Yep. It's a funny thing.
You build a Twitter. Profiles have posts, posts can have images, etc. It's very easy to model the database.
But then how do you make money with it? Now you need to build a separate system for advertising? Or do you want to sell subscriptions? Which means you need to build a separate system to handle payments. This is usually the big one, because when you handle money, what happens if there is a bug and you charge someone without delivering anything? How do you prevent fraud? How do you handle disputes?
Someone posted something illegal. What do you do in this situation? Do you call the police? The FBI? What kind of data do you give the authorities? How much data SHOULD you have been logging in the first place in case something like this happens?
One user doesn't like you so he bought a botnet to DDoS your website. How do you handle this? Are they mass posting? Mass creating accounts? Is it possible for them to exhaust all the usernames possible and then nobody can create an account anymore?
Your website is online but if the server blows up you'll lose all the data in the database. You need backups. You need a system to ensure the backups are actually working. But then some guy from the UK said he wants his posts all deleted. What are you going to do now, because his posts are also in the backups, and you don't want to touch those.
Trolls are posting things against the ToS. Who handles these things? Shadowban? So there needs to be a shadowban system? Moderators? So there needs to be a moderator-only section of the website? Should this be integrated with the main website or not?
Then you look at this horrendous mess of 6 paragraphs and you think back about the first paragraph that already did everything you wanted from Twitter. All these other systems, most of the work, and all you actually wanted was the first paragraph.
All those things are true. It still doesn’t sound like 1000+ engineers at 350k/yr.
What actually happens in a startup is you encounter these problems one at a time as they arise.
Twitter wasn't built by 1000 engineers at 350k/yr.
It had to hire them later on. Because when there are users - you need support, take out fires etc.
And this exact thing will happen with any homebrewed SaaS.
You either run a business or play tech company making your own saas instead of focusing on your business.
Sure you can do both in very rare cases - if you are SpaceX or similar, otherwise you are shooting yourself in the foot.
No. They hired 1000 people to help them justify funding rounds.
Even then, startups prioritize growth over efficiency. So maybe 100 people would have been fine but 1000 gets them a 5% growth improvement in growth.
Startups have no users and no data to start with, and if they fuck up security, well, they just fail sooner than expected.
Once you get past a certain size, you have very different sorts of problems. Any idiot can vibe code a facebook lookalike, but the real one has to handle hundreds of millions of users and posts while being a target for state actors.
TLDR; yes you do need that many
> yes you do need that many
You absolutely do not. what do you think about the website we are using right now! It has half of the problems listed above.
> facebook
Your work project doesn’t have a billion users.
We were talking about what it would take to fix the technical problems resulting from taking a working program to something people use.
> Any idiot can vibe code
I didn’t say that either.
How is it the HN opinion that it’s impossible to make a web application a lot of people use?
These are two different problems.
AI has solved the 'coding' part. The business is still very human because they are the ones buying, for now.
It's still possible. Have the product and hire other people for these things.
Use stripe, cloudflare, whatever the legal equivalent of these stuff, S3.
Yes they might take most potential profit, but you'll also not have a huge payroll.