I watched a talk from jon blow [1] where he mocks twitter & facebook for their huge number of employees. I too think that Facebook in particular seems to employ

I watched a talk from jon blow [1] where he mocks twitter & facebook for their huge number of employees. I too think that Facebook in particular seems to employ a lot of mobile engineer for a meh result. However, he also mocks the complexity of displaying a feed. This is not trivial at all on mobile, at least if you want to : - display a highly customized feed of basically unlimited size where each item is slightly different - keep it running fast, even on low end devices It is a problem faced by all the major apps and there are a number of techniques you can use in order to improve performances but those are hard trade-off that are difficult to get right. Making such a feed work can keep a lot of engineers occupied. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA