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> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there. Absolutely! You could probab
by yid 11y ago
> 4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
Absolutely! You could probably get a single rack to handle storage and broadcast of millions of tweets per minute, perhaps hook it up to a Teradata appliance to handle search and storage at that throughput. Throw it in a nice distributed database indexed by user. Then just another couple of indices for the hashtags and mentions, and the follows/follower graph. Throw in another few tables for handling API permissions, managing schema migrations while ensuring that data from day 1 is still as transparent as yesterday's logs, a highly replicated ad server hooked up to a realtime recommendation engine that analyzes an active user's current stream and recommends the most relevant ad (to maximize revenue of course), set up a few staffed policy teams to comply with the differences in global regulations, handle lawsuits and legal requests, and of course keep competing for more revenue with the likes of Facebook and Google.
It's pretty trivial.
- xienze 11y agoOK, I'm hearing a lot about hardware there but not seeing where thousands of people are needed to keep it all up. Again, WhatsApp -- 50 employees.
- philipjoubert 11y agoWhatsapp is an outlier in many ways and comparing them with any company will make that company seem bloated. As for the comparison, Whatsapp has no monetization model, no marketing and a simpler product.
- Scoundreller 11y agoWhatsApp charges a subscription fee after the first year of $1/year. When you have several hundred million users, that adds up. An effective monetization model, if unusual in SV.
- aetherson 11y agoBut it actually doesn't charge that subscription fee. At least not to the overwhelming majority of its users.
- marcusgarvey 11y agoI really do not understand what the logic is here. They already have your loyalty presumably, and it's not a high sticker price.
- pmontra 11y agoThey used to send me messages about that yearly few but they always ended up extending my membership for free every few months. Then they stopped asking. WhatsApp is de facto free.
- yid 11y agoIn 2014, WhatsApp reportedly made $14 million in revenue. By comparison, Twitter made $479 in revenue in just Q4 2014. I think company size generally scales super-linearly with revenue, so a total staff in the thousands seems reasonable for a post-IPO company. Are you suggesting that WhatsApp's model of organization is the norm for a sustainable organization? I think it's a clear outlier in many respects.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoDoes it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16 BILLION payout. Are you suggesting that WhatsApps business model was based on annual revenue?
- untog 11y ago> Does it really matter what WhatsApp made in revenue? The owners got a $16 BILLION payout. Silicon Valley mentality at its finest.
- w1ntermute 11y ago> I don't want to make a little bit of money every day. I want to make a fuck ton of money all at once. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo&t=15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo&t=15
- jsprogrammer 11y agoWhat do you mean? This is just a fact. The company existed to make a return for the owners. The owners exited with $16 billion. That was the motivation of the owners/employees, not $14 million in annual revenue.
- thomasfoster96 11y agoThe $14 million is what justifies the $16 billion.
- DanBC 11y ago> recommends the most relevant ad They're nowhere near relevant. I keep getting local-to-US ads, and I'm in UK (and geolocate as in UK too). Not as bad as showing alcohol ads to 5 year old children, but still pretty bad.
- yid 11y ago> They're nowhere near relevant. This doesn't mean that there aren't teams of people trying to constantly make those ads more relevant. And since not everyone at a Twitter can statistically be incompetent, I'm going to assume that the problem is actually quite difficult, and perhaps requires a large team.
- blantonl 11y agoTrue. But where is the focus on making money?
- kzhahou 11y agoIIRC Instagram had ~13 employees when they were acquired by FB, and they were obviously already huge. WhatsApp had ~30 when they were acquired, and were also huge. ("Huuuuuge!", says The Trump) Those teams are gods of scalability. Twitter is.... kinda the opposite.
- scurvy 11y agoDid WhatsApp have much in the way of storage needs? I don't think that they did. This is where the cost goes, durability. They were basically just a giant switchboard with some buddy lists (aka glorified MSN Messenger with SMS gateways). It's no wonder they were able to keep costs down and grow. They didn't have a lot of storage and persistence needs, just passing datagrams around the Internet between phones. Edit: My apologies if I've offended the HN mystique surrounding the god-like status of WhatsApp. Ask Jan yourself, they weren't geniuses. I know Jan. He won't claim to be this exalted persona.
- kzhahou 11y agoWe are discussing the need for 4100 engineers, not storage costs.
- scurvy 11y agoIt takes engineers to run and utilize all that stuff. You don't need a back-end scaling team you're only throwing around XMPP in Erlang. Edit: I know b/c I've done that before in $previousjob. Storage is hard. Storage is where the money goes. Durability is expensive. Storing ephemeral stuff in a non-durable KV store is easy, cheap, and trivial to scale. This is why WhatsApp didn't have so many people, not because they were geniuses.
- scurvy 11y agoAlso, they have 4100 employees, not engineers. You know, legal, HR, finance, oh and engineers.
- superuser2 11y agoThe need for consistent, highly available persistent storage in a distributed system with a heavy write workload vastly complicates engineering effort. You're fighting fundamental issues like the CAP theorem. When you can't "just use Postgres" everything else gets a lot harder. Companies that have this problem tend to have a lot of engineers: Facebook, Google, Uber, etc. Disks are slow. If you don't need to wait for disk, then you can handle a great deal more req/s per node, which means the point at which you need to become a distributed system is further away. Without the state synchronization problem, converting to a distributed system consists of little more than adding a load balancer. Even in an environment that needs synchronized state, the services that can be stateless are much easier to deal with (and you try to make as much of your infrastructure stateless as possible). Storage costs are not relevant compared to the costs of engineering distributed systems.
- smacktoward 11y agoBut would that be Web scale?
- kzhahou 11y agoWithout node.js? No.
- lucianmarin 11y agoThis is just rubbish from developers that don't know what they are doing. I run Sublevel on a $5 VPS from DigitalOcean. Guess what, I optimized it to run smoothly in any situation.
- jethro_tell 11y agoI can't tell if you're webscale or trololololing, but I like it either way.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gaius 11y agoIndeed, you could have done Twitter in a single rack with Tibco RV too.
- silverbax88 11y ago4100 employees is completely out of whack with reality. And for those saying they are incorrectly trying to scale to $20 billion...thinking you will be a $20 billion dollar company in the future (even if it were true) would not justify hiring that many people now.