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Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

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

#151

Post by kuschku »

davidw wrote: post #141
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.

Part of this "streamline things" includes lots of IT infrastructure, though.

You can’t get electronic tax filing without technology, you can’t get full open data availability with nice diagrams like https://www.destatis.de/bevoelkerungspyramide/ without lots of IT workers in the government (this is available for every data collected by the German Federal Statistics Agency, btw), and you can’t get stuff like http://ims.kiel.de/extern/kielmaps/ which show even lanes and zoning for cities without people working on it.

Part of the job of governments is also always having reliable, high quality data about their country, for government purposes. But it also means they need to publish those for citizen, and they need people taking care of that.

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

#152

Post by davidw »

kuschku wrote: post #151
davidw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of this "streamline things" includes lots of IT infrastructure, though. You can’t get electronic tax filing without technology, you can’t get full open data availability with nice diagrams like https://www.destatis.de/bevoelkerungspyramide/ without lots of IT workers in the government (this is available for every data collected by the German Federal Statistics Agency, btw), and you can’t get stuff like http://im…

Those are all things with very wide benefits, rather than incubators, where you get someone in the government trying to pick a company to give money to. So to me all those things still sound like 'infrastructure' that private companies probably would underprovision.

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

#153

Post by piyushpr134 »

hudell wrote: post #65

I'll never understand why so many people prefered WhatsApp over anything that already existed previously and even worked better.

To elaborate, there are many reasons 1. They have a no ads policy which is a really godsend thing when other messengers had stickers, games and just plain annoying ads. 2. The ones that did not, for ex Google etc were not really made for phones. They understood the importance of using your contacts as social graph really really well. 3. They almost never experienced outages. 4. Had sensible defaults. 5. Their apps are lightweight (memory and cpu wise) compared to amount of time one spends on it. 6. Had no api and generally very low spam compared to sms. SMS has really high spam in the developing world. 7. Rich media compared to SMS and no character restrictions

I think west really hates it as most of the people there have iphone and they had this $1 signup which made it unpopular there. They never had that on android which made it a darling of non-west

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

#154

Post by pbreit »

I think this is the key line: “The number-one lesson is just be very focused on what you need to do”.

My sense is that WhatsApp spends all of its energy on the very core product offering and not a bunch of superfluous activities. I don't think the language choice has much to do with it unless there's some sort of "keep it simple" thinking that the languages somehow exude.

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

#155

Post by Balgair »

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…

Because most of those politicians think Google employs roughly the same number of people that GM used to. Google has about 55k employees [0] and GM at it's peak had about 350k employees [1], a 6 fold difference. GM also had high competition in the marketplace with Ford and others, so the number of autoworkers was likely in the millions for the country. Since the car and the computer are synonymous for 'mental space' for most people, meaning they are about equally used in terms of time and resources, the 2 industries are considered roughly equal. Granted, there are a lot more tech companies out there than auto companies even in the 80's heyday, so the number of workers may be near parity.

Also, remember that Google and FB have put a lot of cash in to D.C. in terms of lobbying [2]. FB is essentially using the start-up scene as their R&D departments, occasionally having to fork out the moolah to buy WhatsAps and other viable competitors.

[0] https://www.quora.com/How-many-employees-does-Google-have

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors#History

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-google-is-transf...

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

#156

Post by marincounty »

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…

Actually, I think this is a fair way to evaluate new hires. That said, I hope you don't look over their shoulders? I can't tie my shoe laces with someone looking over my shoulders. Or, secretly view their progress? I'm o.k. With reviewing their progress at the end of the day though?

Plus, if you are going to hire in this fashion, why even bother with resumes, or extensive resumes? Just bring people in for a test? If they do well--hire them?

I always felt a test is the fairest way to hire new employees. Tests do away with upperclass privilege(better contacts, padded resumes, etc.) I wish more companies vetted employees in this fashion. It might get rid of something I have always dreaded, and get slightly nauseous when I see the behavior in action--and that is Networking. Sorry, I always thought it was phoney.

I still imagine your company relies heavily on resumes, and uses the test--because they can? Meaning--there's still a lot of desperate software engineers out there; willing to do anything to land a job?

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

#157

Post by 6d0debc071 »

interpol_p wrote: post #77
mdellabitta wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this interviewing methodology mean that you only hire devs that don't currently have a gig or have vacation days to blow on the possibility of getting a job with you?

We do have an initial hour meeting with candidates just to get to know them and propose the trial if they seem like a possibility. Wouldn't most people take a day off to interview somewhere? I know I wouldn't be comfortable ducking out for a few hours to interview — it would feel tense and uncomfortable. Facebook, and I'm sure many other places, do full-day interviews. It's certainly not unusual.

> Wouldn't most people take a day off to interview somewhere?

Not always possible. One of the big annoyances when I was working for a company was that if I wanted time off it was two weeks notice. Doesn't work particularly well when the interview invitation tends to be more along the lines of, 'Hi, your interview date is next week.'

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

#158

Post by smcl »

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 don't think anyone commenting along these lines on HN is that ignorant. Everyone on here understands that anything executed at the WhatsApp/FB/Instagram sort of scale is going to present all sorts of tough problems and require software engineering know-how in spades.

However of all the various applications you could conceivably scale to hundreds of millions of users this is one of the simplest. I do not think acknowledging that is cringeworthy at all.

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

#159

Post by acconsta »

codeisawesome wrote: post #45

"Code in Parallel In using Erlang, WhatsApp is part of a larger push towards programming languages that are designed for concurrency, where many processes run at the same time." Concurrency is not parallelism! /whacks author over the head with a Go manual

Yeah, but what's the best way to explain concurrency to a general audience?

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

#160

Post by lotso »

smcl wrote: post #158
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 don't think anyone commenting along these lines on HN is that ignorant. Everyone on here understands that anything executed at the WhatsApp/FB/Instagram sort of scale is going to present all sorts of tough problems and require software engineering know-how in spades. However of all the various applications you could conceivably scale to hundreds of millions of users this is one of the simplest. I do not think ackno…

>However of all the various applications you could conceivably scale to hundreds of millions of users this is one of the simplest. I do not think acknowledging that is cringeworthy at all.

What other apps besides social networking and communication apps even get to hundreds of millions of user?

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