While working at HBO Max (200 engineers at launch of the original product) I talked to a recruiter at Disney+, where I was informed they had 2000 engineers.

So yeah, 80% sounds about right. :(

Since that time HBO Max was acquired into an org that was an order of magnitude larger. I was downsized out when they cut 20% or so off, but honestly they could have cut another 40% and been Just Fine if the architecture and infrastructure had been built properly.

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tuesdaynight 5 days ago | parent [-]

Do you think that the architecture was built properly or was it rushed? I'm curious about your experience working there. Speaking as an user, HBO Max is the worst streaming service that I've used, by far. Errors happening frequently, basic features missing, etc. I don't expect Netflix level from the start, just the basics being covered.

	▲	com2kid 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		I worked on the original infra, pre merger. The backend stuff was super stable. My team had ~3 on call incidents across 3 years. The front end and catalog systems had more issues. The front end basically used an in house system that was the same idea as react native but originally built before react native, and it was never given enough engineering resources so it kind of hobbled along. The other issue is that we had to support a lot of different platforms, and some used the in house system, some used bespoke systems, and one used screens rendered on a server farm streamed to the underpowered set top boxes because those boxes were complete pieces of trash. The backend stuff was all amazing though, best dev ops tooling I've seen so far in the industry. True CI/CD, teams deployed to prod multiple times a day w/o issue.