"For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed" - what!? That is ridiculous. The only possible thing you need to destroy would be the hard drives. Why on earth would you shred everything?
Also thought that was quite wasteful. Even ethernet cables are cut. Why not just put them online for free pickup?
Also I can't help wondering if the switch to cloud makes sense for stack overflow now again because their traffic collapsed. I took the whole post as something that should be mourned a bit, not gleefully destroyed.
I would say they evaluated it would cost more for them to remove the HDD and sell the machine than just shred them. And they would not risk to forget a HDD inside
The reasoning could be that this makes reliably scaling down (and thus keep making a profit) easier, starting with getting rid of SREs.
We have similar movement going on with Xing here in Hamburg, Germany (once conceived as a LinkedIn competitor).
Great names that still have a lot of momentum, but are expected by ownership to slow down.
Reminds me of Scott Galloway’s most profitable investment having been a yellow pages company. Yes, the market shrunk, but they could shrink running costs as fast or even faster.
This is a terrible waste. Wiping all storage would take a day at best; this hardware is still worth $10-50k. They could donate it.
Then again, they’re migrating to Azure and the whole thing ran for years on SQL Server; being good at tech was never these ex-MS guys’ strong suit. This kind of forklifting is expected from this specific type of corporate droid, it’s how they’ve always done it. Entire industries run just like this, and it’s terrible and stupid.
Any company that switches from real hardware to "the cloud" is going to triple their compute costs. They're obviously making too much money. With them not even selling their old hardware, they are doing the equivalent of setting large piles of money on fire
Blog post from 2016, detailing the setup: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
It's a bit of a shame, but I guess also with declining traffic and revenue, they're also downsizing.
"For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed" - what!? That is ridiculous. The only possible thing you need to destroy would be the hard drives. Why on earth would you shred everything?
Also thought that was quite wasteful. Even ethernet cables are cut. Why not just put them online for free pickup?
Also I can't help wondering if the switch to cloud makes sense for stack overflow now again because their traffic collapsed. I took the whole post as something that should be mourned a bit, not gleefully destroyed.
It's as if they believe some bytes of PII might be recoverable from residual capacitance in twisted pairs of copper...
I would say they evaluated it would cost more for them to remove the HDD and sell the machine than just shred them. And they would not risk to forget a HDD inside
The last couple places I've worked at did this with their old equipment too. It always drove me a little nuts.
This sounds like laziness disguised as security, lol.
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3248911 - Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud (2011)
The original blog post is down but available here: http://web.archive.org/web/20120120201529/http://blog.server...
Worthy of a re-submit / retry, but also: posted 15h ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44604696
"physical" datacenter ?
whats the alternative? a datacenter that exists only in my imagination?
That would be imperfect.
The reasoning could be that this makes reliably scaling down (and thus keep making a profit) easier, starting with getting rid of SREs.
We have similar movement going on with Xing here in Hamburg, Germany (once conceived as a LinkedIn competitor).
Great names that still have a lot of momentum, but are expected by ownership to slow down.
Reminds me of Scott Galloway’s most profitable investment having been a yellow pages company. Yes, the market shrunk, but they could shrink running costs as fast or even faster.
This is a terrible waste. Wiping all storage would take a day at best; this hardware is still worth $10-50k. They could donate it.
Then again, they’re migrating to Azure and the whole thing ran for years on SQL Server; being good at tech was never these ex-MS guys’ strong suit. This kind of forklifting is expected from this specific type of corporate droid, it’s how they’ve always done it. Entire industries run just like this, and it’s terrible and stupid.
Have they never heard of remote hands? The cloud will be much more expensive than than what you would pay for someone to replace a hard drive for you.
Any company that switches from real hardware to "the cloud" is going to triple their compute costs. They're obviously making too much money. With them not even selling their old hardware, they are doing the equivalent of setting large piles of money on fire
The cloud is just someone else's datacenter.
"We like burning money, and hardware, on fire."
... and like fall for marketing pitches