Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users

Post by pakled_engineer » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

kozukumi wrote: post #14

WhatsApp seems to be a great example of designing your system with the best tools available. To go from nothing to pretty much being the de-facto modern replacement for SMS in a couple of years is an amazing achievement. I really need to sit down and spend some time properly learning a functional language. I can hack my way through Haskell code but I do it in a very non-Haskell way. I really need to change that. My p…

Post by tedunangst » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:30 PM UTC

gallamine wrote: post #167

lotso wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I guess "users" is a confusing concept, but a service like Cloudflare would be an example of a more complex application serving that scale of people.

Post by forgottenpass » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:36 PM UTC

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…

Post by the_af » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 6:51 PM UTC

aianus wrote: post #162

rdtsc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading through comments, I think there is an undercurrent of slight envy or resentment (perhaps unconscious) both towards WhatsApp and Erlang. We are rational people so we'll never admit to that, so it comes out in other objections "It is a simple system", "I could do the backend in a weekend"... There are a lot of startup people here, who work at a startup, bet their time, money, life? on one, and talking about a s…

I resent them because Whatsapp is terrible, terrible software compared to Facebook Messenger yet somehow made $19B. 1. No web interface, I'm forced to use a tiny mobile keyboard 2. Identity tied to my phone number which changes every month 3. Ugly (subjective) 4. My friends are already on Facebook, why have another service that does the same thing but worse. 5. No chat bubbles. 6. No meme search I could go on and on.…

Post by thebrettd » Wed, Sep 16, 2015, 7:11 PM UTC

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…