LJ itself

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5124184/the-russian-bear-slashes-a-social-network

There were only 28 people here? Fuck. Shopzilla had hundreds. And it spent a *lot* more CPU on each page view for probably about the same amount of advertising on each page.

If this Paulson guy was dumb to "buy at the top of the bubble", he's also an idiot to divest at the bottom of it. If you have 20 engineers who can build and scale something like this, they're worth their weight in gold. Sign them for a life contract. Auction them offer. Whatever. But you don't lay them off.

And no, you can't just replace them. These people spent years building a complex system. Anyone else hired later would not only have to spend the same amount of time finding their way around it, but would make mistakes in the process, and wouldn't ever have the same love for it as its creators. All programmers want to write new code, not maintain a large pile of existing code, and the best programmers get to. It's the second best that get stuck with the maintenance jobs. Too much work, too little glory. So the best programmers won't even want the job if they do try to rehire for the roles.

This smacks of dotcom boom stuff where a large, stupid companies buys a nimble, smart one for a huge amount of money intending to buy them for their customers, gets cold feet, then just throws the whole company away, customers, engineering, product, and all.

Sorry for the pundity soapbox shit but this is kinda close to home. I have to go on record for the engineers here.

-scott