WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers

Post by math-dev » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

billypilgrim wrote: post #305

stiltzkin wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Post by Zababa » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

def_true_false wrote: post #284

rdsubhas wrote: post #249

My 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),…

That's all nice and well, but some of your examples are not things that save effort -- using phone numbers is surely better for network effects, but not in any way simpler then having regular account registration, unless you just completely ignore security. WA apps are not better than the competition. Basic stuff like a way to disable automatic downloading of media for groups you are in is still missing. No desktop a…

Post by Jensson » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #309

It 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…

Post by t-writescode » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

bcrosby95 wrote: post #289

dano wrote: post #220

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…

I must be weird. I love maintenance. The best bugs come out of that. And it's hard to tell if a system was well designed except in hindsight; maintenance programming is the best place to be for that.

Post by johnisgood » Mon, Oct 25, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC