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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

#371

Post by 908B64B197 »

numair wrote: post #339
dleslie wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything of note we humble readers should take a look at?

I’m having one of those “why can’t there be 36 hours in a day” moments in life, but I’ve got to publish more about this very soon, so, it’s on the way. When you combine the story of WhatsApp’s small team / high impact development with the remote work shift of the past few years, it seems that the next cycle (regardless of when/what it is) will be the first that isn’t centered on SF/SV/California. It’s interesting to…

> will be the first that isn’t centered on SF/SV/California.

I've heard this every 5 years for the last... 25 I think?

Still hasn't happened.

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

#372

Post by dleslie »

Griffinsauce wrote: post #370
jimbokun wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ensuring user privacy _from you_ can be an effective defensive measure for small companies who cannot afford to mount a meaningful legal defense.

"Here's all the data we have, officers. We don't have the keys. Good luck."

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

#373

Post by 908B64B197 »

numair wrote: post #290
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),…

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,…

> I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man.

I remember selling every BlackBerry stock I had when I got my hands on their touchscreen phone (the Storm was it?).

3 years behind the original iPhone, while Apple had just launched the 3G with the App Store. Guess which phone (and stock) I purchased then?

Was there really no-one at BlackBerry following what was going on in the valley at that time?

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

#374

Post by daanlo »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #268
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 s…

In my recollection it wasn‘t about saving 10 cents in the beginning, but about saving 1-2$ per message, since one of the first use cases it enabled was free international texting. That was a HUGE benefit. All the first evangelists I knew were in long distance relationships ;)

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

#375

Post by pessimizer »

def_true_false wrote: post #284
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),…

That's all nice and well, but some of your examples are not things that save effort -- using phone numbers is surely better for network effects, but not in any way simpler then having regular account registration, unless you just completely ignore security. WA apps are not better than the competition. Basic stuff like a way to disable automatic downloading of media for groups you are in is still missing. No desktop a…

Whatsapp:Erlang as Discord:Elixir. The effectiveness of the teams might more be the effectiveness of OTP/BEAM for network applications.

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

#376

Post by jimbokun »

015a wrote: post #354
ryanSrich wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

This is always a controversial opinion, at least in some circles, but: I've long said that the PM role was created solely because companies can't find enough good engineering talent. That isn't to assert that PMs don't do fantastic, necessary work. More-so that there's a more ideal reality where the engineers should be doing that work; the outcomes, in my experience, are better in orgs where engineering is not just i…

> Most orgs don't resemble Whatsapp; they resemble Google.

When they were a startup, Google didn't resemble Google, either.

For large organizations, I'm a fan of the "internal startup" management structure. This just means each product team should be largely self contained, but has the resources of the larger organization to fall back on.

So the leader of each product team can act like a mini-founder, defining and driving the product without being tightly coupled to any other product teams release cycle.

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

#377

Post by steve_adams_86 »

Jensson wrote: post #315
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #309

It crossed my mind while considering this that a figure like this doesn’t mean the same as it would have pre-cloud infrastructure. My team is fairly experienced but not so much in infrastructure. Even so, we build and deploy on Google cloud with fairly excellent scalability and ease. Ten years or longer ago I suspect the story would be different - the infrastructure and scale constraints could have pinned us at times…

Whatsapp used bare metal servers. It isn't hard to do, just that people no longer learn to do it. > Ten years or longer ago I suspect the story would be different Whatsapp was built 12 years ago.

I assumed they did their largest scale ups more recently, though. I could be wrong!

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

#378

Post by mkl95 »

Ultimately, how many engineers a company has is not that relevant when it comes to scaling.

A small team of product-oriented engineers with a devops mentality can easily develop, maintain, and continuously deploy a considerably complex application.

A similarly complex project in the hands of a larger sales driven company often resembles a spaghetti ball, and is held together with rotting shell scripts and unproductive manual processes.

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

#379

Post by sangnoir »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #241
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.

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.

It's really not hard to be a "10x engineer" if you disregard tech-debt and error-handling. I was part of a very productive, complementary duo where my partner churned out a lot of code that only catered to the happy path, and I'd clean it up/"productize" it.

I actually enjoy that sort of work, but didn't receive as many accolades as the guy "churning out features quickly", even though he'd break the build and block the entire company at least once a week before I paired up with him.

Once I saw how the sausage is made, I'm a lot more sceptical of the "10x" label, either there's an invisible support system, or the code base had a short half-life. Any other scenario is a set-up for disaster.

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

#380

Post by vb6sp6 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #360
papito wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also famously had no meetings, like at all.

Like, 5 engineers never huddled together to figure out how to solve a problem?

Getting together with your peers to discuss a problem is entirely different than being called into a meeting with someone who can only use a iPad to evaluate progress on things they cant understand while several other people sit idle waiting for their turn.
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