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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

#141

Post by davidw »

USNetizen wrote: post #139

Here's part of what I don't get - there are so many government organizations, state and federal, jumping over themselves to provide funding, incubation and support to IT product/app companies across the country claiming it creates jobs when, as this shows, it is entirely possible to operate at incredible scale nowadays with a mere skeleton staff. So why do so many government-run and government-funded programs fawn ov…

My view is that government should stick to 'government' things like providing infrastructure, education, health care, and stuff like that. If there's money left over, lower taxes some, or even better, get rid of annoying fees and streamline things.

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

#142

Post by acconsta »

mpdehaan2 wrote: post #56
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 ch…

>I feel the language choice is probably the least contributing factor in terms of what's interesting at that scale

Erlang and BEAM were designed for highly concurrent messaging applications. Surely that's of some importance.

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

#143

Post by monkey_slap »

joeyspn wrote: post #84
KuhlMensch wrote: post #43

The language and culture of simplicity are great aspirations, all companies should look at doing this. However, not all companies are going to get such a huge benefit, as not all companies operate within a narrow problem domain. INSTAGRAM is another similar case: relatively simple solution (share photos with limitations), uses only single language PHP (at least since last I heard). I mean this is partly a reflection…

PHP? They're known for being a huge Django (Python) success. Or did fb converted them to HipHop?

Still Python here

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

#144

Post by semicolondev »

USNetizen wrote: post #139

Here's part of what I don't get - there are so many government organizations, state and federal, jumping over themselves to provide funding, incubation and support to IT product/app companies across the country claiming it creates jobs when, as this shows, it is entirely possible to operate at incredible scale nowadays with a mere skeleton staff. So why do so many government-run and government-funded programs fawn ov…

For startups where technology is not the only infrastructure of the platform your observation is likely not true.

Look at startups like Cloudfactory: http://www.cloudfactory.com/home (they are actually on a mission to create jobs for millions)

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

#145

Post by rifung »

mrweasel wrote: post #101
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…

Actually I believe that answer is in the article: “Our strategy around recruiting is to find the best and brightest engineers. We don’t bring them in specifically because the engineer knows Erlang,” WhatsApp only needs 50 engineers because of who they hire. Even using Erlang, I pretty sure they would need more than 50 engineers if they hired mainly around average engineers.

How do you know if an engineer is average vs one of the best?

I haven't heard of anyone who has figured out how to measure an engineer's abilities.

Some people test algorithms. Others test how often they've shipped things. Most just look for years of experience. A few even test whether you know certain facts.

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

#146

Post by hinkley »

USNetizen wrote: post #139

Here's part of what I don't get - there are so many government organizations, state and federal, jumping over themselves to provide funding, incubation and support to IT product/app companies across the country claiming it creates jobs when, as this shows, it is entirely possible to operate at incredible scale nowadays with a mere skeleton staff. So why do so many government-run and government-funded programs fawn ov…

I have a suspicion that 'job creation' is just the new codeword for trickledown economics.

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

#147

Post by rndn »

USNetizen wrote: post #139

Here's part of what I don't get - there are so many government organizations, state and federal, jumping over themselves to provide funding, incubation and support to IT product/app companies across the country claiming it creates jobs when, as this shows, it is entirely possible to operate at incredible scale nowadays with a mere skeleton staff. So why do so many government-run and government-funded programs fawn ov…

I guess they hope for startups that eventually will be tech giants like Apple and IBM, that actually do create jobs. It's only a fairly recent development that it's becoming evident that technology allows for a tremendous centralization and automation. Algorithms are invented by one person, implemented by ten and used by billions. Eventually, only a tiny elite will need to work, and at that point we will need some sort of basic income.

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

#148

Post by davidw »

linkydinkandyou wrote: post #75

Our company is solving a similar large-scale problem with very few engineers. And our answer, too, is Erlang! (And also, a few very smart, highly experienced, people with Math graduate degrees.)

So... what are you doing? Link?

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

#149

Post by asmosoinio »

mrweasel wrote: post #101
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…

Actually I believe that answer is in the article: “Our strategy around recruiting is to find the best and brightest engineers. We don’t bring them in specifically because the engineer knows Erlang,” WhatsApp only needs 50 engineers because of who they hire. Even using Erlang, I pretty sure they would need more than 50 engineers if they hired mainly around average engineers.

"...to find the best and brightest engineers."

Who doesn't say that though? No company says they hire average engineers.

But I agree that their success does kind of prove that they succeeded in that.

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

#150

Post by acconsta »

temuze wrote: post #138
ericjang wrote: post #132

Question for HN: what is your estimate on the minimum man/womanpower needed to scale a product/service up to 10K users? 1M? 900M? For instance, what fraction of Facebook's work is related to making things scale? How much effort does a smaller company like Quora put into scaling for users? I imagine PaaS/IaaS services like Google App Engine and Amazon Elastic Beanstalk help a lot but I'm curious as to what you think.

Depends on the product! Are you making something that searches the entire internet for relevant documents based on a custom query? Or are you sending a picture to another phone that goes away in If you're talking "minimum" then theoretically it could be 1 person. It's very easy to scale static pages. Heck - you could host a static page on S3.

Sure, but what's the most popular application hosted on AWS? Does it approach 900 million users?
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