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This trite argument made some sense when there were 8000 engineers, but when the 4th most popular social media platform has only 550 engineers working on it, yo

This trite argument made some sense when there were 8000 engineers, but when the 4th most popular social media platform has only 550 engineers working on it, you don’t need to dig deep to figure out how so many engineers are needed. Even the famously nimble WhatsApp which has fewer features and complexity needs this order of magnitude engineers so why would you expect Twitter to be leaner?

marcos100 4y ago
Didn't WhatsApp had like 50 employees in total when they were sold to Facebook?
zoover2020 4y ago
WhatsApp having less complexity? Care to elaborate on that? I'm aware they scaled to 1B+ users with ~100 engineers but I'm failing to see why they'd be working on less complex problems.
- Glaurung 4y ago
  Twitter has a direct messaging feature. It also has many, many other features. Whatsapp is direct messaging, full stop. The two are not at all comparable.
- no_way 4y ago
  WhatsApp always comes up in comparison to Twitter, but they are fundamentally different. WhatsApp is mostly one on one interaction, while Twitter potentially allows every user to interact with every other user, it's unbelievably more complex to do that at scale compared to WhatsApp, not even talking about all the extra features Twitter has. Search probably being best example of complexity differences.
  - bsaul 4y ago
    what's app has e2e encryption, on all platforms including web. Which requires strong constraints on delivery ordering. Operating on almost all native platforms, at this scale, with those constraints, isn't something i find much easier than building a feed.
    - flashgordon 4y ago
      Out of curiosity what makes e2e encryption impact ordering guarantees? With feed things like ranking (bunch of ml pipelines) etc make it pretty stochastic? On Whatsapp the ordering guarantees are limited to within the thread and server side timestamps are good enough for the most part to enforce it. Whatsapp/messaging is a very horizontally scalable problem. With feed (assuming) you have a fully personal feed the storage alone is a pain to manage and optimize.
      - bsaul 4y ago
        i'd say key exchange. You need to get key information and message in the correct order orelse you won't be able to decode the info. Now of course you can reimplement an ordering mechanism on top of an unordered one, with lost messages detection etc on the client side, and let the server be loose. but that means reimplementing that logic on every client codebase.
comprev 4y ago
WhatsApp had a surprisingly small number of engineers upon acquisition - around 50 or so?
- Glaurung 4y ago
  I imagine the team responsible for maintaining the direct messaging feature of twitter is also around 50 or so people. In case you haven't noticed, twitter has many, many, many other features beyond direct messaging, each of which requires its own team to maintain, and many of which are far more complex than a messaging client.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  Yes, 55 employees iirc. I don't think it was 'surprisingly small', though. It's just that cash-rich startups have had the habit of hiring as much as they could instead of hiring the minimum required, which is actually the sensible way to manage a company.
- toto 4y ago
  Ambiance was different compared to today: https://twitter.com/TikTokInvestors/status/1615189880321241088 https://twitter.com/TikTokInvestors/status/16151898803212410... Whatsapp had 35 engineers for 450M users at the time of its acquisition by FB (2014). It had 50 engineers for 900M users (2015). https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/#:~:text=When%20the%20company%20was%20acquired,almost%20entirely%20on%20its%20own https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
- p_l 4y ago
  WhatsApp also had no need for moderation or ads handling (IIRC, they used small yearly payments plus contracts with network operators). Just handling the ads, both backend and user interfaces for buyers, would quickly net you several more developers. It's easy to have only 45 engineers when you constrain the scope of what they have to do very well, but the scope was much, much, much smaller than Twitter's.
michpoch 4y ago
Still; numbers. I do not use Twitter, but the web app is relatively simple; I am not hearing much good about the mobile apps. So we got what; maybe 30 people working on the frontends? I do not think Twitter had ever 8000 engineers - my understanding is that there were that many employees. It's easy to imagine a lot of non-tech roles, b2b sales, management, support etc.
yucky 4y ago
This isn't logical though. We have evidence that 8,000 was far too many, because they're gone and Twitter is still Twitter. We have zero evidence that 550 isn't still too many.
- p_l 4y ago
  Dunno, ever since Musk started purges and especially after infamous "I'll switch off a bunch of servers" thing, I observe more and more bugs on Twitter. Mind you, I already had searches that triggered bugs in mobile app where first search would always fail, but things like significant drop in tweets I see in my feed from people I follow (and no, none of them were bots), random outages like Lists or the whole search feature just failing, pervasive feeling that even searches return maybe 1/10th of what I was getting before... This is a tirefire.

marcos100 4y ago

Didn't WhatsApp had like 50 employees in total when they were sold to Facebook?

zoover2020 4y ago

WhatsApp having less complexity? Care to elaborate on that? I'm aware they scaled to 1B+ users with ~100 engineers but I'm failing to see why they'd be working on less complex problems.

