I previously worked for a mortgage software startup that attracted interest from big banks.

To ease concerns about our scalability and longevity, we move from a tiny office to an office with a lot of empty space.

This strategic move supposes signaled to prospective corporate clients that we were committed to sustaining our solution over the long term, rather than just a few years but in the end the company went out of business. so much for that.

Yet the same corporate will eat anything that Google or MSFT does while we all know they kill projects just like anyone else or like any smaller company going out.

I am actually seriously interested in what people there do day to day. I’m wondering this about a lot of very large companies, I would definitely watch a documentary about that.

Hour-long meetings about whether the copy should read "data center," "datacenter," "data-center," or whether it is really even correct to say any of these at all. And then negotiating with the design folks to fit in the extra character. Only to throw it all away because nobody thought about the fact that it has to support 5 different languages.

I wish I was kidding. Used to work at a place that did crap like that, pulling in developers for these time sucks because "only they really know the correct technical usage for our industry."

I had a similar meeting with documentation folks about "dataset" vs. "data set". With Google trend charts and all... I also wish I was kidding.

It's not weird to pick one and keep a consistent style, for example by looking at Google or at Wikipedia or some other source if the dictionary lists both or neither, but to have meetings about it?!

Feels like something the technical writers and copy writers should decide around the watercooler if anything.

Smells like being afraid to make a choice, even a tiny one.

Just re-watch Office Space..

I work in one of the biggest companies of the world (employee and revenue wise) and it's basically a run-off reaction of well-articulated desk employees jerking each other off that, telling each other that they are so very important.

And the common management approach to anything not working immediately is "throw another 1.000 employees into the project" and the middle-managers measure their success by how many employees they are managing so it's a train without breaks. Hope it goes bankrupt soon.

At some point, most of your engineering time is spent on trying to understand what the previous team did. There's probably some engineer at Zendesk banging his head on the table because his boss wouldn't let him fix the sequential ticket IDs when he found them two months ago.

I work at similar size company. Basically they are like most companies building out the next 5 years while also keeping the lights on at four nines. There can be a lot of depth to product that you dont see. Anyone who says "why you need X people" often havn't tried a side hussle where you see 360 all the activities involved.

Building at scale without racking up big bill and hitting SLAs require a decent amount of effort.

If it's anything like ServiceNow, they have insane feature bloat and poor overall software architecture.

Every single click in ServiceNow takes a full 2 seconds to do anything. For a ticketing system. Insane.

What’s more insane is that it is still better than the vast majority of ticketing software. I don’t know what it is about ticketing and Helpdesk that it ALwAYs ends up like that.

We are using Helpscout wich is very nice over all. The also do not send the weirdly formatted ticket email, with 'respond above this line' etc.

> I don’t know what it is about ticketing and Helpdesk that it ALwAYs ends up like that.

The curse of B2B software is that every new big customer wants some custom feature or configuration that is the "deal breaker" for their multi-million dollar contract signing. And everyone except engineering is eager to give it to them because it's not their problem once the ink is dry. Support and renewals are the next guy's problem.

What's interesting is that Frank Slootman touts this transformation as a huge success in his book and talks at length about his conflict with Fred Luddy (who originally authored the simple ticketing incarnation of the ServiceNow monsterblob). The focus on keeping things simple is highlighted as an example of nerds' nearsighted thinking.

I'm sure it's a huge success for the few earning the profits from ServiceNow.

Like any SaaS, the more feature boxes you check, the more potential customers you can "satisfy". And the worse the UX gets for the average user (which then gets driven to purchasing more support).

Great for business (the few), terrible for users (the many). No contradiction there.

If you google "Zendesk annual revenue" you will find that perhaps many of those 6000 employees are doing something after all.

Big companies are places where you get kudos for only taking two weeks to solve a problem you’ve solved elsewhere in two days. To an extent it’s Little’s Law. The latency requires more “CPUs” to handle the traffic.

This is super loud to me RN because some of these "big" companies are case studies in Mythical Man Month's "N channels of communication" as well as weird flashbacks to discussions on costs context switching and schedulers in various CS courses.

It's throughput versus responsiveness.

If you can't get one story through in a week, you start a bunch of them so one finishes every few days.

I look at the Docusign building every day and shake my head. 20 stories of office space!

Software developers being surprised that software companies need to do a lot more than just write code is kind of like sailors being surprised that global logistics involves a lot more than handling a ship.

Still naive enough to buy into the lie that they can just be “left alone to do the REAL work” and a business just…spontaneously appears around them.

Solopreneurs making millions just like Pieter Levels are giving wrong impression.

Never said that, but a competent engineer should be able to build like 75% of the main functionality of Zendesk over a weekend.

Now, I understand there's probably a lot more to it which is why I would expect it to be a company of around 50 engineers and 150 business/marketing/etc and that's being generous.

The hill I'd die on is that, with money not being a scarce resource and a technically feasible challenge present, a team of 200 should be able to build and sustain almost anything in the world. And that's being even generous. I think realistically a team of 50 should be able to build almost anything

Just pick the 50 people who can weekend something and you'll be set to build any 5 things.

Let me guess, you could build it over the weekend?

Never said that, but a competent engineer should be able to build like 75% of the main functionality of Zendesk over a weekend.

Now, I understand there's probably a lot more to it which is why I would expect it to be a company of around 50 engineers and 150 business/marketing/etc and that's being generous.

The hill I'd die on is that, with money not being a scarce resource and a technically feasible challenge present, a team of 200 should be able to build and sustain almost anything in the world. And that's being even generous. I think realistically a team of 50 should be able to build almost anything

That’s a very HN take but the reality is that the tech is usually never the hard part. Selling, supporting, legal, all the certifications and enterprise contracts you have to do for a product like that are the hard part.

Valuable? Yes Tiring? Sure Hard? I guess

You have to admit it's a very social job, talking with lots and lots and lots of people

A lot of them are probably sales and support.

Zendesk is not just one product, they have:

- chat stuff you can embed into your site for user support

- managed call center software

- knowledgebase management linking all the other services

- whitelabel consumer forums you can use for offloading some of the support

- a shitton of analytics

- sales CRM

- profile platform you can link to various sources of information to get info on their activity on your site, so that you can use that for support

And there is probably a few more. Sales CRM alone can be its own company.

As usual on hackernews there is a lot more to it, but you are just not exposed to it.