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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

#211

Post by bob1029 »

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.

> Heroes are a red flag for me, as a manager, trying to build a resilient team

Heroes are your most powerful asset, but you have to use them responsibly. The best thing you can do when handed a 10x unicorn developer is to try to document 100% of the things they say & do, and also make it a requirement that the hero mentor others some % of the week. E.g. For 1-2 hours every Friday you force them to hold a "no stupid questions" session.

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

#212

Post by qaq »

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.

My first interaction with this management philosophy was when our partner AOL replaced experienced SRE serving our project with 3 far less experienced people for the same price. What used to take an hour now literally would take weeks on the bright side for the manager he had way more reports now.

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

#213

Post by papito »

Because complexity kills. Something that has yet to be learned by the new generation of developers. While disciples of FAANG create a gazillion microservices that they spend most of their time debugging in production ("observability"), smaller teams just get shit done.

Since "monolith" has become a dirty word, it would be instructive to remember that some of the major companies out there are still light on distributed systems, which we all knew even back in the olden days of the internet were an absolute killer of efficiency and productivity. Yes, "microservices" is just another word for it - believe it or not, there was life before Node and Docker.

Whatsapp, Dropbox, Instagram, StackOverflow - all existed or still exist as one easy-to-maintain application. But go ahead, "be like Google".

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

#214

Post by papito »

streamofdigits wrote: post #167

Beware of survivorship bias. Team does X, does not achieve scale, nobody knows about it Team does X, achieves scale, X is the new sliced bread

The first team does not achieve scale because they are still building microservices. The word of the day is "lean".

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

#215

Post by lumost »

My 2cents.

Messaging is a weird app to focus on mau/dau. There have been many messaging protocols which scale to hundreds of millions of users, and there is prior art of large not particularly valuable chat systems like aim, gchat etc.

No one is going to use a consumer messaging system which charges money or shows ads. Which brings to mind substantial questions on the business model others are using the messaging platform for e.g. data collection.

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

#216

Post by namdnay »

Traster wrote: post #45

I think one thing to consider is that WhatsApp is probably by nature a scalable application. It is in the end, simply a client app that sends data to other client apps. So by nature, you scale in parallel very well, there are no 1-all communications. So unlike something like facebook where the data all needs to go to a central server and be polled by an unknown (but potentially arbitrary large) number of clients, in…

> It is in the end, simply a client app that sends data to other client apps

That's not the case. Consider the "one tick" messages - they must be on a server somewhere. One tick means they've left your phone but aren't yet on (all) the recipients' phones

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

#217

Post by unsungNovelty »

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.

I meant they as in Whatsapp - the company. And yeah to be more specific, I meant making revenue on their own.

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

#219

Post by mywittyname »

altacc wrote: post #86
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…

Having worked in a range of companies, there is definitely an inverse correlation between company size and speed, especially for individual teams. At 500 people you're well into enterprise level organisation, where a lot of processes are put in place to minimize the amount of damage a single person can do to the organisation. That also puts a speed limit on those efficient and knowledgeable contributors. Some compani…

I think this is more correlated to maturity than size. It's just that size is highly correlated to maturity.

I've been in large companies where I was the admin/owner of their AWS account. And I've worked at companies with 200 people where I have to submit tickets to get anything created in AWS. The major difference was how mature the product was.

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

#220

Post by dano »

I looked at it this way. The thing most engineers, hero's or not, want to work on is new projects and to build products customers enjoy. The last thing they want to work on is maintenance. In my last personally owned company, small as we were, the engineering team and I documented how things worked as part of what we did every day. We found that by having the inner workings documented so that anyone in the team could effect a repair or update a piece of code freed us to work on new products and services. Just having the system continually documented freed our minds and kept us mostly happy (everyone has a challenge from time to time) and productive.

The documentation, not that it really matters, was done in a MoinMoin wiki. It was written by engineers, for engineers. We didn't stop marketing or sales or anyone else from reading it, but the target audience was the engineering and operation staff thus no one had to over-explain the vocabulary of our architecture.

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