The users are all handled through a common set of code, I don't see why its remarkable that it takes 50 engineers to keep things going. Customer support, I can see that eating manpower, but not keeping the code running on a few racks of servers.
WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
301–310 of 462 posts
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#302That sounds about right, even slim
I've honestly never understood how faang companies can have such incredible numbers of devs when the products basically move at a snails pace for years now
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#303Only? Sound like plenty.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#304My 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),…
> They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step
This is the key mistake. Having teams of 2-3 with a manager each is way too many managers. If you have a clear focus, small teams are great because they can work autonomously, with little management and good results. You can't hire your way out of coordination hell.
I was at WhatsApp between 2011 and 2019; for the most part early on, we had essentially the CEO who does a mix of product management and engineering management and engineering, an actively engineering server manager (who also did some client work), and a client engineering manager. Android team grew enough to have an engineering manager and we also ended up with one product manager. Post aquisition, staff grew and so did management.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
WhatsApp was originally a super simple product. Send and receive messages. It was fundamentally a solved problem. It was all about the fact you could send free messages in a world where sms cost 10 cents a message. It wasn't that their messages were faster, their messages were anything other than free. They had a year fee of $1. Which I never paid yet I used their service anyways. The reason they were able to scale s…
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?
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#306I'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.
Managers prefer a team reliably working at 0.1x speed rather than have it work at 1x speed 95% of the time. Yes, sometimes people leave and you will have less velocity for a while, but people pick it up and you go back to high velocity. To fix that you ensure the team always works at slow velocity, that way it wont get slowed down since it was already performing as if you lacked those heroes from the start.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
WhatsApp was originally a super simple product. Send and receive messages. It was fundamentally a solved problem. It was all about the fact you could send free messages in a world where sms cost 10 cents a message. It wasn't that their messages were faster, their messages were anything other than free. They had a year fee of $1. Which I never paid yet I used their service anyways. The reason they were able to scale s…
How things would have work around if Microsoft released MSN Messenger for Android and iOS. They had the userbase and the brand already.
Yep. They ware the dominant instant messenger here.
They would have had a massive user base from day one.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#308My 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),…
> Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers.
Part 1: By definition: more engineers = more ideas.
Part 2: Not so much.
On the one hand, mediocre engineers are sometimes sequestered into small teams where they can't interfere with the important projects that all the smart people and other resources are being thrown at. They just sit there and churn out crappy ideas and crappy non-vital tools. Like daily indicators.
On the other hand, I can see that as more of a tautology: ideas come from one person and are grown by a team. So be definition a quality idea comes from one person, and turns into a team.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#309It 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. We would have needed to hire more to support that effort.
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.
Not to say this isn’t impressive still, I think it’s a great thing and worth aspiring to. I love small teams.
Re: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers
#310My 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,…
Nice story. What are you doing now?