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Having gone through some of these scaling issues. Three things pop out: 1. With more customers, you find your code is much buggier than you thought. Most code

Having gone through some of these scaling issues. Three things pop out: 1. With more customers, you find your code is much buggier than you thought. Most code has a long-tail of weirds bugs that may be a non-issue at current scale but absolutely crippling by just increasing the number of users by 1-2 orders of magnitude. 2. As you increase the number of business functions within the company, cohesion breaks down. People start losing more and more context and you start needing full time jobs just to keep everyone pushing in the same direction without stepping on each others toes. I don't know you in particular, but most engineers seem oblivious to how many business functions a company trying to operate internationally often needs. 3. As engineers, there's often a wall between us and huge amount of effort that goes into sales, marketing, and customer service (even if the last is only provided to enterprises). One way to keep headcount down is keep this to a minimum, but you're usually leaving most of your profits on the table.

hotpotamus 4y ago
Indeed, we're nowhere near the scale of Uber. We have a few thousand users supported by 7 developers, 2 ops people (one is me) and 7 in customer support who provide 24/7 support with an on-call rotation. If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much. I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technology to scale out their platforms with very agile (read small) teams. I don't think we're anywhere near on par with Netflix, but we can read their engineering blog ;) My previous role in the big company was actually post-sales customer support so I'm actually pretty familiar with those functions and somewhat aware of all the coordination and power politics that come with increasing numbers of people - there's a reason I'm trying something pretty different these days. And so far, I have to say I'm happier with the surroundings.
- dmitriid 4y ago
  > We have a few thousand users > If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much Two orders of magnitude would land you with a few hundred thousand users. Uber has ~93 million users in 80 countries. Just supporting payments in all those countries is a full-time job for a dedicated team.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I suspect it also means our unit economics are several orders of magnitude better than Uber's.
    - dmitriid 4y ago
      It doesn't. Your unit is tiny. A few thousand users doesn't even break the threshold of "death by Hacker News". Uber's 93 million in 80 countries means that (very roughly) in each country they have three orders of magnitude more users than you: 93 mln/80 countries = 1+ mln in each country = 1000 times more than you = 3 orders of magnitude. As I said, just dealing with payments in each country is often a full-time job for a dedicated tema even if you process payments through a third party like Adyen. Are Uber operating at 100% efficiency? Hell no. Will you have several orders of magnitudes fewer people than Uber when you grow to Uber's size? I very highly doubt it. Of course, there are exceptions like WhatsApp, but WhatsApp in itself is a very simple product (that is very hard to scale), and was (and still is) very slow in rolling out features.
      - moralestapia 4y ago
        >but WhatsApp in itself is a very simple product (that is very hard to scale) What makes it particularly hard to scale?
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  > I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technology to scale out their platforms with very agile (read small) teams Netflix has over 1000 engineers, maybe close to 1500? Uber has ~3,000. If we assume these companies are handling similar amount of work, Netflix has only managed to do 2-3x better in terms of headcount to work ratio. (talking to friends at these companies, I think this paints a rosier picture of Netflix than is reasonable). As another commenter pointed out, there's also a real step change when you go global. The requirements in terms of governmental compliance and engineering effort to outcompete local software shoots up headcount significantly. With a global audience you generally need to be providing an excellent experience in more ways as local values and tastes can vary more significantly than you expect.

hotpotamus 4y ago

Indeed, we're nowhere near the scale of Uber. We have a few thousand users supported by 7 developers, 2 ops people (one is me) and 7 in customer support who provide 24/7 support with an on-call rotation. If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much. I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technology to scale out their platforms with very agile (read small) teams. I don't think we're anywhere near on par with Netflix, but we can read their engineering blog ;) My previous role in the big company was actually post-sales customer support so I'm actually pretty familiar with those functions and somewhat aware of all the coordination and power politics that come with increasing numbers of people - there's a reason I'm trying something pretty different these days. And so far, I have to say I'm happier with the surroundings.

dmitriid 4y ago
> We have a few thousand users > If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much Two orders of magnitude would land you with a few hundred thousand users. Uber has ~93 million users in 80 countries. Just supporting payments in all those countries is a full-time job for a dedicated team.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I suspect it also means our unit economics are several orders of magnitude better than Uber's.
  - dmitriid 4y ago
    It doesn't. Your unit is tiny. A few thousand users doesn't even break the threshold of "death by Hacker News". Uber's 93 million in 80 countries means that (very roughly) in each country they have three orders of magnitude more users than you: 93 mln/80 countries = 1+ mln in each country = 1000 times more than you = 3 orders of magnitude. As I said, just dealing with payments in each country is often a full-time job for a dedicated tema even if you process payments through a third party like Adyen. Are Uber operating at 100% efficiency? Hell no. Will you have several orders of magnitudes fewer people than Uber when you grow to Uber's size? I very highly doubt it. Of course, there are exceptions like WhatsApp, but WhatsApp in itself is a very simple product (that is very hard to scale), and was (and still is) very slow in rolling out features.
    - moralestapia 4y ago
      >but WhatsApp in itself is a very simple product (that is very hard to scale) What makes it particularly hard to scale?
Hermitian909 4y ago
> I'm told really effective companies like Netflix are quite skilled at leveraging technology to scale out their platforms with very agile (read small) teams Netflix has over 1000 engineers, maybe close to 1500? Uber has ~3,000. If we assume these companies are handling similar amount of work, Netflix has only managed to do 2-3x better in terms of headcount to work ratio. (talking to friends at these companies, I think this paints a rosier picture of Netflix than is reasonable). As another commenter pointed out, there's also a real step change when you go global. The requirements in terms of governmental compliance and engineering effort to outcompete local software shoots up headcount significantly. With a global audience you generally need to be providing an excellent experience in more ways as local values and tastes can vary more significantly than you expect.