Startup companies
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22 hours agoPlatform Engineering: Lessons from the Rise and Fall of eBay Velocity
eBay pioneered many technologies but ultimately could not save the company despite doubling engineering productivity.
Dhruv Amin stated, 'We built a mobile app primarily to let our users who are building iOS apps preview their own app on their own device while developing it. [We] had no problems through December. Post December, we and everyone else in the category started getting our updates blocked.'
Her payment form wasn't connecting to the payment processor, and every attempt ended in an error message that made no sense. I understood her frustration. As a founder myself, I was acutely aware of the pain of trying to run a business and feeling like nothing was going your way. When I dug into her form, I found the problem a few minutes later: a mismatch between test mode and live credentials.
"I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue."
To find the typical example, just observe an average stand-up meeting. The ones who talk more get all the attention. In her article, software engineer Priyanka Jain tells the story of two colleagues assigned the same task. One posted updates, asked questions, and collaborated loudly. The other stayed silent and shipped clean code. Both delivered. Yet only one was praised as a "great team player."