The job description is below and also viewable here

Fast-growing, Well captitalized startup looking for C/C++ developers

at Oyster Hotel Reviews

New York, NY 10011

Oyster Hotel Reviews — a fast-growing and well-capitalized start-up seeks extremely talented C/C++ developers to help revolutionize travel planning on the Internet. You must have
experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so much faster than most competent people think possible. You should have a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent. Top-notch communication skills are essential. Familiarity with web development would be helpful, but is not necessary.

Oyster’s management includes Microsoft alumnus Eytan Seidman – formerly Director of Core Relevance on Live Search (now Bing.com) – and two highly accomplished serial entrepreneurs, Ariel Charytan and Elie Seidman. Our engineering team includes members who architected and scaled Microsoft’s search engine between 2003 and late 2007. They hold computer science degrees from Cornell University, University of Pennsylvania and Harvard.

We launched recently and have been written about in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, Economist, USA Today and many others. You can read recent press the company has received here: http://www.oyster.com/about/in-the-news/

Requirements
• BS or MS degree or higher in Computer Science
• 3+ years of professional development experience in either C/C++ is a must.
• Experience in database programming
• Experience with web development
• Interest in working with other disciplines including customers (end users of the software you write) and product management
• Permanent legal right to work in the US

What we offer:
• 30” monitors and the best computers money can buy
• Full health care benefits
• Meaningful Equity/ Stock Options in a startup with a very bright future
• Friendly coworkers who are the best in their respective fields.
• Amazing server infrastructure with which you can do very unique things (details in the interview)

How to Apply:
Please submit your resume to jobs@oyster.com with “C++ Software Engineer” in the subject.

Interested?

jobs@oyster.com

Back in 1984, my Dad bought me and my brothers a Mac. We were the cool kids on the block in Ithaca, NY because our Mac was no ordinary Mac but rather a “Fat Mac” in fact as it had a full 512k of RAM – not the lowly 128K that the unlucky had to deal with. That began my love affair with the Mac – a love affair that continued until late 1995 give or take a few months.

I first browsed the web on a Mac on Mosaic followed shortly thereafter by Netscape; that’s assuming you don’t count Lynx on Unix/Solaris in 1993. But by late 1995 I had interned at Microsoft (summer 1995) and the Mac OS had become unstable enough to be somewhat unusable – Steve Jobs was still a few years away from coming back to Apple to save it. In the interim, Windows had gone from the absolutely terrible Win 3.1 to the usable Windows 95. I was the fortunate recipient of an inexpensive – but good – laptop running Windows 95 and I’ve been on Windows ever since. With the release of the iPod I once again became a customer of Apple’s and I was reminded of how cool their hardware could be, how expensive it was, and how it was typically unreliable. I’ve had enough iPod’s fail on me to become somewhat convinced that the Apple folks build obsolescence into their hardware and I’ve seen my brother Eytan’s iPhone battery die around 2pm while on a business trip often enough to quietly laugh at how silly he is to not have a good ole Blackberry like me (even if my Bold does run it’s battery dry in about 24 hours).

All of this had me feeling a bit old and uncool so one day not too long ago, I walked over to the cool looking Apple store during lunch; the Apple store at 14th street and 9th Ave is walking distance from the office. I had in mind that if I did not upgrade our entire company to Mac’s, I’d at least make myself nearly as cool as some of the young hip people who I work with and get myself a Mac laptop.

And then at the store it dawned on me. Forget about being cool – I’m not nearly rich enough to be a Mac person. If I wanted our photo editors (they are the ones who select the photos that end up in our hotel reviews like this one of the Hotel Renew, Oahu, Hawaii) to be on a Mac, it would cost me nearly two times as much for similar hardware as it would on Windows 7 (a great OS BTW – more on that later). Here’s the math. It’s not a perfect comparison but for our needs, the computers would be more than equivalent. The Mac would cost me more than $2,000 more.

Mac Pro Tower

• Mac OS (a given)
• 2.66Ghz Intel Xeon quad core
• 8GB of RAM (DDR3 1066)
• RAID card
• 1 640GB SATA
• 4×15k RPM 300GB SAS drives (bought aftermarket and installed myself)
• Nvidia GE Force GT120
• Total Price: ~4,700 from Apple Store (SAS drives but elsewhere)

Cost of parts for a windows 7 equivalent

• OS: Windows 7 64bit- $134 (currently at this price from newegg)
• Case – $80
• 12GB DDR3 1600 RAM – $260
• Power Supply: $75
• Video card: EVGA GE Force 9800GT 1GB – 135
• LSI RAID card – $200
• 4×300GB 15K RPM SAS drives – $1,280
• Motherboard: $130
• Misc cables and parts
• CPU: Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem Quad Core – $280
• Total price: ~$2,600

