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Err, WhatsApp?
Thanks, I feel dumb. Although that makes his argument "WhatsApp is good because you can use it to keep in touch with friends and family" which is meaningless.
> 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.
Actually, over lossy links, it's well known to be an impossible problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Generals%27_Problem
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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.
Is cloudflare more complex or less? If I'm connecting through a CF proxy in North America and someone else is connecting through Europe, there's not really any state that needs to be synchronized between us. If I send a message to somebody in Europe, that obviously does need to be synced.
Basically they're a silicon valley company who've done everything that's exactly the opposite of standard silicon valley advise -- bootstrapped for first few years, complete apathy or even aversion to silicon valley marketing (if you live in the valley and have no foreign connection, you probably didn't even know what whatsapp was before 2012 or so), built for all client platforms simultaneously (including blackberry…
I interviewed with them recently. They claimed their success was due to picking up Erlang.
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That's not evidence that's speculation. They could be using really good tools. Or each of those 50 programmers are 10x more productive than regular programmer (I don't believe in this imo).
The evidence in this case is the fact that they built the company and product with 50 developers. Whether that evidence implies anything about the product's complexity is the speculative part. If the explanation is that every single programmer at WhatsApp is 10x more productive than programmers at similar top companies, then my first question is how did WhatsApp manage to hire such people but Google, Facebook, etc.,…
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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?
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…
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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!
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'…
[1] http://fortune.com/2013/11/27/by-the-numbers-how-foxconn-chu...