousands of JIRA tickets by mistake and seemed completely unprepared to scale up their support.

Is that something you can reasonably prepare for as a company? Like just keep a bunch of extra support people on payroll in case there's a catastrophic event?
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