top | item 26097547

Employee #1: Reddit (2016)

144 points| bemmu | 5 years ago |blog.ycombinator.com

111 comments

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[+] purple_ferret|5 years ago|reply
Reddit's greatest engineering decision of the past 5 years is leaving up old.reddit.com
[+] 2pEXgD0fZ5cF|5 years ago|reply
The moment old.reddit.com stops working is the moment I will stop using Reddit generally, the new design is just too slow for me to create a pleasant experience (and the UX of the redesign is overall very unpleasant). Ever since they began limiting viewing on mobile browsers I already stopped using Reddit with my mobile phone completely.

There are ways to circumvent that of course, but I just can't be bothered.

[+] 0xdky|5 years ago|reply
I am very interested to know what is the engineering overheads and increase in code complexity incurred in maintaining 2 different views.

At NetApp, backward compatibility and ability to rollback across multiple releases was a hard requirement. This made the codebase real hard to understand and maintain.

[+] s_dev|5 years ago|reply
As soon as it's deprecated I'm gone. I'd consider myself a power user. I have zero confidence new.reddit.com will ever improve to my satisfaction.
[+] AlwaysRock|5 years ago|reply
For you. And for me. But Reddit has many more users now then it did in the days when old.reddit.com was just reddit.com.

As much as many people hate UI/UX changes they happen for a reason. Due to the much more mainstream adoption of reddit I'd say that reason was wider adoption.

[+] LukeEF|5 years ago|reply
wow - didn't know that - it is much better - are there really people that like those little pop-up windows?
[+] bink|5 years ago|reply
I had the pleasure of working at Reddit for a few years. I even worked with Chris from time to time. He's one of those people that you can just tell is genuinely a good person shortly after meeting him. I'm happy for the success he and Reddit have seen recently.

After reading "We are the Nerds"... well, I don't want to say I got the impression he was treated poorly. But it was very odd. He seems like a hidden founder which is weird considering how many treat Aaron Schwartz, given the stories told about them both in the book.

[+] spoonjim|5 years ago|reply
Well people don’t write stories about Aaron Swartz because he worked at Reddit, they write about him because he was persecuted by the corporate-government complex.
[+] toyg|5 years ago|reply
It's not like Aaron was treated much better by Reddit leadership... his profile was just higher before and after that experience.
[+] throwaway_2047|5 years ago|reply
> I can’t tell you how many times I was on a call and the other person on the phone was referring to their engineering staff as “IT.”

Can someone elaborate the difference? To me IT is more on the operation side while engineering is on development side. Would love to hear other perspective

[+] ubermonkey|5 years ago|reply
My impression at this point is that while non-technical people can't tell the difference and don't care to learn, there IS a split in the two sides of things now.

This is a little weird to me, because for my age group (I'm 50), both sets were typically made up of the same tribe of computer-obsessed folks who begged a 6502 machine from their parents in the early 80s and took degrees in unrelated fields because of how far behind industry most university CS programs were in the early 90s. (And there really weren't any MIS programs.)

Somewhere along the way, though, a split happened. And in many (but not all) companies, IT became a lower-tier support organization. Salaries stagnated, and a quality gap happened. It might just be that, in lots of places, developers are a revenue source while IT is nearly always overhead. It's a rule of thumb that the more talented folks will probably venture towards being revenue and not overhead, because the compensation is typically better, and the organization will treat you with more respect.

So now, in many but not all places, there's a perception of a class difference between the two. The IT guy is derided as someone 5 hours short of an associate's degree with a cheap certification, no ability to troubleshoot beyond obvious steps, and zero interest in computing when off the clock while the developer is an ivory-tower whiz kid with hobby projects in Haskell and his/her fingers in half a dozen FOSS projects.

I am obviously exaggerating. But this view, which is not uncommon, and reflects a shift that IS real even if not to the degree I lampoon above, is probably why a developer would make the distinction.

