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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

#441

Post by brigandish »

lhnz wrote: post #439
brigandish wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, thank you for answering. I think most people would be too defensive (devs are a touchy lot:) to bother or just dismiss my sincere question. I'm going to disagree though (quite gently, I hope:) > Functions are first class. Always a good thing to have in a language but I struggle to think of a language that doesn't have this now. Java has it, C#, Python… if a language is being developed and didn't have it then…

> I think the driving force of the move to Javascript > everywhere was because devs were tired of learning at > least three languages [...] Companies love it because > of fungibility [...] > > Perhaps I've just got used to keeping several languages in my head? Another possibility that doesn't involve you being smarter than everybody in the room is that many people that were capable of learning several languages saw t…

> Another possibility that doesn't involve you being smarter than everybody in the room

No one made a claim like that and your rudeness is uncalled for.

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

#442

Post by danlugo92 »

jbverschoor wrote: post #165
jawns wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> Nothing works as well as whatsapp.

I don't disagree with the rest of your post but Telegram does in fact work as well if not better than whatsapp.

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

#443

Post by frankietaylr »

mavelikara wrote: post #418
paxys wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp was successful only because they had no intention of ever making money. Simple lightweight app, no tracking, no ads, no upsell. Yet they were funded by VCs who would want a return on their investment at some point.

> WhatsApp was successful only because they had no intention of ever making money. IIRC they had 450M users when they sold to FB. Their plan was to charge $1/user/yr. A $450M ARR company run by 50 people would have done fine.

But if they started charging even 1$/user/year, most of the 450M users might not be on the platform. There are other free platforms offered with similar functionality. Security/Privacy is not a concern for a lot of that 450M users.

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

#444

Post by danlugo92 »

sangnoir wrote: post #379
SkyPuncher wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the company/stage/setup/etc. Having a "hero" at a 5 person startup can mean life when death was inevitable. Having that at a 500 person org likely means another team is left cleaning up crap.

It's really not hard to be a "10x engineer" if you disregard tech-debt and error-handling. I was part of a very productive, complementary duo where my partner churned out a lot of code that only catered to the happy path, and I'd clean it up/"productize" it. I actually enjoy that sort of work, but didn't receive as many accolades as the guy "churning out features quickly", even though he'd break the build and block t…

7x is the sweet spot.

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

#445

Post by wly_cdgr »

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),…

Correct

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

#446

Post by wly_cdgr »

bobthepanda wrote: post #352
ryandrake wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always called this Feature Cram, and it's standard procedure at basically every company I've ever worked, small and large, B2B or B2C. Nobody is willing to say "Our software is a success and it's done . Let's fix the major bugs, put it into maintenance mode and start a new, separate, great idea!" Nope, instead it's always "OK the MVP is going well. Let's jam ten other unrelated things into it and see what takes…

This may very well be unpopular, but this is what happens when you pay someone in measures tied directly to share price, or even more directly in shares; they have every incentive to do whatever it takes to juice the share price up. VC money has even more extreme growth expectations.

There's absolutely no good reason why the same team can't just make another great focused product under the same company umbrella instead of ruining the original

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

#447

Post by aabbcc1241 »

dleslie wrote: post #372
Griffinsauce wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea how your point connects to mine. We're talking about consumers choices here.

Ensuring user privacy _from you_ can be an effective defensive measure for small companies who cannot afford to mount a meaningful legal defense. "Here's all the data we have, officers. We don't have the keys. Good luck."

having the messages encrypted end to end also free WhatsApp from being asked to do censorship or moderating

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

#448

Post by def_true_false »

pessimizer wrote: post #375
def_true_false wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Whatsapp:Erlang as Discord:Elixir. The effectiveness of the teams might more be the effectiveness of OTP/BEAM for network applications.

Indeed. Discord even has a handful of blog posts about running into its limits.

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

#449

Post by def_true_false »

Zababa wrote: post #313
def_true_false wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC I think they displaced Skype, mumble and teamspeak too.

In my experience it displaced Mumble and Teamspeak only for casual gaming. If your group is strict enough about muting/kicking people who refuse to fix their mic settings, Mumble or Teamspeak is generally better -- better quality, local volume adjustments, less resource hungry, open mic not being the default, etc. Think tryhard esport players, or just people with old hardware (probably 90% of CSGO players )).

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

#450

Post by trasz »

RNCTX wrote: post #436
seanw444 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, but there are signs of distress, IMO. I think their decline in usage has resulted in a decline in port maintainers, which is a bigger deal now that systemd is the default on Linux for so many things. In the 32 bit days it wasn’t hard to get most Linux binaries to run, now it’s virtually impossible for an end user to do on their own.

Pretty much nothing important depends on systemd, for the simple reason that it’s proprietary and non-portable. Thus, even if there is some code that depends on it, it’s optional.

Also, Linux binary compatibility - the capability to run unmodified Linux binaries - works much better now than ever before.

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