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

201–210 of 462 posts

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

#201

Post by varelse »

y4mi wrote: post #191
jbverschoor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hire more "heroes". Pay what they're worth. Make them happy. Or you just pay an order of magnitude on hosting, performance consults, bandwidth, etc. etc. etc. And STILL won't EVER get to the same result, because you can't always pay (I'd say almost never) your way into a stable and performant solution. Look at all the others.. Nothing works as well as whatsapp. Good luck hiring 500 engineers who have no idea what…

> You hire more "heroes". Pay what they're worth. Make them happy. i dont think its as easy as you make it sound. these "heroes" generally are as productive because they dont sync and already have a clear idea of what they want to achieve/how to implement what they wish. if you add a second person like that to the same team you run a massive risk of having two competing ideas which creates a lot of friction.

So make sure you're hiring a hero and not a primadonna?

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

#202

Post by moralestapia »

unsungNovelty wrote: post #175

They not only used FreeBSD for their servers, their CEO at the time Jan Koum donated $1 million dollars to FreeBSD foundation too. Talk about giving back! The only thing they failed at was making money. I really wished they had. They knew what Whatsapp meant to the world. Look at WA now. https://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2014/11/freebsd-found...

>The only thing they failed at was making money.

Huh? They're all million/billionaires now. That part of the plan seems to have worked.

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

#203

Post by McWobbleston »

onion2k wrote: post #188
vp8989 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being replaceable tends to make work less satisfying. All the places I've worked at that followed your advice had the most churn and the least productivity/ROI on engineering $ spent.

Being replaceable tends to make work less satisfying. In my experience the opposite is true. My personal goal on any project is to make myself replaceable. There's nothing I find more tedious than having to work on the same thing for years because no one else can take over from me.

I would hate to be stuck on the same product or set of features, but I very much enjoy getting to a point where I know all of the systems, how they relate, and roughly where all the functionality lies and who's worked on what. It takes a lot of time to develop that experience and it's so valuable, and it seems so strange that companies don't want to select for this and we're dominated by a culture of job hopping every 2-3 years because it's the only way to maintain appropriate pay. Then companies wonder why everything is over budget and never on time

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

#204

Post by jpgvm »

y4mi wrote: post #139
shmel wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you compare it to Rust though? JS is as old as Java, however its ecosystem seems to be much less mature (at least from outside). I haven't touched Java for 15 years, but I am fairly confident that people still use Apache Ant as build system. Every time I try to peak into JS world, it appears similar to tiktok trends in terms of how quickly people move from one thing to another.

JS is as old as java, but they're both talking about the build process of JS. in the beginning, JS wasn't really transcoded/compiled. The first time i personally found out about that was sometime after 2010 with coffeescript, not sure if there were preceeding examples. and your claim that people move around is really false. React has been the defacto standard for a pretty long time at this point. yes, other UI librar…

I don't think anyone really has strong opinions about JS on the frontend. It seems relatively fit for purpose there.

Most contention I have seen is around attempting to apply it outside the browser. That path only seems to lead to misery.

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

#205

Post by throw1234651234 »

jawns wrote: post #134
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…

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.

I understand your point, but what managers fail to understand is that someone usually "carries", i.e. is actually responsible for the success of the product. I have even seen it be a manager...once.

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

#206

Post by seanw444 »

RNCTX wrote: post #181
yen223 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp was built on Erlang and FreeBSD, which feels way more exotic to me

FreeBSD was a more stable/mature platform to build on when WhatsApp was designed, particularly in terms of network performance.

Is the implication that FreeBSD is less mature now, intended? I'm assuming not. The BSDs have grown in popularity significantly in the last couple years.

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

#207

Post by cerved »

moralestapia wrote: post #202
unsungNovelty wrote: post #175

They not only used FreeBSD for their servers, their CEO at the time Jan Koum donated $1 million dollars to FreeBSD foundation too. Talk about giving back! The only thing they failed at was making money. I really wished they had. They knew what Whatsapp meant to the world. Look at WA now. https://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2014/11/freebsd-found...

>The only thing they failed at was making money. Huh? They're all million/billionaires now. That part of the plan seems to have worked.

presumably they meant revenue

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

#208

Post by netcan »

baktubi wrote: post #176
netcan wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all sorts of reasons, good and bad. One is that the future is unknown. Your goal might be to keep the product simple and scale to 1bn users, but you don't really know if it will play out like this. Maybe you plateau at 1m users with the initial idea and pivot the product somehow. Now the app does dating, social media or specialised communications for highway construction teams. Tradeoffs are easier to make in hin…

I think the Unix philosophy should apply here. The fact that WhatsApp did one thing well and it had a good business model (was it $1 per year?) is the important bit. When you say, “Now the app does dating…” I think the right move is to scrap the project because that’s a colossal fuckup. Unless you have Microsoft cash to have multiple colossal fuckups in a row, don’t add another dating app to your messaging app. Ergo,…

Maybe.

I'm not saying that philosophy is bad, just that reality is complicated.

"Scrap the project and move on" works in some contexts, not others. The way startups/products actually work, often, is evolutionary. If your texting idea didn't work, but you see a chance to pivot into something... are you really going to just fire everyone and tell investors "sorry?"

That said, the "one thing well" philosophy really does have big engineering advantages. You can't have everything. I'm just raising the "retrospectives" warning.

In any case, the "$1 per year" was never a real business model. They never even got around to actually charging it... because anything that limits the usership of a messaging app will sink it. It's the opposite of "support everything" strategy that made them successful.

"Sell to Zuck" was always the plan.

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

#209

Post by btbuildem »

moralestapia wrote: post #202
unsungNovelty wrote: post #175

They not only used FreeBSD for their servers, their CEO at the time Jan Koum donated $1 million dollars to FreeBSD foundation too. Talk about giving back! The only thing they failed at was making money. I really wished they had. They knew what Whatsapp meant to the world. Look at WA now. https://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2014/11/freebsd-found...

>The only thing they failed at was making money. Huh? They're all million/billionaires now. That part of the plan seems to have worked.

Because they sold to FB. I think parent meant "they failed to make money on their own"

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

#210

Post by amaajemyfren »

jameshart wrote: post #199
vp8989 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being replaceable tends to make work less satisfying. All the places I've worked at that followed your advice had the most churn and the least productivity/ROI on engineering $ spent.

If you think being replaceable is unsatisfying, try being indispensable. In the long run, it’s way worse.

I think like most things there is a balance. The sweet spot may be I can go hard on the project but if I feel like I need some time off - there is the ability to step back and have the work continue.

I'm sure I don't know how to achieve it though.

Post reply on HN