Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
1–10 of 255 posts
Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
#2Isn't it more because they're a simple IM application (albeit spread across a number of platforms)? I know they're hugely successful and there are considerations about scaling to that sort of size, but surely the fact that their product is extremely simple has to be a huge factor?
Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
#3Because adding more engineers will make the development slower (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month).
Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
#4"Enlightened Product Management" is the phrase I've heard to describe WhatsApp's success in keeping their engineering requirements to a bare minimum.
Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
#5I got my first ever spam on whatsapp the other day from someone who had never been a contact, and there seems to be no way whatsoever to prevent it. So maybe they should hire 1 more engineer to work on spam.
Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
#6If this isn't a counter to the inane recruiting requirements of "5 years with language X" I don't know what is:
We don’t bring them in specifically because the engineer knows Erlang,” Mahdavi said on Monday. “We expect the engineer to come in and spend their first week getting familiar with the language and learning to use the environment. If you hire smart people, they’ll be able to do that.”
Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
#7I don't quite understand the correlation. If the article was about how Whatsapp achieves scale and parallelism through functional languages, then fair enough. But I'm not sure it's fair to say they need 50 engineers, in part, because of the language choice ? Surely they need 50 engineers because their product is fairly simple and there's no need to have more engineers than features. Maybe the point it should have made is that Whatsapp values higher quality over quantity ? That I could relate to.
Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
#8I got my first ever spam on whatsapp the other day from someone who had never been a contact, and there seems to be no way whatsoever to prevent it. So maybe they should hire 1 more engineer to work on spam.
Adding more privacy controls would sort of kill the point of it as SMS killer. You can block specific people.
What they should control is the APIs that are popping up like promotional SMS with support for Whatsapp. These companies are obviously circumventing their endpoints.
Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
#9I got my first ever spam on whatsapp the other day from someone who had never been a contact, and there seems to be no way whatsoever to prevent it. So maybe they should hire 1 more engineer to work on spam.
What version of Whatsapp/Platform are you using - newer versions of Whatsapp have spam blocking features.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/whatsapp-rolls-out-new-spam-blocker...
Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
#10For reference here is a talk they did about how they scaled WhatsApp and the problems they faced: