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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

#161

Post by thekyle »

brigandish wrote: post #152
goodoldneon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re fine — don’t listen to JS haters on Hacker News. They pine for the simpler days of sites that primarily use HTML and CSS, with maybe a little bit of JS sprinkled in. But consumers are increasingly demanding an app-like experience from the web, which requires JS frameworks. As for Express, JS on the backend will be popular as long as JS on the frontend is popular. JS backends have their flaws, but there’s a lot…

> But consumers are increasingly demanding an app-like experience from the web This seems tendentious. Which average user was looking for these changes? Can you point to a site that shifted to an "app-like experience" and became successful because of it?

How about Google Maps and Docs

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

#162

Post by thewhitetulip »

jawns wrote: post #134
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…

Heroes are a red flag for me, as a manager, trying to build a resilient team. Which is not to say that you can't have a range of experience levels. But what happens when those heroes are unavailable? Maybe they're out on vacation, or medical leave, or they eventually retire or leave the organization because they're tired of propping it up? Heroes tend to be a single point of failure.

The worst team is the one with a single point of failure. All hell breaks loose if they're unavailable. This makes me wonder why managers have teams like this?

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

#163

Post by vp8989 »

jawns wrote: post #134
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…

Heroes are a red flag for me, as a manager, trying to build a resilient team. Which is not to say that you can't have a range of experience levels. But what happens when those heroes are unavailable? Maybe they're out on vacation, or medical leave, or they eventually retire or leave the organization because they're tired of propping it up? Heroes tend to be a single point of failure.

Being replaceable tends to make work less satisfying. All the places I've worked at that followed your advice had the most churn and the least productivity/ROI on engineering $ spent.

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

#165

Post by jbverschoor »

jawns wrote: post #134
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…

Heroes are a red flag for me, as a manager, trying to build a resilient team. Which is not to say that you can't have a range of experience levels. But what happens when those heroes are unavailable? Maybe they're out on vacation, or medical leave, or they eventually retire or leave the organization because they're tired of propping it up? Heroes tend to be a single point of failure.

You hire more "heroes". Pay what they're worth. Make them happy.

Or you just pay an order of magnitude on hosting, performance consults, bandwidth, etc. etc. etc. And STILL won't EVER get to the same result, because you can't always pay (I'd say almost never) your way into a stable and performant solution. Look at all the others.. Nothing works as well as whatsapp.

Good luck hiring 500 engineers who have no idea what happens throughout the whole stack.

I'd rather pay what you save on cloud providers and snowflakes to them. (not even taking into account the result of these "heroes".. the business value / dominance whatsapp has because of this)

You can hire 1000 people who can't draw, or maybe just a little bit, or you can pay an artist and get the result you'll otherwise never get.

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

#166

Post by Zababa »

crate_barre wrote: post #123
capableweb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems redundant to have a Express backend + REST API, why can't you just build your REST API on the Express backend? And also, React is complex, hardly anyone seems to know the internals. The API interface might be easy to learn, but "simple" is not something that you should label React with.

why can't you just build your REST API on the Express backend Pretty sure he means to set up the REST api in Express with a few simple routes. JS is not complex, and pretty vanilla choice. It’s what people add on top of it that gives it a bad name. I’ll link to this guy so you can understand: https://kentcdodds.com/blog/how-i-built-a-modern-website-in-... ^ This is the problem, not JavaScript.

I'm not sure I understand why people build websites like that. My theory would be that usually at some point you have to go lower in the stack (learn how Linux/Node/V8 work or stuff like that). You can avoid going lower in the stack, but the complexity has to go somewhere, and that's what we see here.

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

#168

Post by chenmike »

brigandish wrote: post #152
goodoldneon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re fine — don’t listen to JS haters on Hacker News. They pine for the simpler days of sites that primarily use HTML and CSS, with maybe a little bit of JS sprinkled in. But consumers are increasingly demanding an app-like experience from the web, which requires JS frameworks. As for Express, JS on the backend will be popular as long as JS on the frontend is popular. JS backends have their flaws, but there’s a lot…

> But consumers are increasingly demanding an app-like experience from the web This seems tendentious. Which average user was looking for these changes? Can you point to a site that shifted to an "app-like experience" and became successful because of it?

This is a strange way to phrase the question. Sites that had to shift to app-like experiences are hard to find, because nowadays pretty much every web app is an app-like experience from the beginning and is created with a JS framework. The shift happened years ago.

Barring informational sites like blogs and news publications, it’s actually more challenging to come up with new web products that are NOT app-like in nature, and that do not use any kind of JS framework. Craigslist may be one of the few big ones and even it is losing market share to FB marketplace, which is an app-like experience.

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

#169

Post by macintux »

bjarneh wrote: post #48
Closi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's something I think we have all seen a lot of times - that by the time a company is serving 1 billion users it has quickly expanded out it's engineering team hugely, and because of that additional abstraction is required and the complexity/LOC skyrockets.

> it has quickly expanded out it's engineering team hugely But makes little sense (as a developer/engineer myself) to think that growth in users, requires a ton of new developers/engineers. We are not tattoo artists, our job can scale indefinitely if set up properly, i.e. all you should need to scale further (to 1BN or 7BN) should be enough money to buy more hardware; which WhatsApp/Facebook clearly has.

You're assuming that their use case & technology stack & application scale cleanly horizontally and they're not spending all their time fighting fires.

True in this instance, but far from a universal truth.

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

#170

Post by Zababa »

brigandish wrote: post #152
goodoldneon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re fine — don’t listen to JS haters on Hacker News. They pine for the simpler days of sites that primarily use HTML and CSS, with maybe a little bit of JS sprinkled in. But consumers are increasingly demanding an app-like experience from the web, which requires JS frameworks. As for Express, JS on the backend will be popular as long as JS on the frontend is popular. JS backends have their flaws, but there’s a lot…

> But consumers are increasingly demanding an app-like experience from the web This seems tendentious. Which average user was looking for these changes? Can you point to a site that shifted to an "app-like experience" and became successful because of it?

I think it's a "general trend" rather than a website by website trend. I think that 20 years ago most of the discussion online took place with things that looked like websites (forums, mailing lists). These days, most of it takes place in places that look like apps (Twitter, Facebook).
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