I took a job some time ago (back around when the internet was morphing from uucp to ppp) as a consultant to an "independent agency of the United States government" which seems to enjoy placing big blue boxes all over the landscape.

It was my first real job outside of the university system, so it is safe to say that I was rather green. This job basically involved being an apprentice to someone who oversaw the code supplied by vendors that sorted a tremendous amount of non machine readable mail, i.e. it assisted humans using chord keyboards sorting mail with pneumatic arms and big chains and slots. Back then, a fair amount of mail traveled this way - stuff your grandmother wrote that couldn't be OCR'd, postcards, etc. The whole apparatus was similar in size to a semi trailer [1]. Each station dealt with a piece of mail every second (give or take), with two fifteen minute breaks and a half hour for lunch. This was around the time of the postal shootings [2].

Two weeks into the job, my boss quit. Just never showed up again. Not exactly sure what happened. Apparently, I had become the most knowledgeable person in the organization on this software which was currently being rolled out widely.

Unsurprisingly, there were some serious code quality issues. This was QNX real time sorta unix in C and ASM with RTOS daughter boards. The vendor's code jockeys, apparently, had become unavailable.

Main takeaways: Systems seem to keep working despite everything looking very fragile. Read tons of code. If it's working, don't poke it.

A year later I was able to make some form of industrial dance music by coordinating the openings and closings of the mail slots and the chain with the software. Bad situations can sometimes lead to greater clarity and new opportunities.

[1] http://www.usps.com/postalhistory/images/photogallery/equipm...

[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Going_postal

I wish the TC article had done more than merely mention that keltranis is "joining Alexis". Hipmunk now has both reddit cofounders, their first hire in keysersosa, and their most senior programmer in keltranis. I wouldn't be surprised to see jedberg join them before too long, and then hipmunk would have almost all of the old reddit team on board.

Unless they're working on new features which are needed tomorrow, one dev seems fine in the interim. The number of sysadmins is more important to keeping a site running, but of course that's not what's in TC's headline.

This makes me shiver in my boots. I couldn't imagine having to run that site myself. Neil is inline for a big pay raise.

This is the second TC article today I see where they claim news site like digg or reddit are in competition with twitter. I don't think they understand that it's two very different type of stuff that is complementary. Or they are paid to say twitter in every article.

What happens when the last one leaves?

Is Conde just going to run off to Elance or something?

I can't even find a jobs page on Reddit.

At least it's open source.

OT but I found this amusing: competitor Digg (which has 42 employees and has raised over _$40_ in funding)

This is what happens when your primary demographic is people with no jobs and no money -- no ad revenue because nobody clicks the ads, and no possibility of selling subscriptions. Compare Reddit's target demographic with Bloomberg's target demographic. I bet Bloomberg has more than one developer.

(Incidentally, what a scam. Bloomberg terminals cost some insane monthly fee, and they have ads! And all I've ever seen anyone do with them is check sports scores and read celebrity gossip. Google should have put them out of business years ago.)

In theory, if they can get by temporarily with just one engineer then the site was engineered well to begin with. There's some good management lessons from "The Mythical Man-Month" being applied here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

How many developers does hacker news have?

my bet is that there is some 'technical debt', so the devs leave when said 'business is over your tech details'! :)

This is not good given that they just had a recent 6 hour downtime. Why would folks at Conde let this happen ?

Wouldn't it be surreal if Kevin Rose went to Reddit?

Interesting. This sure is boosting their pageviews/developer ratio.

Hmm.. Would now be a good time to build a new reddit?

Does this mean that the social new bubble has finaly burst with reddit down to one person and digg winding down?

HN seems to be doing fine with just one awesome developer :-)

Scrap it. Rewrite. It can't be that complicated and if it is, it needs to go.

It appears that Reddit's days are numbered. Sure they may be able to get by with one developer for a while, the product is fairly mature and content is driven by the user base. But how long can a website remain stagnant, with no innovation until the user base starts to migrate to the next best thing? Also, being owned by a large, old media company doesn't necessarily give one much confidence that Reddit is backed by visionaries who are willing to push the envelope and take risks.