Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

quastor.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 462 posts

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

#361

Post by pards »

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),…

> 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

1,000 times this.

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

#363

Post by jgilias »

civilized wrote: post #144
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're right up to a point, but I've seen far worse red flags. Like companies that can never acquire these heroes in the first place because no one competent would work there that long. As somebody else mentioned, these companies end up regularly throwing millions at consultant projects that always fail. In other words, they pay a hefty premium for shitty temp "heroes" that give them less than employee heroes would h…

Yeah, somewhat counterintuitively treating tech as a cost center will inevitably lead to wasted funds. But hey, that just makes incumbents die faster and give way to organizations treating tech as an investment. Which are the ones you want to work for as a tech person anyway.

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

#364

Post by heywherelogingo »

This site is getting quite repetitive. I think the balance of News to things of interest has gotten quite out of whack. This article is not news, and is also in recent memory so not an interesting re-visit. Is HN average age decreasing? The content character has changed in recent years. Something's changed/changing.

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

#365

Post by bluedino »

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…

I worked at a place that made a group of loosely-related websites. Basically different spins/themes on the same products. There were 4 of us on the development team. There were 10 websites. Some new, some in maintenance mode.

I quit after a few years, and about 3-4 years later they went on a hiring spree. Tripled the number of developers. Refreshed some products, discontinued some, and some went into maintenance mode. They still had around the same 10 websites, but 12 developers.

The products didn't get better. The products didn't get made any faster. They didn't have any less bugs. My wife actually works there now, and when she tells me about the issues they have I laugh a little bit.

It's all the same problems we had back then. Invites don't work. Teams doesn't work. Uploading profile pictures has issues. Entering data doesn't work. Registration is broken.

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

#366

Post by et-al »

Spivak wrote: post #278
amelius wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh yeah, but it was only possible to have such a simple product because they reached mass adoption. Without network effects, you've got to differentiate and thus add complexity to gain users.

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.

They had fantastic product-market fit.

As dleslie and that_guy_iain have mentioned, it was expensive to send an SMS text back then, especially in Europe when your friends have different country codes. So WhatsApp was a free alternative that tapped the unmet need for millions.

And signing up with only a phone number seems like a nobrainer nowadays, but the mindset of the time was still email + password. Sure, Microsoft could have launched a competitor, but they would most certainly require you to use an MSN account, thus adding friction to adoption.

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

#367

Post by jimbokun »

Griffinsauce wrote: post #341
dleslie wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> WhatsApp provided secure, ludicrously cheap instant messaging across all meaningful handsets. You can scrap secure from this, the vast majority of users don't care or even know what that means. If SMS was more secure I 100% would still expect whatsapp to win. Convenience and cost are the biggest drivers here.

> You can scrap secure from this, the vast majority of users don't care or even know what that means.

Until you get sued or called in front of legislative bodies to testify about why your customer data was breached.

But maybe you're big enough at that point to ride it out.

On the other hand, it's very very hard to add in robust security after reaching critical mass.

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

#368

Post by foepys »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #142
foepys wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WA Management was misled by Facebook about what FB wanted to do with WA. I agree that you'd have to pretty naive to believe FB but it's not like WA founders sold solely because of money.

I think you would have to be pretty naive to think WA founders were above having a price at which they would sell solely for the money.

WhatsApp founder Brian Acton left 850 million USD on the table when he left Facebook prematurely in protest of Facebook's lies about the vision they had for WhatsApp after its acquisition. After that he donated 50 million USD to the Signal foundation.

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

#369

Post by akkpxl »

heywherelogingo wrote: post #364

This site is getting quite repetitive. I think the balance of News to things of interest has gotten quite out of whack. This article is not news, and is also in recent memory so not an interesting re-visit. Is HN average age decreasing? The content character has changed in recent years. Something's changed/changing.

I thought I was the only one who felt this way. Almost every day I see the same "style" of articles that isn't news or that interesting. One thing I've noticed is almost every day I see an article explaining why remote work is better and/or how tech interviews are broken, both of which are popular opinions a lot of people on this site share. Maybe it's just me though

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

#370

Post by Griffinsauce »

jimbokun wrote: post #367
Griffinsauce wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WhatsApp provided secure, ludicrously cheap instant messaging across all meaningful handsets. You can scrap secure from this, the vast majority of users don't care or even know what that means. If SMS was more secure I 100% would still expect whatsapp to win. Convenience and cost are the biggest drivers here.

> You can scrap secure from this, the vast majority of users don't care or even know what that means. Until you get sued or called in front of legislative bodies to testify about why your customer data was breached. But maybe you're big enough at that point to ride it out. On the other hand, it's very very hard to add in robust security after reaching critical mass.

I have no idea how your point connects to mine. We're talking about consumers choices here.
Post reply on HN