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Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

wired.com

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Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#51

Post by hockeybias »

interpol_p wrote: post #25
ghshephard wrote: post #6

If 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.”

This reminds me of how we have been hiring engineers. We sit them down for a day with a fairly simple task (build a simple web or mobile app, about three screens with a basic data model) but we make sure to give them a language or framework they are unfamiliar with. They have Google, Stack Overflow, and other employees to use as a resource. It's a great way to get to know new hires while seeing how resourceful and in…

A day? No thank you...

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#52

Post by koffiezet »

alkonaut wrote: post #34

Language/platform choice explains why they need 50 engineers rather than 100. The trivial scope of the application explains why it's 50-100 and not 5000. It's a messaging service! If they weren't extending their application by developing new functionality then 50 even sounds like a lot (assuming they don't run any of their own hardware).

Don't forget they also have to develop the front-end applications, which include iOS, Android, web, ... That will probably be the largest part of their engineering effort.

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#53

Post by JupiterMoon »

sidcool wrote: post #50

Comments in this thread are quite cringeworthy. People calling WhatsApp a simple application seem to fail to understand the cost of simplicity under such scale.

I think the point is more that WhatsApp continues to do one thing and to do it well. Conceptually this is simple -- although yes the scale adds plenty of complexity. Other social type services/apps/whatever try to become all things to all people they therefore become complex conceptually as well as due to scale.

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#54

Post by amorphid »

apexkid wrote: post #21

I wish there were some good online resources around Erlang. Most of the content is very theoretical and not explanatory. Its hard to find implementation of common algorithms like Sorting, graphs, link-list and other dataStructures in erlang.

I haven't taken the Erlang plunge yet, but if I did, I'd probably try starting with Elixir, a language written in Erlang. There is a growing amount of buzz, community, tooling, etc. A basic understanding of Elixir would probably make Erlang a lot easier to understand.

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#55

Post by clessg »

amorphid wrote: post #54
apexkid wrote: post #21

I wish there were some good online resources around Erlang. Most of the content is very theoretical and not explanatory. Its hard to find implementation of common algorithms like Sorting, graphs, link-list and other dataStructures in erlang.

I haven't taken the Erlang plunge yet, but if I did, I'd probably try starting with Elixir, a language written in Erlang. There is a growing amount of buzz, community, tooling, etc. A basic understanding of Elixir would probably make Erlang a lot easier to understand.

> A basic understanding of Elixir would probably make Erlang a lot easier to understand.

It does, can personally confirm.

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#56

Post by mpdehaan2 »

sidcool wrote: post #50

Comments in this thread are quite cringeworthy. People calling WhatsApp a simple application seem to fail to understand the cost of simplicity under such scale.

It wasn't a great article from wired. I feel the language choice is probably the least contributing factor in terms of what's interesting at that scale. Yes, it's an eclectic choice, but I find systems/component architecture much more interesting than language and program architecture in scaling considerations.

A bit more info here: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

With regard to fun challenges to solve, from that article:

"Lots of problems related to scale as you might imagine. Problems with flapping connections, queues getting so long they delay high priority operations, flapping of timers, code that worked just fine at one traffic level breaking badly at higher traffic levels, high priority messages not getting serviced under high load, operations blocking other operations in unexpected ways, failures causing resources issues, and so on. These things just happen and have to be worked through no matter what system you are using."

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#57

Post by microtonal »

oskarth wrote: post #47
amelius wrote: post #17

> Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users Answer: because sending short messages from A to B is basically a solved problem. There is even a programming language (Erlang) that was made with this application in mind. The prototypical "Hello World" example for Erlang is a messaging application.

I'm sure you could do it in an afternoon, right? Just like anyone on HN can make a "basic CRUD app" like Facebook in a weekend. I really dislike the arrogant attitude behind these types of comments. Have you worked at WhatsApp? Do you have any idea what they spend their days doing, what their systems look like, what their requirements are like? WhatsApp have close to a billion users, 50 engineers and they manage to p…

I believe that the line of reasoning of your parent still has merit. Erlang OTP was developed for telephony systems and has proven to be very reliable for distributed system. Messaging maps relatively nicely to Erlang OTP and as such Whatsapp are leveraging decades of research and work by Ericsson. Of course, this is how it should be: a good software infrastructure should save users time.

Obviously, creating Whatsapp is nothing near a weekend project. But I think there founders should be commended especially for avoiding some classic mistakes: the NIH syndrome and going on a hiring spree once the investments started rolling in. Their managerial skills are at least as good as their engineering skills.

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#58

Post by mlazaroff »

humanrebar wrote: post #32
planetjones wrote: post #7

I 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 mad…

> Surely they need 50 engineers because their product is fairly simple and there's no need to have more engineers than features. Right. There's not even a way to adjust notification levels based on person or group. I ended up turning off notifications for the whole app, so it stopped serving the same use cases that text messages do. People still need to text or call me if they need an urgent answer.

You can mute an individual chat for up to a year.

Re: Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

#60

Post by reitoei »

nbevans wrote: post #41

50 developers actually seems grossly too much for such a simple product. I can only imagine it is because they wrote the app over and over again for each platform, in that terrible legacy fashion, without being able to share any code.

You say this, of course, with the experience of supporting that many users and platforms... right?
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