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How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

engineercodex.substack.com

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Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#91

Post by mk89 »

rhuru wrote: post #58
EspressoGPT wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. He had a point there though: He said that there seem to be "3 managers 'managing' one engineer", and I believe this is a common problem in the industry. VC-funded startups are terribly overstaffed and over-inflated.

Musk's actions have certainly damaged Twitter and its engineering. When you set the house on fire of course some termites will get killed but then you might also kill some babies and the family dog. A lot of tech companies have bloat in the form of AI ethics people, DEI people and so on. They need to go. But Musk probably hurt twitter a lot in short term by firing a lot of engineers and making it a place that made pe…

He is squeezing everything as much as he can.

Introduced failing ideas that made him ridiculous world wide, ... to finally hire a CEO.

And now he is using the platform to influence elections and events - free for all. Sure.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#92

Post by kristopolous »

Sparkyte wrote: post #13
kristopolous wrote: post #4

"When you choose the right people you'll need only a few. When you don't, you'll need them all"

I think this idea hurts the industry. Don't get me wrong. I think it is important to hire the right people, but if you don't hire enough people this 3 man job is 80-100 hours a week per for months to years. Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. Then when you design more features, security and other various systems to serve the customers it will creep in complexity. You can not esca…

> You can not escape that no matter what you do.

The point is you can.

Choosing not to do is probably more important than being able to do.

Organizations are reflected in the products they create. We shape our teams and thereafter they shape us.

This doesn't mean brain teasers or other arbitrary metrics with standard bell curve distribution so you can pick the statistical outliers and claim you've done this. That's totally wrong because that's not what you're fitting.

Those are filters that produce stochastic results with merely the statistical properties of these rules of thumb.

If you're looking for a programmer, here's a better test: think if some famous programmer walked in and sat down to do your process. Could they pass? If the answer is "dice roll", meaning you'd say, turn down Rob Pike or Larry Wall, then you're doing it wrong.

As far as X, Musk is insane and drunk with power, that is not this.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#94

Post by NavinF »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #69
frenchman99 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed absolutely no difference with Twitter/X. I am a casual user, sure, but for me it seems to work well.

I'm not even a casual user, I just go there when a friend sends me a funny tweet or an article point to one, and even I have noticed major bugs like comments not loading or other functionalities not working.

That's not a bug. If you're not logged in or your account looks like a bot, you can't see comments

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#96

Post by mk89 »

EspressoGPT wrote: post #23
Sparkyte wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this idea hurts the industry. Don't get me wrong. I think it is important to hire the right people, but if you don't hire enough people this 3 man job is 80-100 hours a week per for months to years. Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. Then when you design more features, security and other various systems to serve the customers it will creep in complexity. You can not esca…

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. He had a point there though: He said that there seem to be "3 managers 'managing' one engineer", and I believe this is a common problem in the industry. VC-funded startups are terribly overstaffed and over-inflated.

When you own a company and fire someone to cut costs nobody is gonna say anything, of course. It's the sad reality.

When you cut the company to 1/3 and keep foreigners because of their visa status, nobody is gonna say anything of course, but that says a lot about you!

I do not believe that half the company was just "overstaff". I have been in situations where 1 manager had 1 reporter/reported, but they were single cases - it can't be spread to the entire company and nobody does anything.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#98

Post by throwaway290 »

coldtea wrote: post #89
bluepizza wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP. No anger in his words. Please don't make OP feel inadequate for expressing themselves clearly.

They sure seem bothered a lot by something trivial (god forbid the post which was NOT made for HN anyway quoted some original sources and didn't go into the detail they'd like it to). Somebody took the effort of compiling an article on several sources, and we're throwing the rulebook on them.

The author is not the submitter. Rulebook is thrown for submitting, not for writing.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#99

Post by dijit »

thebears5454 wrote: post #72
EspressoGPT wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. He had a point there though: He said that there seem to be "3 managers 'managing' one engineer", and I believe this is a common problem in the industry. VC-funded startups are terribly overstaffed and over-inflated.

There is not a single VC that is three managers to one engineer

Team Lead, Scrum Master and Director.

Not to mention HR managers.

I have seen situations where there are 10% engineers to 50% "assorted management" in tech companies. (the remaining 40% being a mix of sales and support staff such as office management).

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#100

Post by 0xFF0123 »

engineercodex wrote: post #68
0wis wrote: post #8

Interesting I wonder if its seems easy because it’s explained simply or if it really is simple to put in place. I want to make a clone now, just to try. At least for this inspiration, this article was well worth the read. Thanks !

Author here. Comments like this make my day, so thank you! I’m trying to find old software engineering gems and explain them as simply as possible, so I’m glad you found it simple to understand. Also, it’s definitely possible to make a clone, but the hard part is getting the users :)

Do you have a link to Fabric? My Google Fu is failing me, looks like it might be dead?
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