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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

#241

Post by SkyPuncher »

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.

It depends on the company/stage/setup/etc.

Having a "hero" at a 5 person startup can mean life when death was inevitable. Having that at a 500 person org likely means another team is left cleaning up crap.

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

#242

Post by unsungNovelty »

moralestapia wrote: post #231
btbuildem wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they sold to FB. I think parent meant "they failed to make money on their own"

You probably don't know the story. Selling was part of the plan all along. Whatsapp didn't even try to make money on their own.

The founders hearts were in the right place. Brian Acton created Signal Foundation and Jan Koum like I said also have done good things.

They also tried the paid version for a while if you remember. And they were also dead against ads on the app. Unless I missed something or if I am wrong somewhere (At which point I would love to be corrected), Selling was the plan all along doesn't seem like a right observation.

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

#243

Post by bmeski »

leeoniya wrote: post #186
illegalmemory wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

hmm, not sure how many customers would be okay with 7 days of downtime, for instance.

System has less of a chance of going down if you have fewer noobs pushing to master all day.

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

#244

Post by globular-toast »

dunefox wrote: post #193
globular-toast wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatsapp is built on a massive, mature, global system specifically designed for sending messages. It's sad that it needs to exist and even more sad that it has to "make money" for someone. Aren't we already paying for our internet connexion/phone bill? Why do we need to be used by Whatsapp just to utilise it for its most basic purpose?

Because it needs to be built, supported, etc.?

Does it? Dumbphones from 30+ years ago can still send SMS messages just fine with zero software updates. Maybe once a decade or so that could have been enhanced with longer messages, pictures etc. But overall the messaging problem really should have been solved by now.

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

#245

Post by marderfarker2 »

y4mi wrote: post #191
jbverschoor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You hire more "heroes". Pay what they're worth. Make them happy. i dont think its as easy as you make it sound. these "heroes" generally are as productive because they dont sync and already have a clear idea of what they want to achieve/how to implement what they wish. if you add a second person like that to the same team you run a massive risk of having two competing ideas which creates a lot of friction.

At my company, “heroes” are given their own projects with them given full creative control over every detail, including the people they work with. I think I’ve read somewhere on HN to never let any two person do the same thing, to avoid the conflicts you mentioned.

Benefit of this is that these heroes can each break new grounds, and their BKM shared amongst themselves making the team extremely productive.

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

#246

Post by KennyFromIT »

dano wrote: post #220

I looked at it this way. The thing most engineers, hero's or not, want to work on is new projects and to build products customers enjoy. The last thing they want to work on is maintenance. In my last personally owned company, small as we were, the engineering team and I documented how things worked as part of what we did every day. We found that by having the inner workings documented so that anyone in the team could…

How did you manage to keep the documentation from going stale or efforts being duplicated?

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

#247

Post by _1 »

moralestapia wrote: post #231
btbuildem wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they sold to FB. I think parent meant "they failed to make money on their own"

You probably don't know the story. Selling was part of the plan all along. Whatsapp didn't even try to make money on their own.

Wasn't it $1 per year before Facebook bought them?

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

#249

Post by rdsubhas »

My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out.

Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers.

WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long), no account creation (your phone number is enough, thanks), no hidden ad engine, no hundreds of stupid features that product people stuff down in the name of experimentation.

There are some leaders who want anything and everything: Throw 100 darts in the wall. Leave what sticks (don't touch or nurture it). Go back to throwing 100 more. The other guy does that? We want that too. Mobile? Yes. Desktop? Yes. Browser? Yes. Different affiliate channels? Yes. Custom features for B2B partners? Yes. Merchandizing? Yes. Build a mini Ad engine? Yes. Multi user profile management systems? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, every requirement is a go.

The crucial difference is: What happens when you have a restricted pool of people, but insist on doing 100s of things? Some leaders simply treat this as an "org structure" problem, not a problem of focus. They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step – just so that more quantity of features can be seen on paper. This is how most startups are, except for those rare few which don't "talk" about focusing, but actually focus.

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

#250

Post by xyzzyz »

marderfarker2 wrote: post #245
y4mi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You hire more "heroes". Pay what they're worth. Make them happy. i dont think its as easy as you make it sound. these "heroes" generally are as productive because they dont sync and already have a clear idea of what they want to achieve/how to implement what they wish. if you add a second person like that to the same team you run a massive risk of having two competing ideas which creates a lot of friction.

At my company, “heroes” are given their own projects with them given full creative control over every detail, including the people they work with. I think I’ve read somewhere on HN to never let any two person do the same thing, to avoid the conflicts you mentioned. Benefit of this is that these heroes can each break new grounds, and their BKM shared amongst themselves making the team extremely productive.

> I think I’ve read somewhere on HN to never let any two person do the same thing, to avoid the conflicts you mentioned.

I’ve read this in Peter Thiel’s “Zero to one”.

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