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WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

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Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#81

Post by foepys »

kosolam wrote: post #20
alanfranz wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp used to charge 1 eur or usd per year per user. Assuming a 20% vat, that’s $800M in yearly revenue. If you spend $500k per engineer per year, you’re still left with $775M to handle infrastructure and all other expenses. Whatsapp would have been sustainable without fb. That’s the regret.

Exactly. Facebook bought WhatsApp’s users like cattle on auction. WhatsApp guys just needed the right price offer. Now with pseudo tech posts like the current they are trying to mask it’s public image behind some ancient tech innovation from it’s past…

WA Management was misled by Facebook about what FB wanted to do with WA. I agree that you'd have to pretty naive to believe FB but it's not like WA founders sold solely because of money.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#82

Post by emerongi »

_Understated_ wrote: post #69
freeall wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we really think Javascript is exotic? Hasn't it proved itself over many years now? That doesn't mean it can't have issues like anything else. And because of the massive scale of the language you'll see a lot of shit. It's a language and ecosystem like anything else - it's what you do with it that matters.

I wouldn't say JavaScript is exotic, it's more to do with what is being done with it. Traditionally it was used to enhance HTML pages with some DOM manipulation but it's now being used for a million other things too. So historically, if your JavaScript code broke your page would still render as it was just html but now there are all sorts of build processes and long chains that use JavaScript to create the html in th…

JavaScript has matured massively over the past 10 years. I'm not a Node developer myself, but JS + TS is a very palatable combination to me. I'd pick it over many other languages.

10 years ago I would not have touched JS unless I was forced.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#84

Post by vadfa »

javchz wrote: post #72
tdrdt wrote: post #16

"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…

Well, WhatsApp had to support exotic cases like BlackBerry, Symbian OS (Nokia), and Windows Phone. I will say, dealing with JS stacks, seems easy in comparison to mobile fragmentation from back then.

I don't see how this is related. Server-side you write and expose an API. Then you have 1-3 developers for each platform that write code that consumes that API. Those developers don't need to know anything about the internals of the server.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#85

Post by Kelteseth »

javchz wrote: post #72
tdrdt wrote: post #16

"The simpler product makes it much easier to maintain and scale." This is good news for the developers, the product owners and the customers. I still can't understand why today people choose a (Javascript) stack of build systems, ton of dependencies, and all kinds of exotic tech that is the latest and most hyped. As a developer you need to support this in the future. It might be nice to build today but it will be a n…

Well, WhatsApp had to support exotic cases like BlackBerry, Symbian OS (Nokia), and Windows Phone. I will say, dealing with JS stacks, seems easy in comparison to mobile fragmentation from back then.

But this would be client side only, right? These issues would also only occur in the corresponding app repository, when building a separate native app for all platforms. The backend for all of these apps would be the same, not the frontend.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#86

Post by altacc »

M0r13n wrote: post #57

I'm honestly not that surprised about the size. In my experience, efficiency and the number of engineers have not necessarily correlated. For example, I used to work for a company with about 500 employees (relatively large by German standards) and now work for a competing company in the same industry with less than 150 employees. The core engineering team only consists of a dozen engineers. The output is noticeably l…

Having worked in a range of companies, there is definitely an inverse correlation between company size and speed, especially for individual teams. At 500 people you're well into enterprise level organisation, where a lot of processes are put in place to minimize the amount of damage a single person can do to the organisation. That also puts a speed limit on those efficient and knowledgeable contributors.

Some companies spend a lot of time & energy trying to implement operating models that try to overcome this but actually end up putting in place more decision processes & oversight. Sometimes the real solution is to reduce control and let the efficient teams lead the way. But then what would all that management do to fill their days...

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#87

Post by robjan »

ducklingslicks wrote: post #40
dncornholio wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Whatsapp for a few years when they had this pricing model. Use 1 year for free and pay after. I've never paid anything and nobody who I know needed to pay to keep using WhatsApp.

I think it was free on Android but not on iOS. But not completely sure because I only had Android back then

It was a one off payment on iOS but a poorly enforced annual subscription on Android

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#88

Post by emerongi »

M0r13n wrote: post #57

I'm honestly not that surprised about the size. In my experience, efficiency and the number of engineers have not necessarily correlated. For example, I used to work for a company with about 500 employees (relatively large by German standards) and now work for a competing company in the same industry with less than 150 employees. The core engineering team only consists of a dozen engineers. The output is noticeably l…

As long as the core system is built on solid engineering, this definitely makes sense.

From my experience in a deadline-constrained environment, things end up being slapped together until they "just work". Adding new features gets more and more difficult and if you're still constrained by deadlines, then the solution is to hire more, which is effectively a brute-force solution to meet the deadlines. Output per employee gets smaller, but total output should grow by some marginal amount.

Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

#90

Post by aledthemathguy »

willejs wrote: post #17
bjarneh wrote: post #9

This article does very little to explain how they did that. It basically states the type of tech they used (Erlang, FreeBSD and SoftLayer), and something about not trying to over engineer stuff. The title also makes it sound like 500 engineers would make it easier to scale up WhatsApp, which does not make too much sense either.

Theres a high scalability post from years ago that has a bit more information. http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

this is great. wondering if Telegram also have a post similar to this? (unlike whatsapp, they do store the messages)
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