As someone who had some outages due to AI traffic and is now using CloudFlare's tools:
Most of my site is cached in multiple different layers. But some things that I surface to unauthenticated public can't be cached while still being functional. Hammering those endpoints has taken my app down.
Additionally, even though there are multiple layers, things that are expensive to generate can still slip through the cracks. My site has millions of public-facing pages, and a batch of misses that happen at the same time on heavier pages to regenerate can back up requests, which leads to errors, and errors don't result in caches successfully being filled. So the AI traffic keeps hitting those endpoints, they keep not getting cached and keep throwing errors. And it spirals from there.
Yes, no question, assuming Rails matches what the startup is trying to do well enough. I've worked in other frameworks, stacks, etc and nothing beats the raw productivity of Rails for web applications.
A lot of people say things like "the difficulty with Rails is in the long term". To them I'd say two things:
- In starting a new company, I'd assume failure as the starting point and do everything I can to wrestle success from the jaws of failure. I don't want to waste time worrying about what will happen in the long term, because statistically we won't get to the long term. I'll take every advantage I can get to get over that statistical hump. Rails gives me that advantage on the engineering front.
- I'm currently working in a Rails codebase along with a few hundred other developers and its fine. It isn't great, largely because it was an inherited codebase I was acquired into and the OGs made some (imo) sub-optimal decisions, but it isn't really any different than working on a java project with a few hundred devs. Its fine at scale.
Don't think I've ever worked for a startup that had any patents whatsoever. I think I consulted with one IIRC, and they folded largely due to their hyperfocus on tech to the detriment of building something people actually wanted to pay for. Filing a patent was probably a symptom of that problem.
Its more like smaller public companies trying to keep bigger public companies in check.
Well I think it depends on the industry. Patents tend to be less relevant in software. But in other capital intensive industries where there is some manufacture of physical matter - like biotech or hardware - IP is a big deal.
That's true, I'm mostly commenting on software because the article is about software, and this might be anecdata, but it certainly seems to me like patent trolls are more prevalent in software.
Fully agreed. IMO its a critical thing to provide engineers an IC career path that enables advancement without requiring moving into a manager type of job. Otherwise, you get people who are shitty managers because they feel they have to do the job to continue to grow, and that turns into a team/org-wide morale issue.
When promoting engineers into management positions, I'll always give them a trial run first in some form to make sure they actually enjoy the job, make sure their new team doesn't see any red flags, and to give them a graceful path to go back to IC without some fanfare company-wide promo announcement locking them into the role socially.
Stock issuance deducts from GAAP earnings. So yes, it sounds like they would be profitable excluding this issuance.
Imagine you own 1% of a business that nets $100/year in cashflow, so you're entitled to $1/year. But they give the employees of that business 2% (of total count) additional shares per year (and not you).
Are you making or losing money? Cash flow positive, negative earnings... loss of your equity exceeds your cashflow.
That's not how it works for this comp. It is the max total stock comp for a 10 years employment if every milestone is hit and reddit market cap goes up 300%.
My example was to refute the parent poster who implied, in a seemingly general sense, that stock issuance doesn't impact earnings, which is false.
As to the exact timing of the accounting treatment in this case, I'm not privy to that. The statement above was that the CEO was paid ~$193m in stock, which implies it was issued in that fiscal year. Maybe it was in this case, maybe it wasn't, but that doesn't change the underlying point.
Stock grants absolutely do adversely impact GAAP profitability. A company will dilute existing holders to issue RSUs or otherwise.
Agree with this. There are also still lots of companies hiring CS grads. They just aren't paying FAANG level comps. Kind of strange to hear people say they're going to pivot into being a garbage man if they can't get the $200k+ TC straight out of school.
Being a developer for $80K+bonus is a lot better than $16.50 per hour for being a translator... although I've interviewed a few recent grads that had so much debt the first $60K/year they made would be vaporized by paying the loan.
Depends 100% on the company you're referring into. The larger the company, the less personal it tends to be. Conversely, if the "current employee" is a leader with hiring authority and the referral will be hired onto their team, the more personal it tends to be.
Depends so much on so many things. Like, what kind of app/company are you building? How big is the company/app/team(s)? Who is on your team? What are your other practices? Etc..
For example, if my team was very junior, I'd be less inclined to merge first, but if it was very senior, I'd be more inclined. But even then, it depends on other factors.
You can see this with a "new" ANY dev, because there are only 4 years of college and far more years are required to learn the increasingly complex technology environment.
I graduated with a Computer Engineering degree, did assembly, C, microprocessor design, computer vision, and know a good bit about lower level stuff, how memory works, how networking works, etc. All the stuff people in this thread seem to be lamenting the lack of. But I was also a shitty employee fresh out of school because I didn't know anything at all about modern software development because there was absolutely no time to learn that stuff as well.
I still had to spend a lot of time getting good before I was worth anything, just as these "new frontend devs" will, as well.
> "* I didn't know anything at all about modern software development because there was absolutely no time to learn that stuff as well.*"
Yeah, but modern software development is trivial to learn, particularly in comparison to a computer engineering degree. You see "developers" here on HN gloating all the time about how they didn't need any post-secondary education at all to get their jobs; these frameworks are literally designed to be usable even by minimally skilled coders. You were in a much better position having to learn modern software development after a computer engineering education rather than having to learn the rudiments of computer engineering on the job after getting an education in modern web development.
> This is pretty trivial to build once you have given it some thought, it sits nicely next to the work you do building health-checks into the various tiers of your infrastructure, yet there are enough people out there willing to pay for it.
I think the reason you don't have a bootstrapped startup is because you don't see the difference between trivial and valuable.
Would it be easy for you to build out a feature flag app? Yes, most devs probably can without a huge problem. But it will take them time to do it, and it will require maintenance over time. If it takes a senior dev two weeks of dev time in sum total over 4 years, it would be "cheaper" to pay $100/mo for this service. This type of product product has value as it allows us to spend our limited dev time more on forward feature development that drives future revenue and less on infrastructure.
This is the math that companies buying SaaS products will make. I don't want my eng team to spend hours on trivial stuff, I want them to work on the things that move the needle for the company. I'll gladly pay $$$ for certain features and functionalities that are not part of our core competencies so that the team can focus on the things that are. And once we're a Big Company paying Enterprise tier prices to a feature flag company or whatever, we can have the chat about in-housing it or building Feature #137,221
Most of my site is cached in multiple different layers. But some things that I surface to unauthenticated public can't be cached while still being functional. Hammering those endpoints has taken my app down.
Additionally, even though there are multiple layers, things that are expensive to generate can still slip through the cracks. My site has millions of public-facing pages, and a batch of misses that happen at the same time on heavier pages to regenerate can back up requests, which leads to errors, and errors don't result in caches successfully being filled. So the AI traffic keeps hitting those endpoints, they keep not getting cached and keep throwing errors. And it spirals from there.