[+] imgabe|5 years ago|reply
IT works on the company's internal networking and computer equipment. Engineering builds the customer facing product.
[+] Yizahi|5 years ago|reply
In my country "IT" is all engineering, and what USA means by IT is called "IT support". Was surprised when I read about this on Reddit, also in some discussion when some developer complained about being called IT.
[+] tshaddox|5 years ago|reply
I think in that context the expectation is that “IT” would refer to the people at your company who would fix the printer or remove a virus from someone’s workstation.
[+] spaetzleesser|5 years ago|reply
"To me IT is more on the operation side while engineering is on development side. "

In my company (a big Fortune 500) engineering and IT are totally different things if you look from the bottom of the hierarchy. BUT (this is a big but) when you talk to management the higher you get, the more SW engineering and IT are the same. I have been in several meetings where the CEO always referred to the CIO whenever a tech question came up. So the CIO answered all these questions although in reality she has no input into any software development decisions that are being made for our products and her knowledge basically consist of reading vendor whitepapers. It's quite annoying because this way IT often gets multi million dollar budgets for fancy AI/digitization/ML projects that are all wasted because they have no clue about SW engineering.

In summary, there is a very common perception that everybody that uses a computer is part of IT.

[+] k__|5 years ago|reply
I think, it depends on the company.

In software companies I usually found an IT and an R&D department.

In non-software companies I found IT departments that did everything. From IT support to software development.

[+] kryptn|5 years ago|reply
IMO Engineering builds and maintains the product, while IT enables Engineering and every other team to build, maintain, and sell the product.
[+] underwater|5 years ago|reply
IT is internal facing, their customer is the business and they are a cost centre.

Engineering is external facing, their customer is the end user and they generate revenue.

The terms being so clearly deliniated is more obvious in the US, in my experience. But some old brick and mortar companies still treat their engineering departments as a cost centre and it shows.

[+] icedchai|5 years ago|reply
Every software engineer who has been asked to fix a relative's computer to remove spyware should recognize the difference...
[+] paulcole|5 years ago|reply
IT is a cost center. Engineering drives revenue.
[+] xwdv|5 years ago|reply
I hate when people call engineering staff "IT". It's a derogatory term to use that minimizes their contributions, and I wish I had some equally derogatory term to refer to the jobs of people who say that.
[+] worker767424|5 years ago|reply
Wow, they all look so young. Imagine telling Alexis back then that he'd be married to Serena Williams and discover a fondness for snow.
[+] kangaroozach|5 years ago|reply
How did DIGG miss this boat?
[+] danhak|5 years ago|reply
They rolled out a catastrophically bad redesign of the site, resulting in a mass exodus of users directly to Reddit
[+] TameAntelope|5 years ago|reply
Someone is going to do to Reddit what Reddit did to Digg, and we'll all be saying "How did REDDIT miss this boat?" in 10 years...
[+] 11thEarlOfMar|5 years ago|reply
I like this format. Looking forward to seeing more of it.
[+] aidenn0|5 years ago|reply
Slightly OT, but what's a good flight search tool now that hipmunk has shut down? I was super bummed when that happened because they just presented so much useful information on a single screen.
[+] modeless|5 years ago|reply
I've always heard that ITA Matrix is the most powerful flight search tool that exists. Not a polished UI like Hipmunk though. https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ I have no real complaints with Google Flight search though.
[+] tomerico|5 years ago|reply
When looking for the cheapest tickets, I tend to search all three (which tend to give dramatically different fares for some reason):

flights.google.com fareboom.com skyscanner.com

[+] totalZero|5 years ago|reply
I generally use Kayak. Used to use Skiplagged for hidden city ticketing as well. It certainly feels like price discovery has gotten a lot easier...and I tend to book with the airline anyway in case I have to deal with customer service.
[+] telesilla|5 years ago|reply
I'm using the team at flightfox. Not search but if you do long haul it's a major time saver and it pays for itself. During the early lockdown they also managed to get every single flight we had refunded, making me a fan for life.

https://flightfox.com

[+] mrg2k8|5 years ago|reply
In Europe there's azair.eu.