Sticking with Windows 7 and commodity hardware

So much for that partial mid-life crisis. I’ll be sticking to Lenovo laptops (x200 and x301 – preferably with SSD drives), Windows 7, and when we need desktops, machines we build ourselves from commodity parts; at our scale, it can make sense to build our own machines vs buying from Dell but you have to have someone who is willing to sacrifice what little spare time they have to make this happen. The advantage of building your own is you get exactly what you want at a price you’ll be hard pressed to get from Dell (truer as the machines get higher end) and you won’t get any of Dell’s terrible “value added” bloatware preinstalled on the machine when it arrives. When we buy Lenovo laptops, we don’t even bother with the pre-installed OS. We just reinstall the OS from scratch.

Outsourced Hosting (Rackspace, Pair Networks, Amazon Web Services, etc)

• You buy servers or units of performance (RAM, hard disk, processor performance)
• Vendor worries about data center functions including power allocation, cooling, internet (ISP) bandwidth allocation
• Vendor does all the IT work – they install the OS, install the machines in the rack, connect the machines to the internet, etc.
• For $5,600/yr Rackspace will sell you the power of 2 processors, 8GB of RAM, and redundant (RAID1) 10K RPM 73GB hard disk space plus 24TB of data transfer/yr.
• You focus on writing software and building your application, content or service instead of worrying about pesky little things like hardware, ISPs, routers, and switches.

