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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

#171

Post by tolgerias »

brigandish wrote: post #148
emerongi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'd pick it over many other languages. I'd be interested to know which ones, because I can't think of one advantage that Javascript has - aside from the ubiquity of browsers. If we're comparing any other aspect of it though, I just don't know what advantage it has (seriously).

Functions are first class. Async i/o by default. Familiar syntax (I'm sure Haskell or Clojure are better languages, but they sure take some time to get used to. You can be fairly productive in js in very little time). There are packages for anything you can think of, no need to reinvent the wheel most of the times. And I even like it's single threaded nature. Being able to keep a process waiting without needing to spin a new thread with all that implies is very convenient. Edit: Original commenter had already mentioned typescript.

So what's the deal with TS? I think on top of adding much needed type safety to Javascript, TS is also one of the best type systems you can ask for.

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

#172

Post by yodsanklai »

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…

> Given the choice, I would always prefer a small team over a large team.

I think that's one of the conclusion of the "mythical man-month" book.

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

#173

Post by mensetmanusman »

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.

Use heroes to make jumps you can’t make with cog machine teams, then manage the prior tier platform to be resilient.

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

#174

Post by illegalmemory »

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.

5 heros on vacation for 7 days, and coming back and finishing the work in next 5 days is more comfortable position than 50 clueless engineers claiming work will be over in 4 days.

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

#175

Post by unsungNovelty »

They not only used FreeBSD for their servers, their CEO at the time Jan Koum donated $1 million dollars to FreeBSD foundation too. Talk about giving back!

The only thing they failed at was making money. I really wished they had. They knew what Whatsapp meant to the world. Look at WA now.

https://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2014/11/freebsd-found...

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

#176

Post by baktubi »

netcan wrote: post #115
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…

For all sorts of reasons, good and bad. One is that the future is unknown. Your goal might be to keep the product simple and scale to 1bn users, but you don't really know if it will play out like this. Maybe you plateau at 1m users with the initial idea and pivot the product somehow. Now the app does dating, social media or specialised communications for highway construction teams. Tradeoffs are easier to make in hin…

I think the Unix philosophy should apply here. The fact that WhatsApp did one thing well and it had a good business model (was it $1 per year?) is the important bit.

When you say, “Now the app does dating…” I think the right move is to scrap the project because that’s a colossal fuckup. Unless you have Microsoft cash to have multiple colossal fuckups in a row, don’t add another dating app to your messaging app. Ergo, less is more.

WhatsApp probably started with passion and a solid vision. The Zuckerberg gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Anyone will take 19 billion for a basket full of Indian users.

Another thing WhatsApp did well is they targeted ALL phones. They didn’t abandon their users like the fang-bangers (sorry been watching True Blood— FAANG is an annoying acronym so they are hereby fang-bangers).

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

#177

Post by dunefox »

jbverschoor wrote: post #165
jawns wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nothing works as well as whatsapp.

Ehh, that's very debatable. Signal, Threema, and yes even Telegram (regardless of E2E enc, etc.) work well and are reliable.

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

#178

Post by snovv_crash »

vadfa wrote: post #125
snovv_crash wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this speaks to good architecture decisions, right? If they tried to make a shared framework that ran the same codebase everywhere and then port it onto different platforms ( cough facebook) then you don't get these nice isolated issues, for example.

Yes, if you don't write a native app for every platform the result will be rubbish. That's not a "good architecture decision", that is common sense. If they don't do it that way it's to save money, because as we all know Facebook is strapped for cash. (Talking about Facebook and Instagram here, because as far as I know WhatsApp is completely native on every platform)

This then also means a well defined server API without undocumented behaviour that individual implementations depend on. I stand by my assertion that the good scaling and separable builds is a sign of good architecture.

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

#179

Post by killtimeatwork »

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.

Many/most teams don't have heroes at all, they only have noobs :) I.e. most people stay on a team for a year or three and change jobs afterwards - there's no chance of accumulating knowledge. Nobody is sure how things work and why they are the way they are.

I believe many managers are fine with this, because the team is producing something (i.e. "velocity" is higher than zero), but are oblivious to the fact that team could be way more productive if the knowledge was actually retained in people's heads and not just lousy attempts at documentation.

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

#180

Post by WJW »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #162
jawns wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is one type of team which is even worse than one with a single point of failure: those teams without anyone at all capable of fixing the system. Given that alternative, having a single point of failure is better than having nothing at all. It would of course be even better to have multiple capable employees, but you cannot always have the team you want with the hiring budget you have.
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