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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

#381

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),…

you're perfectly right

I get scared every time that senior leadership pushes a new member on the team, because I know that overall quality will drop; their view is completely related to how much things they want to done on every cycle, and they don't care about quality (until it blows up in their face)

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

#382

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),…

I think there is something else that I find hard to explain, but it stems from the same vein.

The best way I can call it is the impedence mismatch between what business people imagine and envision, and what the real products, their code, their systems are actually doing and are actually designed to do.

It creates a kind of cost explosion in the velocity needed and it is often solved by throwing more developers at it instead of rethinking the actual design of the products so that they can better grow to support additional use cases and scale.

You can't totally call it a hack, but it kind of is. A system was designed in a way that doesn't scale to the user demand and to the additional features or the new abstractions that it wants to grow into. Instead of rethinking holistically about how that system should be re-designed to now encompass all of this new stuff, and then put the work into changing it from its current model to that new one. What people do is they break up the current system in two, so now you have two service where you had one before. And now they hire a new team of engineers, manager, PM, etc. to start working on this new half. This repeats again where each of those two half are split in half again, hiring a new team, now there are four teams and four service, etc.

As that happens, you can no longer redesign the way the systems fundamentally work, so each team accrues more and more complicated workarounds on their individual pieces and all new feature becomes cross team projects where you now need someone to coordinate the work between all teams for each little project.

Once you start down this path, there is no way out, the only solution becomes throwing even more teams at it, breaking things down again and again into smaller pieces with a whole team behind it as each piece becomes more and more complex to all work around the inherent holistic limitations that were never reconsidered.

It's a vicious cycle, the piece cannot grow in it's current state because it is too complex, break it up, have two teams tackle each half, now they can take the complexity until they themselves add more stuff to it which makes them too complex once more, break it again, add another team, rinse and repeat.

The issue is often that complexity is accidental, due to the design in place and the tech dept accrued till now, as opposed to being inherent to the domain problem. But instead of addressing the accidental complexity, it is simply broken down in two so we can throw more people behind taming it.

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

#383
post #328

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…

> And what I’m getting to is that yes, they had 50 engineers in their pay roll, but many more supporting various SaaS products and infrastructure they use and pay for. I was at WhatsApp from 2011 to 2019. Hardware was outsourced to SoftLayer, of course. I think they had a sizable operation, but if you move that in house, you've got a team of 4ish for 24x7 colo work (we were only in one location for an embarassing amo…

I hope I didn't come across as though I was criticizing at all. I meant to point out that having 50 engineers build something today means something different than it would have a decade ago, although in retrospect my age/career are getting away from me and 15-20 years ago would have been a much better example.

I should emphasize that the accomplishment is incredible, regardless of how much we outsource things today. I know you didn't outsource crucial talent or the ability to deliver a good core product; you can't do that as far as I know.

I apologize if it seemed like I was putting down the accomplishment. I'm only meaning to reflect on how much more technical and infrastructure work happens outside of our teams these days than it has in the past. Perhaps though it isn't how much _more_ happens, but how _different_ what happens is. Building these products has changed a lot in some ways.

Edit: Also thanks for overview, that was a cool cursory look at how you operated.

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

#384
post #339

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…

Looking forward to reading it, plz let us know once done

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

#385

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),…

As an end user I think WhatsApp is a terrible product for some the reasons you mentioned (tied to phone number, no desktop client) but I cannot deny that it was the smart thing to do from a business perspective.

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

#386
post #290

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.

Well, he had a point. What killed BB was the iPhone, not that their chat app was going to lose out to the competition. They simply had a product that was inferior in every single important way.

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

#387
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?

There is no need to turn this into an argument by suggesting that somehow WhatsApp banned its engineers from getting together. That never happens, ever. We are obviously discussing scheduled meetings and scrums.

By the way, this is mentioned here: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different product. One is a social media network and one is a messaging app.

You say that now, but Twitter also began as a way to send a quick message to your friends.

You used to be able to use it as a way to create a free self-managing SMS distribution list. Pretty cool, before I had phone with data capabilities.

That was even a use case I understood. Now I feel too old to understand how to use twitter. But that can't be it. Much older people seem to have no problem.

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

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Again, how does this connect with why Whatsapp won as an app?

Consumers didn't follow this logic. At all. They went for the convenient and free option.

I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me.

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

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How things would have work around if Microsoft released MSN Messenger for Android and iOS. They had the userbase and the brand already.

Why didn't MSN become what WhatsApp is today? I always wondered how they could screw this up. Smartphones are perfect for chat apps, that's basically what they are supposed to be used for, and MSN / ICQ already covered a gigantic portion of the instant messaging market. Did they just assume people would stay on desktop for chatting forever?

Good question. I remember Microsoft had an app around 2010, but it just failed to gain critical momentum, maybe because people were already moving en masse to Facebook and WhatsApp itself.

The app was only ok-ish. There were some alternative apps in the AppStore. But people just preferred talking trough WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (which was already two years old at this point). I guess people gravitated to WhatsApp because it was less cluttered and snappier, and to Facebook because it also had a proper social network in it, but I have no idea. Two years later Microsoft would kill MSN and integrate it with Skype.

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