Managing your own hosting

• You don’t install the servers at your office serving off a cable modem, T1, or DSL line.
  • If you were planning on doing that, call someone like Rackspace or Amazon instead and learn about the wonders of virtual hosting. ASAP.
• You find a collocation provider like Level 3, Internap, Equinix or Switch and Data.
  • A collocation provider is someone who runs a secure building – or a space within a building – where they have pre-arranged to have cooling, air conditioning, lots of power from the electric company (”the grid”) and power redundancy via batteries and diesel fuel generators. These are sometimes called data centers, POPs (points of presence) or telecom hotels if you are telco person. These are not the same as phone company (local monopoly phone companies like Verizon or Pacific Bell) central offices. In New York City, buildings that are primarily or entirely used for this purpose include 60 Hudson and 111 8th Ave.
• The collocation provider sells you rack space (a full rack, a half rack, multiple racks, etc.) and power.
  • They cool and secure the facility and insure (at least theoretically – I’ve got a good story about how the uninterruptable power supply at Switch and Data NYC failed during big East Coast blackout a few years ago and took 10s of my servers down with it) that the power stays on no matter what happens.
• You buy bandwidth from the internet service provider (ISP) at the collocation center
  • Typically you buy a given pipe size (say a Gigabit Ethernet connection or a 100Megabit/second (Mbps) Ethernet connection) and you can burst traffic up to the size of the entire pipe but only pay for what you use on average. There are different ways of measuring the average utilization but most use something called “95% th percentile measurement”. You pay some amount per month for the cost of the pipe – independent of how much of the pipe you use – and included in that price is some amount of average utilization. If you use more than that average, you pay more – typically at a price/Mbps
  • Depending on the collocation provider, you either buy the ISP (internet bandwidth) service from the collocation provider directly or from one of the ISPs they have “on-net” (which simply means that the ISP is located in the same facility and is easy to connect to). Unless you are running a huge application with massive traffic (think YouTube, Google, MSN, the New York Times) you buy your internet bandwidth from one provider and let them take care of the redundancy requirements.
• You buy your own servers
  • And put them in the rack and connect them to the power that the Collocation facility sells you. You can get whatever kind of server you want with whatever ratio of CPU:hard disk:RAM you want. More on this in a few bullets.
• You buy your own switch or router.
  • You connect your servers to the switch/router and then connect the router to the ISP that you’ve bought bandwidth from. You have to configure the router. You likely configure the router with more than one physical connection to the ISP so that if the connection fails (the wire gets cut or the port on your router or theirs fails) you are not out of business.
  • The days of exponential innovation in routers/switches is behind us. While you can’t get fired for buying Cisco, there are other great options – less expensive as well – from vendors like Force10 and HP. You’ll want an experienced – and pragmatic - network engineer to help you figure out what to buy so that you don’t massively overspend. You can waste a lot of money on hardware you won’t have any need for for years to come (unless you rapidly become the next YouTube). While you won’t be able to use a $300 Linksys to connect to the switch/router of the ISP you are using, in all likelihood you’d be hard pressed to use more bandwidth than that Linksys can handle. Non blocking gigabit Ethernet switches were modern and advanced five or six years ago. Today you buy them for a few hundred bucks. They’ve made office LANs dramatically faster, have enabled the easy deployment of VoIP based PBXs and in general are no brainer plug and play. Stay tuned for a future post on startup IT made simple where i’ll discuss what you need to get started in IT for a startup with anywhere from 3 to 200 people and how to insure you don’t waste a lot of money on stuff you don’t need but that IT vendors want to sell you.
• Cost to get started: Not including the cost of the servers and switch/router you will use, the cost to get in the game here is on the order of 1,000 to 1,500 dollars/month depending on what part of the country you are trying to locate your servers in.
  • Collocation space in locations with expensive power and expensive real estate (e.g. Manhattan or Silicon Valley) costs more than in places where real estate is nearly free and power cheap bc of a nearby nuclear power plant or hydro-electric facility. It’s no an accident that the biggest Google and Microsoft data centers are not in densely populated places and are typically near a large dam.
• You manage all of the IT issues yourself
  • You configure the servers, the switch/router, the OS, etc.
  • If you have a hardware failure, you deal with it yourself
• You control performance – this is the MOST important reason to do it yourself. Performant sites are not performant by accident
  • You don’t share your servers with anyone
  • You control – for the most part – the quality of the internet bandwidth your servers are seeing. The ISP is still a bit of a black box but it can be measured pretty easily and there are good vendors like Internap that provide a performant service and do it well.
  • Most importantly: You can control the ratio between CPU and RAM. Modern CPUs are astoundingly fast and are often not the bottleneck in applications. The speed at which data (content) gets to the CPU is often the bottleneck and being able to take advantage of the revolutionary RAM density that you can put into a rack of storage is something very special and one of the most fascinating aspects of modern application development.
  • You know how people tell you to add more RAM to your PC to make it run faster? Well, the same concept applies to your servers and the applications they run on. It’s not trivial to take advantage of it but RAM is orders of magnitude faster than hard disk (or even SSD) so content delivered to an end user from a server that is primarily using RAM is going to be dramatically faster than one that is dependent on hard disks. The laws of physics are strict about that. And while it’s not cheap (figure on the order of $200K), you can now get nearly a Terrabyte of RAM into a single rack.
  • The likes of Amazon and Rackspace simply cannot afford to give you the prices they do and keep your data primarily in RAM. Disk is orders of magnitude cheaper; RAM is, all in, about $150/GB in a server and hard disk – even using RAID1 for redundancy – is on the order of a $1/GB.
  • You can take advantage of faster large storage technologies like 15K RPM hard disks or solid state disks (SSDs) and allocate them in whatever ratio you want. The economic decisions are your own.
  • You can take advantage of a content delivery network (CDN) like Akamai (this is not necessarily unique to doing it yourself)
  • None of the above will fix poorly written software. If you don’t write software that can make use of the hardware, you won’t be performant.
  • Lastly, the economics scale well. If you have your own rack, at first your servers will be incredibly lightly loaded and relative to outsourcing, you will be paying top dollar. BUT, your site will scream and the first users who come will have an amazing experience (remember that first impression thing). If your site is successful, that one rack will go a very very long way and depending on your application, will serve 100s of thousands or even millions of unique customers per year. It will likely be a very long time before you upgrade anything in it. Assuming you chose a business that makes money (it’s not a business unless it makes money) the cost of the hardware and the rack will be irrelevant to you – a real rounding error relative to the profit they generate. This is not true if you chose to build the next YouTube in which case your serving costs will continue to scale massively as you increase your users.

So should I outsource or do it myself? By looking at the comparison above, it would seem that outsourcing it is the obvious choice – doing it yourself seems incredibly complicated. Truth is, the likes of Rackspace have made it much easier to buy service from them than the collocation providers have and simplicity of service and purchase is what they are selling you. The underlying elements – computer hardware, power, ISP, cooling, real estate – are all commodities which are sold at low margins. Rackspace sells their combined service to you at a a better margin (for them) bc of all of that service that they are selling you. How big a margin they make depends on how big or small you are. If you are running a blog – like this one – that gets 10s or even 100s of thousands of page views/yr, you can’t possibly justify the cost and complexity of managing it yourself. But if you are running a site that needs to be at reasonable scale to be successful – and most web sites can’t hope to be profitable without significant scale – and needs performance as a competitive differentiator, you need to consider this insourcing – and using lots of RAM – very closely. Given my own experience with mid-scale data center installations at Epana and our collective performance obsession at Oyster, we decided to make the rather large upfront investment and manage our own servers. We use Force10 switches, Internap collocation and ISP services, servers from Rackable (now SGI) and a ton of RAM (we have 100,000+ photos on the site) to get a site that is quite fast depsite being photo intensive – for example, the Oyster Review of the Kahala Hotel and Resort, Oahu, Hawaii has 600+ photos.