mfrommil

>> I'd say the biggest cost is probably hiring a decent Engineering+Product+Test team

Part of it is cost, but a lot is culture and leadership. Streaming (especially live) is one of the toughest areas to maintain a good user experience. I've led Streaming Product teams for years. Product teams almost always needs to deliver growth, which comes in the form of new features, monetization, and other changes. But the user cares most about the core experience - did the video start playing without a delay? Were there buffering issues? Audio playback out of sync? Issues are very noticeable, and sometimes very difficult to test proactively for. Product needs to find this balance, and can not go 100% all in on growth and neglect the not sexy stuff. If the whole Product/Engineering/Test org is not aligned on stability/QoE being a top priority, it can degrade very quickly after a few releases for a streaming app.

Thanks, you're right . Edited it

This is rough napkin math, no need to downvote if anyone knows the real number and this is way off :)

Meta 2023 ad revenue was $131 billion. To make it easy, let's assume an even spread for # of users and ad revenue generation per hour/minute of the day and day of the year (which I'm sure is not the case).

This would be:

$358 million per day

$15 million per hour

$249k per minute

This also assume a minute down won't be somewhat or totally offset by a spike in users when it comes back online.

A much better UX would be clear error messaging informing users that the service is down and there is no problem with their individual account.

This would prevent people from panicking they've been hacked and/or unnecessarily resetting their password.

My prediction is that to be competitive, companies will eventually need to rely on AI-produced code to some extent or risk being slower and less efficient than competitors. It would be like not using email or messaging and only using snail mail for all written communication.

But AI is nowhere close to perfect now, and will have flaws for a long time. Having AI write code is like having a so-so junior engineer, who can complete the task, but makes mistakes, so needs their code reviewed closely. And is unable to architect anything complex, that still needs to be done by the leads/managers/senior folks.

So more and more of the simple, low complexity coding tasks will be done by AI, while the value of importance of senior engineers will be as high as ever, since they need to oversee the AI's outputs.

What I wonder is how junior engineers, who will be starting their careers out as more expensive or weaker coders to AI, will get the experience necessary to become the senior engineers that need to guide/review the AI's work?

Agreed. Probably could be a much better UX for handling a mass outage like this. Graceful, clear error messaging that FB login is down would be better than the current UI.

Triggering millions of people to unnecessarily reset their password yet still be unable to login is not a great UX. This seems like one of those cases that's high impact when it does happen, never likely to occur on any given day, but likely to happen at some point; probably just wasn't much focus put on handling a case like this.

Roadmaps come in many different flavors depending on the company/culture/processes/etc. For an org where roadmaps are more formal/solidified - a healthy level of "product discovery" should be happening before items are put on the product roadmap. We do it this way at my current company (am a Product Director, leading multiple Product teams). When items are put on the roadmap, scope may not be 100% final, but there is a relatively high level of certainty for what's in/out of scope based on customer & business value, as well as clear prioritization based on value/effort. And for larger scope/high priority items, they've already been aligned to a good extent across key stakeholders & partner product/engineering teams before formally being put on the roadmap.

Thank you for suggesting this. One of the most interesting podcast episodes I've ever listened to. The background of Chang/TSMC is fascinating. Lots of lessons to be learned regardless of industry. While Chang is a technical genius, my main takeaway was that his smartest move might have been seeing the overall strategic picture / value chain of the industry and seeing the long term opportunity. A good reminder that it's always critical to deeply understand your current (or potential) customers and their needs and problems.

This has been my go to weather site since I heard of it last year. I've yet to find another website or app with the variety of detailed radar views that windy has, and seems to be extremely accurate.

Have several years experience dealing with supply chain from the retailer side in the past, and your comment is spot on.

Anything that is: expected to be in demand during Q4/Xmas season, manufactured in Asia, electronics, etc., demand planning and orders are in minimum 3-6 months in advance.

Even if a retailer wants more supply, many manufacturers are extremely hesitant to overproduce.

Here's some rough napkin math to help illustrate the cost of being overstock (caveat: I have no idea actual costs of video games, using best guess), applies to both retailers and manufacturers:

$60 MSRP Switch game, cost to retailer: $48 ($12 profit/unit)

Let's say a retailer orders 100k units of a game in Q2 for the upcoming holiday season, but sells only 70k units during Q4. 70k * $12 = $840k profit. Meanwhile, 30k * $48 = $1.4M of inventory is sitting there, that cash is tied up so the company can't buy inventory of new games releasing in the future, and there's some non-trivial cost for each subsequent month that merchandise sits unsold in the warehouse. That's for under-selling forecast by 30%... now imagine if you're off by 50% or more an any individual game.

Heard one of the Warby Parker founders speak once, and he mentioned a similar process at their company. I believe once a week all employees anonymously rated their satisfaction 1-10. He was very bought into the thought that "happy employees = productive employees". He said the weekly ratings was a very powerful tool for the executive team to get a feel for how the team was feeling, and if they could push harder or needed to ease up. Compared with the alternative of waiting to see resignation numbers go up, seemed like a pretty brilliant idea to me.

This was many years ago so apologies if some details are a bit off, but the gist of the story has stuck with me over the years.

It depends on what the process is for.

Regulatory / legal compliance? Solid process = good

Non-customer-facing repeatable operations? Solid process = good

Financial controls (with the right level of flexibility for smaller/quick decisions to be made)? Process = good

Restricting creative/knowledge worker teams - whether design, product, marketing, engineering - with over-burdensome "process for the sake of the process" = quick way to lose good talent and kill good ideas before they come to life

Great to see more competition in this space.

Would be nice to see currency pairs not currently supported by other services (like wise, etc.)

If I was going to transfer 4 or 5 digits of $$, even if I save a couple bucks of fees, I would choose the more trustworthy option (e.g. Wise has thousands of reviews across websites, social media, etc.), even if it means an extra bit in fees. But if you can support currency pairs that aren't supported by the existing players in the space, would give potential customers a very good reason to try out a new app like this.