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Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

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Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#111

Post by brianchu »

aryastark wrote: post #105
staunch wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I could duplicate the entire thing in about a day with inotify and rsync. The scaling is mostly on Amazon. No, you could duplicate a narrow piece of Dropbox's functionality in a day. You could not even get anywhere near duplicating the product and the service in anything less than months.

Dropbox pretty much uses librsync and, I believe, inotify on Linux. With Amazon S3. That is Dropbox. Literally. Polishing any product takes time. But that's universal and has nothing to do with engineering. What exactly is non-trivial about Dropbox?

Some of the technical challenges I can think of:

1. Version control.

2. LAN sync.

3. Dropbox probably also does a lot to try and minimize their S3 costs - so probably a good deal of compression/duplication-detection on the backend.

4. Any and all networking issues. Even if using OSS gets you 98% of the way, Dropbox probably gets you 100% of the way.

5. Performance. I don't know what Dropbox is doing, but about a year ago I tested out Google Drive, SkyDrive, Dropbox, and SugarSync. I didn't want to use Dropbox because it gives you the least free storage, but Dropbox was consistently 2x faster than the competition (without using LAN sync). That makes a huge difference so I switched to it, and if Dropbox engineers are beating out Google and Microsoft engineers, they're clearly doing something special.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#112

Post by zwass »

fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

Among many serious engineering projects at Facebook:

* HHVM (open source) - A PHP runtime and JIT compiler (http://www.hhvm.com/blog/)

* Presto (open source) - A distributed SQL query engine working on hundreds of petabytes of data (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-i...)

* Running graph algorithms on a graph with a trillion edges (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scaling-...)

* Open Compute (open source) - Custom designed data centers down to the motherboard (http://opencompute.org/)

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#113

Post by rfnslyr »

StavrosK wrote: post #93
brianpgordon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HFTs. This story hit HN a couple of months ago: > A year into his new job he had a job offer from UBS, the Swiss bank, and a promise to bump up his salary to $400,000 a year. Serge didn’t particularly want to leave Goldman Sachs just to go and work at another big Wall Street firm, and so when Goldman offered to match the offer, he stayed. http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol... But yeah, reali…

This baffles me a bit. Why would you even want this much money? These sums of money are comfortably beyond anything I could reasonably spend, so after a certain amount it's all moot. You could live in a nice, cheap country with a good standard of living instead, and spend a tenth of what you make while living very well with your family. People keep wanting more money and what do they do? Get a car. Get a house. Get a…

Money is freedom. Simple.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#114

Post by theboss »

czbond wrote: post #110
theboss wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in 2004 but this is 2013. Rails, iOS, Digitalocean, heroku, aws, with a front-end designer. You no longer need to know anything about infrastructure.

Until you scale. I've met too many developers who say this until they're in a high growth environment.

My original point exactly. They get all these rails cloud heroku iOS guys and then how aren't the startups trapped? Ive never seen a job posting for an infrastructure all-around-guy

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#115

Post by eshvk »

randomdata wrote: post #108
fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

As far as I am concerned, Evernote's core competency is their scanned document handling. Extracting meaningful information from bitmaps is not exactly an easy problem, but Evernote does it very well. Far better than a lot of other solutions I have looked at. Ultimately you need some CRUD to get the documents into that processing pipeline, but that doesn't mean it is just a CRUD app. Now, we're maybe not talking cutti…

> Now, we're maybe not talking cutting edge computer science research here, but I'm skeptical that the average programmer could put the same thing together in reasonable time. The algorithms involved are fairly complex and who knows what they had to discover on their own to achieve the desired results?

How hard is it going to be for the "average programmer" to a) read a fucking research paper. b) optimize based on aforesaid paper to "achieve the desired results.". After all, every company in the bay who is anyone asks you enough C.S. fundamental questions.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#116

Post by randomdata »

eshvk wrote: post #115
randomdata wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I am concerned, Evernote's core competency is their scanned document handling. Extracting meaningful information from bitmaps is not exactly an easy problem, but Evernote does it very well. Far better than a lot of other solutions I have looked at. Ultimately you need some CRUD to get the documents into that processing pipeline, but that doesn't mean it is just a CRUD app. Now, we're maybe not talking cutti…

> Now, we're maybe not talking cutting edge computer science research here, but I'm skeptical that the average programmer could put the same thing together in reasonable time. The algorithms involved are fairly complex and who knows what they had to discover on their own to achieve the desired results? How hard is it going to be for the "average programmer" to a) read a fucking research paper. b) optimize based on af…

I think you vastly overestimate the average programmer. Every company in the Bay area asks for CS fundamentals because they think they need a great tech team.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#117

Post by meowface »

theboss wrote: post #114
czbond wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you scale. I've met too many developers who say this until they're in a high growth environment.

My original point exactly. They get all these rails cloud heroku iOS guys and then how aren't the startups trapped? Ive never seen a job posting for an infrastructure all-around-guy

>Ive never seen a job posting for an infrastructure all-around-guy

I've seen plenty of such job postings, though typically for big boring companies; not startups.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#119

Post by poissonpie »

The trouble is less that CEOs believe they have a superior tech team, because any set of reasonably smart people working on a problem domain day in, day out will eventually gain a level of expertise in that domain beyond what most people have. The problem is, to believe you have more innate talent than others, rather than accepting that hard work is what makes people good at what they do. Arrogance is an easy trap to fall into though. Creating a truly humble team is the real challenge.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#120

Post by lazyjones »

zwass wrote: post #112
fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

Among many serious engineering projects at Facebook: * HHVM (open source) - A PHP runtime and JIT compiler ( http://www.hhvm.com/blog/ ) * Presto (open source) - A distributed SQL query engine working on hundreds of petabytes of data ( https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-i... ) * Running graph algorithms on a graph with a trillion edges ( https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scal…

Are (were) any of these essential for Facebook's success? I doubt it. They are by-products of Facebook hiring talented people after they already had a leading product.
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