WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

Post by Griffinsauce » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

dleslie wrote: post #327

numair wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s comical that all of the replies to what you’ve written claim you’re wrong, because you’re actually 100% right. And this is even more true when you remember that the company had fewer than 20 people for a long time, and that there was only one real goal , that seems to be forgotten: they needed to clone BlackBerry Messenger and get it working on every platform possible. That was it. That’s all they needed to do,…

Also can't overlook that for many SMS was ludicrously overpriced, but the early basic smartphones (palm and symbian) often had wifi capability; WhatsApp provided secure, ludicrously cheap instant messaging across all meaningful handsets. And that's all it had to do; the telecoms weren't interested in making SMS cheap or secure, RIM didn't want BBM on anything but their devices, ICQ/AIM/MSN/etc were similarly unavaila…

Post by abduhl » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 5:57 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #282

Spivak wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then how did they reach mass adoption in the first place? It’s not like they were a Swiss Army knife and before and stripped features once they got big.

That's a totally different question. A larger company such as Microsoft could have easily grabbed the market first, but they didn't.

Post by myohmy » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 6:07 PM UTC

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?

Post by jawns » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 6:12 PM UTC

qaq wrote: post #212

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.

My first interaction with this management philosophy was when our partner AOL replaced experienced SRE serving our project with 3 far less experienced people for the same price. What used to take an hour now literally would take weeks on the bright side for the manager he had way more reports now.

Post by MomoXenosaga » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

johnisgood wrote: post #319

I could scale to billions of users as a one-man engineer, but I would need a marketing team. :D What I am trying to say is that I could make a WhatsApp-equivalent relatively quickly, alone, yes, but that is definitely not enough to gain billions of users.