Glaurung 4y ago
Twitter has a direct messaging feature. It also has many, many other features. Whatsapp is direct messaging, full stop. The two are not at all comparable.
no_way 4y ago
WhatsApp always comes up in comparison to Twitter, but they are fundamentally different. WhatsApp is mostly one on one interaction, while Twitter potentially allows every user to interact with every other user, it's unbelievably more complex to do that at scale compared to WhatsApp, not even talking about all the extra features Twitter has. Search probably being best example of complexity differences.
- bsaul 4y ago
  what's app has e2e encryption, on all platforms including web. Which requires strong constraints on delivery ordering. Operating on almost all native platforms, at this scale, with those constraints, isn't something i find much easier than building a feed.
  - flashgordon 4y ago
    Out of curiosity what makes e2e encryption impact ordering guarantees? With feed things like ranking (bunch of ml pipelines) etc make it pretty stochastic? On Whatsapp the ordering guarantees are limited to within the thread and server side timestamps are good enough for the most part to enforce it. Whatsapp/messaging is a very horizontally scalable problem. With feed (assuming) you have a fully personal feed the storage alone is a pain to manage and optimize.
    - bsaul 4y ago
      i'd say key exchange. You need to get key information and message in the correct order orelse you won't be able to decode the info. Now of course you can reimplement an ordering mechanism on top of an unordered one, with lost messages detection etc on the client side, and let the server be loose. but that means reimplementing that logic on every client codebase.

comprev 4y ago

WhatsApp had a surprisingly small number of engineers upon acquisition - around 50 or so?

Glaurung 4y ago
I imagine the team responsible for maintaining the direct messaging feature of twitter is also around 50 or so people. In case you haven't noticed, twitter has many, many, many other features beyond direct messaging, each of which requires its own team to maintain, and many of which are far more complex than a messaging client.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
Yes, 55 employees iirc. I don't think it was 'surprisingly small', though. It's just that cash-rich startups have had the habit of hiring as much as they could instead of hiring the minimum required, which is actually the sensible way to manage a company.
toto 4y ago
Ambiance was different compared to today: https://twitter.com/TikTokInvestors/status/1615189880321241088 https://twitter.com/TikTokInvestors/status/16151898803212410... Whatsapp had 35 engineers for 450M users at the time of its acquisition by FB (2014). It had 50 engineers for 900M users (2015). https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/#:~:text=When%20the%20company%20was%20acquired,almost%20entirely%20on%20its%20own https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...
p_l 4y ago
WhatsApp also had no need for moderation or ads handling (IIRC, they used small yearly payments plus contracts with network operators). Just handling the ads, both backend and user interfaces for buyers, would quickly net you several more developers. It's easy to have only 45 engineers when you constrain the scope of what they have to do very well, but the scope was much, much, much smaller than Twitter's.

michpoch 4y ago

Still; numbers. I do not use Twitter, but the web app is relatively simple; I am not hearing much good about the mobile apps. So we got what; maybe 30 people working on the frontends? I do not think Twitter had ever 8000 engineers - my understanding is that there were that many employees. It's easy to imagine a lot of non-tech roles, b2b sales, management, support etc.

yucky 4y ago

This isn't logical though. We have evidence that 8,000 was far too many, because they're gone and Twitter is still Twitter. We have zero evidence that 550 isn't still too many.

p_l 4y ago
Dunno, ever since Musk started purges and especially after infamous "I'll switch off a bunch of servers" thing, I observe more and more bugs on Twitter. Mind you, I already had searches that triggered bugs in mobile app where first search would always fail, but things like significant drop in tweets I see in my feed from people I follow (and no, none of them were bots), random outages like Lists or the whole search feature just failing, pervasive feeling that even searches return maybe 1/10th of what I was getting before... This is a tirefire.