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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

#261

Post by ryanSrich »

rdsubhas wrote: post #249

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),…

This is why, after being both an engineer and a product manager (and VP of Product), and now a CTO of a seed stage startup, I’m fairly convinced PdMs are unnecessary. At least for the the type of company I’d like to build (WhatsApp as a primary example of that).

Off loading the founders vision to someone else is a failure of both communication and org structure (at the seed-SB stage). People may not think hiring their first PdM is offloading their vision, but it is. That person is going to come up with their own ideas, validate their own assumptions, and push for product updates that directly serve their own self interests. To think that this won’t happen is naive.

What I’ve found works the best is hiring competent engineers, giving them adequate business context, a decent design spec, and letting them figure it out.

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

#262

Post by Jensson »

onion2k wrote: post #188
vp8989 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being replaceable tends to make work less satisfying. In my experience the opposite is true. My personal goal on any project is to make myself replaceable. There's nothing I find more tedious than having to work on the same thing for years because no one else can take over from me.

> My personal goal on any project is to make myself replaceable.

So you admit that you aren't replaceable? If the company mandated that you should always be replaceable then you wouldn't need that goal, it would always be fulfilled. And working in a way that makes you always replaceable isn't fun.

Edit: What we learned from your comment is that making yourself replaceable is fun, but being replaceable isn't fun, since as you say you work to become replaceable so you can start working on something new rather than to stay replaceable forever.

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

#263

Post by tored »

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…

Yes, you will always pay one way or the other.

I work as a contractor, thus I have read a lots of code from various different types of projects and the conclusion is always the same, if they had spent more money on skill to begin with I wouldn’t be needed.

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

#264

Post by jonasdegendt »

_1 wrote: post #247
moralestapia wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I believe so, but wasn't it much like the Winrar license where nobody was actually forced to pay at the end of the day?

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

#265

Post by schnitzelstoat »

killtimeatwork wrote: post #179
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.

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…

I don't know if they are oblivious to it - but it might not be possible to pay people enough to get them to stay due to pay bands set by HR etc.

OP mentions that he is in Germany - there it might be more possible as SWE doesn't pay as well as it does in the USA and there are fewer companies so it might be feasible to pay a lot more than the competition, whereas in the USA that's unlikely to be viable outside of companies like Netflix etc.

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

#266

Post by hermanradtke »

tinus_hn wrote: post #260
rdsubhas wrote: post #249

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),…

Ultimately though WhatsApp ended up with a billion users and 0 revenue.

They charged $1 per year before Facebook removed the fee.

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

#267

Post by austincheney »

rdsubhas wrote: post #249

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),…

This confuses the mistakes of a mature company. Different dynamics.

For example Google had thousands of engineers back when they had only 3 products: search, auction, and AdWords. I remember Travelocity having over a thousand developers and not being able to redesign a webpage.

Its deeper than a product problem. Its an execution problem. It’s the ability to do what works with great criticality opposed to what’s expected, standard, normal, or comforting.

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

#268

Post by that_guy_iain »

rdsubhas wrote: post #249

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),…

WhatsApp was originally a super simple product. Send and receive messages. It was fundamentally a solved problem. It was all about the fact you could send free messages in a world where sms cost 10 cents a message. It wasn't that their messages were faster, their messages were anything other than free.

They had a year fee of $1. Which I never paid yet I used their service anyways. The reason they were able to scale so large with so few devs is simple, their product was super simple. 50 tech people to build a messaging system is actually a lot.

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

#269

Post by rglullis »

tinus_hn wrote: post #260
rdsubhas wrote: post #249

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),…

Ultimately though WhatsApp ended up with a billion users and 0 revenue.

Not true. They were charging $1/year from users in the richer markets. They could easily reach hundreds of millions per year in revenue if they followed this model.

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

#270

Post by bradhe »

tdrdt wrote: post #19
bradhe wrote: post #11

Some of these points are a bit suspicious, and I bet don't tell "the whole story" the way they're intended. For instance, the statement about not investing in automation unless absolutely necessary or the point about hot-swapping Erlang code. Would be good to actually hear from one of these engineers for a discussion on the paint points of working on WhatsApp back then.

Automation can be good, but will also be another system to support. I think this XKCD applies: https://xkcd.com/1205/

I'd like to see what their criteria for "absolutely necessary" is--I bet it doesn't fall on the right side of that table.
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