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IDK, employee count seems like a red herring. To me it's much more impressive to do a lot with a small number of employees (like WhatsApp's 18M users/engineer [
by rgbrgb 11y ago
IDK, employee count seems like a red herring. To me it's much more impressive to do a lot with a small number of employees (like WhatsApp's 18M users/engineer [0]). Amazon incredibly impressive, I just mark the high employee count as a point against them rather than in their favor.
[0]: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-use...
- benologist 11y agoThere's some notes about how Whatsapp achieved that here [1], they attribute their capacity in part to Erlang's concurrency and in part to cloud hosting with SoftLayer. Amazon is the origin of SoftLayer's cloud services and single biggest reason one engineer can manage arbitrary numbers of servers/users: The popularization of the term can be traced to 2006 when Amazon.com introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud. [2] [1] http://research.dyn.com/2014/03/global-consumerwhatsapp/ http://research.dyn.com/2014/03/global-consumerwhatsapp/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#History_of_cloud_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#History_of_clo...
- serge2k 11y agoExcept most of those are fulfillment center employees anyway. Plus they are working on the robots.