Facebook, Google, Uber, LinkedIn, and friends are the rarefied heights of software engineering. They encounter and solve problems at scales shared by few others, and as a result, their priorities in production engineering and architecture are just a bit different from the rest of us down here in the other 99% of services. Through deconstructing a few blog posts from these giants, we’ll evaluate just what is it that they’re thinking about when they build systems and whether any of their choices are relevant to those of us operating at high scale yet still something less than millions of requests per second. This talk will go into depth on how to make technological decisions to meet your customers’ requirements without requiring a small army of engineers to answer 2 AM pages, and how to set realistic goals for your team around operations, uptime, communications, and disaster recovery. With these guidelines in mind, you should be better equipped to say no (or yes!) the next time your team’s software hipster proposes moving everything to the Next Big Thing.