How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

Post by renegade-otter » Sat, Sep 16, 2023, 10:58 AM UTC

frenchman99 wrote: post #19

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…

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

Post by bornfreddy » Sat, Sep 16, 2023, 11:03 AM UTC

mk89 wrote: post #96

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.

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 ca…

Post by hestefisk » Sat, Sep 16, 2023, 11:07 AM UTC

Octabrain wrote: post #81

I find the simplicity of the stack brilliant. It makes me to think now, to which extent, the industry nowadays simply suffers from a mix of lack of knowledge, CV driving design and big players in the game trying to sell you overkilling solutions and approaches for their own economical benefit. Have we perhaps, fell into a big enchant and, at the end of the day, 99% of companies out there could just use a classic LAMP…

Post by bornfreddy » Sat, Sep 16, 2023, 11:09 AM UTC

dingdong33 wrote: post #134

rhuru wrote: post #58

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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…

Our company has a position like a DEI director, and honestly, it baffles me. All they seem to do is push what some might call 'leftist woke propaganda' in their never-ending meetings, and I question whether our company's resources should be invested in that.

Post by sealeck » Sat, Sep 16, 2023, 11:22 AM UTC

throwaway290 wrote: post #105

onurcel wrote: post #79

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These CRUD apps need complex business rules, requiring expertise in the domain and making them configurable on the application level for customer while trying to keep the app not bloated. Scaling is not the only challenge engineers face, but somehow it's the one that is mostly praised.

They also need to respond to customer requirements, which IG never needed to do while they had no actual customers. And as soon as fun was up and IG had actual customers (spoiler alert, advertisers) what a surprise 3 devs was not enough. They also need to quickly respond to downtime, because unlike IG if some of those CRUD apps go down in B2B world you are often losing customers actual money not just ad views