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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

#181

Post by kuschku »

davidw wrote: post #152
kuschku wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Effectively, the whole reason why governments exist to do things is because they can do things that are unprofitable. And they can do it well. Look at the US healthcare system vs. the social democracies. You have the same cost per person in taxes (the US actually spends more tax dollars per person on the healthcare system than most other countries), but the US has, additionally, people paying private on top of that, and you get worse results.

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

#182

Post by KirinDave »

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…

> I don't think anyone commenting along these lines on HN is that ignorant.

You are quite the optimist.

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

#183

Post by KirinDave »

For reference, Level Money sold to C1 and had 1 backend engineer, 1 android engineer, and 1 ios engineer.

This scale isn't unusual at all. Really it's a lot more about feature development. The smart way to build most mobile startups is to use managed providers like google app engine, AWS Container Service, or Heroku. Between that and how not-bad both Android and iOS are to develop for these days (compared to their history), it's possible to get your engineering team size pretty small.

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

#184

Post by semicolondev »

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…

I have been looking for full time openings at the moment and I prefer this kind of hiring practice but it's been rare.

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

#185

Post by segmondy »

rifung wrote: post #145
mrweasel wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interviews!

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

#186

Post by jsprogrammer »

xyzzyz wrote: post #35
alkonaut wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing simpler would be sending messages to a centralized queue for people to fetch. Yet Twitter needs 4100 employees for that (though not all engineers I hope).

Centralized queue and global fan-out makes it only harder to do at scale, not easier. With 1-to-1 messaging, it's trivial to shard the whole system. http://xkcd.com/1425/

Twitter is not 1-to-1 messaging, generally.

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

#187

Post by mahyarm »

The reason why whatsapp can keep it small is because they decide features based on engineering cost first. Does the designer want a feature or UX design that would be a pain in the ass to create with this UX kit? Is there a probably uglier equivalent that would take 1/10th of the engineering time? It gets shot down and we do it the engineer-simpler way.

One UX example in the iphone app is the action sheet that pops up when you want to send photos or your location. While in facebook it gets embedded in a fancy keyboard drawer. The action sheet version probably took about 5 hours total for all of it, while facebook messenger's version probably took 500 hours minimum.

Another example on the backend is how they are relatively stateless, do not keep chat histories, do not have real multi-device w/ one account capabilities and so on. Each of those features would increase engineering and machine cost, sometimes significantly.

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

#188

Post by USNetizen »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #168
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…

Why are you picking on the government :)? There are many funded startups and publicly traded companies that are doing the same thing.

Because private sector investors have an interest in making a return on investment, which product companies do in spades, but government has an interest in creating jobs, which these product/app startups don't typically do well at all. So why should government pick the same types of "investments" as Silicon Valley VC's when their criteria and end goals are so completely different?

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

#189

Post by davidw »

hudell wrote: post #65

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

Yeah, I've always used Google chat, which works from my computer too (I can type way faster with a keyboard). I do like Erlang, though.

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

#190

Post by kcorbitt »

mahyarm wrote: post #187

The reason why whatsapp can keep it small is because they decide features based on engineering cost first. Does the designer want a feature or UX design that would be a pain in the ass to create with this UX kit? Is there a probably uglier equivalent that would take 1/10th of the engineering time? It gets shot down and we do it the engineer-simpler way. One UX example in the iphone app is the action sheet that pops u…

I totally agree with what you're saying. But remember that they got to 900M users with this approach. Obviously users liked something about what Whatsapp's philosophy produces.
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