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That's because there's a bunch of examples of companies that have deployed massive services with a dozen or so engineers. Craigslist, Snapchat, Wikipedia (until
by nateberkopec 10y ago
That's because there's a bunch of examples of companies that have deployed massive services with a dozen or so engineers. Craigslist, Snapchat, Wikipedia (until recently) to name a few.
- rco8786 10y agoCraigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch, and Snapchat is rumored to have over 1,000 employees? There really are no examples of something at Medium's scale being built and maintained by 5 engineers.
- melvinmt 10y agoInstagram had around ~50 million users and 13 employees when it was acquired by Facebook.
- sulam 10y agoProbably not the best example since the rumor was they were all constantly paged. But yeah, some sites don't require much engineering horsepower.
- stevens32 10y agoWhat do you mean by constantly paged?
- mynegation 10y agoGot a "pager" message about problems requiring immediate attention. These days it's probably iMessage or Slack or WhatsApp, not the actual pager.
- was_boring 10y agopagerduty.com
- carlivar 10y ago> Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch You say that like it's a bad thing.
- pcwalton 10y agoYes, I suspect that it is a bad thing. People who like modern UIs greatly outnumber people who like ones from the '90s. The most straightforward explanation as to why Craigslist remains king is simple: network effects.
- neilcrj 10y ago> People who like modern UIs Even more people like stable UIs.
- alexandercrohde 10y agoMind you that you're writing that point on news.ycombinator.com (another '90s-esque site). Maybe people prefer a "newer" web interface when it doesn't have ads, banners, popups, auto-playing-content, clutter (see yahoo), oversized images, 25 tracking scripts loading, but the lesson seems to be that too simple trumps too complex. An example that gets it exactly right IMHO is gmail. The OTHER problem with having a nice UI is then people start to want to redesign every year, buy new logos, constantly adapt new design and FE trends (make it flat! make it angular! make it ES6! make it react! now pre-render on the server!).
- pkamb 10y agoThe "how it looks" of Craigslist is fine, just like HN. The "how it works" is abysmal.
- mulmen 10y agoI can't think of a single modern UI that I like.
- Angostura 10y ago
- Sir_Cmpwn 10y agoI built a service with a buddy of mine (so 2 engineers total) that achieved a scale comparable to Medium circa-2014/2015 (given baseless guesses about Medium's scale), with a similar featureset (perhaps more sophisticated, apples to oranges somewhat). It's definitely possible to achieve scale on a small team.
- sanderjd 10y agoBut... As you say, your guesses about their scale are baseless...
- anewhnaccount 10y agoHow about Reddit? That's a site that's undergone a number of UI changes and I'm pretty sure even now still has <30 engineers. It had around 6 in 2012 I believe.
- jrnichols 10y agoDoesn't Imgur still only have about 15 employees too?
- kuschku 10y ago> There really are no examples of something at Medium's scale being built and maintained by 5 engineers. There’s WhatsApp. A billion users, and 35 employees, running on less than 100 off-the-shelf servers.
- bluedino 10y ago>> Craigslist hasn't changed their UX since launch, It looks similar but to say it hasn't changed is silly
- alexandercrohde 10y agoGood point. I think it's easy to forget how much work engineers can make for ourselves (Uber has >700 microservices)... Maybe 1 person can't make twitter by himself, but I think the necessary number is much closer to 1 than it is to 4,100
- bdcravens 10y agoRecently listened to DHH's Software Engineering Radio interview, and his statement about teams of 3 developers bragging about their 4 microservices really stuck out to me.
- sanderjd 10y agoWe seem to be in an era of microservice dissing. It reminds me a lot of the recent era of monoservice dissing. Just an observation.
- thesimpsons1022 10y agoeverything in the world is susceptible to trends. especially in the tech world we tend to embrace concepts and take them too far. we then realize we took it too far and adjust too far to the other side like a pendulum. As usual, somewhere in the middle is best.
- Arcaire 10y agoDo you happen to have a link to that? I'm interested to hear it.
- jdex 10y agoHaven't listened to it yet, but it seems like this is the mentioned episode http://www.se-radio.net/2016/06/se-radio-episode-261-david-heinemeier-hansson-on-the-state-of-rails-monoliths-and-more/ http://www.se-radio.net/2016/06/se-radio-episode-261-david-h...
- thrillgore 10y ago
- Doctor_Fegg 10y agoOpenStreetMap: no paid engineers, half a dozen volunteers, unmetered (though not unlimited) public API, one of only four global geodata providers.
- FLGMwt 10y agoNo disservice intended to the volunteer engineers and project members, but don't forget about the thousands of geographic data volunteers as well. : )
- Tobu 10y agoWhatsApp: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
- flurdy 10y agoKudos to Craigslist, Whatsapp, Instagram etc that managed to keep staff size low. At least until they were acquired... Only a very strong non changing management that say no to nearly all feature changes can make that possible. 99% of companies and projects is not that. New features, new management, new customers, new priorities, leads to exponential complexity of services and staff numbers. And over-head staff such as sales, support, legal, hr, localisation, etc.
- bluedino 10y agoWhat's interesting is how fast they add engineers. Many startups will start out with 1-2 people, then slowly add people as they grow. So the team becomes 5, 8 people. You always read about this in detail when they talk about scaling at a conference. But then they have 300 engineers. That is the growth period I want to hear about.