Re:Downtime
by thesethings on Tuesday December 07, 2010 @02:24AM
(#1978315)
As a longtime Tumblr user, I can tell you serious performance/ frequent down blips/ bugs/ issues have been there for a long time, way before Marco left.
I'm not saying they're his fault (he seems awesome), just that they don't correlate with his departure.
Maybe part of the problem is that NYC doesn't have as many people familiar with running high volume consumer web apps at scale?
They have banking people (who use a largely entirely different technology stack, budget, and way of working), and people who have worked for smaller companies, but they don't have a huge number of veterans of large consumer webapps. Google's NYC office probably is more of a sink than a source for ops talent, and there isn't a large presence of declining big giants to strip for engineers like there is in Silicon Valley.
Do people move from SF/SV to NYC to work for established companies? I could see this if you had personal reasons for wanting to move (being from NYC and going back, or just wanting to go there), but it doesn't seem like a compelling option otherwise.
Experience with LiveJournal, Friendster, Twitter, etc. has been that problems don't just magically fix themselves; absent someone with enough vision to figure out potential problems and actually solve them in technology and business process, you're kind of fucked. In the case of Twitter, they had enough money to buy some excellent talent. In the case of LJ, Brad stepped up as an amazing hacker (with limited financial resources, and really one of the first to solve the problem). In the case of Friendster, bad executive leadership (CEO/board being ineffectual, VP Eng being a tool) killed them.