16 ms·

I'm always more impressed that sites like twitter and facebook need so many engineers for what are fundamentally fairly simple platforms that haven't hugely cha

I'm always more impressed that sites like twitter and facebook need so many engineers for what are fundamentally fairly simple platforms that haven't hugely changed in years

Beaver117 4y ago
Ads, sales, new partnerships with companies, etc WhatsApp doesn't have any of those
- bierjunge 4y ago
  They have at least sales and partnerships: https://business.whatsapp.com/ https://business.whatsapp.com/
  - IceWreck 4y ago
    They do now. The article is from 2015.
  - darkwater 4y ago
    Nowadays that it's Meta. Back in the day it was just a end-user chat platform, and pretty simple.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  They used to have the 1 dollar per year payment for users. With the amount of users they had, that probably covered all of their cost and then some.
GoToRO 4y ago
All those people and the X button to close a picture preview is not working now for quite some time.
fsociety 4y ago
Ignoring the fact that Facebook/Meta also includes several other businesses, the amount of work required for their adtech alone is non-trivial and the AI play is going to be crucial for that. Plus having the global outreach requires a fair bit of work around compliance and privacy.
jimbob45 4y ago
On the other hand, Twitter Bootstrap, React, and GraphQL have helped immeasurably in the greater tech world and they didn’t need to create/support/release those to achieve their goals.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > (...) and they didn’t need to create/support/release those to achieve their goals. I'm not sure about that. These framework projects sound like internal projects developed to meet internal needs and improve internal processes. The GraphQL concept and use case in particular, as well as API management tools, is something I've seen reinvented internally by companies to be able to simplify processes. You just hear about GraphQL because Facebook decided to release it publicly. Everyone else has been more or less reinventing the wheel to meet the same needs.
tshaddox 4y ago
There’s a famous comment or blog post from years ago that communicates this better, but the gist is that the question these companies are asking isn’t “what’s the least amount of engineers needed to maintain the product most commonly associated with our company?” but rather a question more like “how many engineers can we get more value from than what we pay them?”
- huevosabio 4y ago
  yup,in theory you keep hiring until the value of the marginal engineer is equal to its cost.
  - AmericanChopper 4y ago
    This certainly isn’t any type of business theory. In theory you should spend as much money as you possibly can on the things that provide the most return. You shouldn’t be hiring any engineers if hiring a salesman has a greater return, or running a marketing campaign, or buying new hardware… Hiring an engineer has a significant opportunity cost.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      Note that they didn't give a time constraint. You're right that in the short term you aim to hire where the return is highest, but in the long term that means they're right that you'd want to keep hiring as long as you get a positive return.
      - AmericanChopper 4y ago
        No it doesn’t. It means you want to keep _spending money_. You want to spend it on whatever has the highest return, which will frequently be on an expense other than hiring, and when it is on hiring, it will frequently be on hiring roles other than engineers.
        vidarh 4y ago
ocimbote 4y ago
Scale, for the most part. Adding yet another zero to your user headcount is costly and a true engineering challenge. Also, organizational inefficiencies are very costly and require more and more people to fill more and more layers of cintributoand managers alike. But mostly managers. Edit: Third, product space exploration should not be forgotten.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  They had 900M users, so at that point scale is effectively done - you're not ever going to add yet another zero to the user headcount as there simply aren't that many possible users in the world, it might triple and that's it forever. And demonstrably 50 engineers was sufficient for handling stuff at scale.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    >you're not ever going to add yet another zero to the user headcount but you could add another 0 to the message count. You could add another 0 to the image count.
    - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
      Do you think it's likely that the behaviour of ~1B people on an existing service changes so much that one component of the service scales another order of magnitude? That seems highly unlikely unless they launched a new product, or this was a gradual shift over many years.
      - charcircuit 4y ago
        Yes, new features get added over time. Discord supports servers with over 500k users in them while having a 10th of the MAU of Whatsapp. Whatsapp only supports communities with a max of 1024 users. That's a 2 orders of magnitude difference.
        ZephyrBlu 4y ago
simplotek 4y ago
> I'm always more impressed that sites like twitter and facebook need so many engineers for what are fundamentally fairly simple platforms that haven't hugely changed in years The bit that you get wrong is assuming that Facebook or Twitter are simple platforms, and that their main and most complex features is allowing users to post, search and read messages. This is entirely wrong as these platforms are actually ad-selling platforms and thus include region-specific services, localized ranking, all sorts of data harvesting, etc etc. Also, as companies grow they start to feel the need to implement efficient development processes, and thus start to allocate resources to stuff like putting together their own build farms, CI/CD infrastructure, deployment auditing, etc etc etc. They also develop things like front-end and back-end frameworks. It's not like a random team at Facebook just signs up for gitlab and does all it's business from there.
- beebmam 4y ago
  Likewise, I get annoyed when I hear people scream "publish the algorithm!" at social media companies. There isn't an algorithm. There's an enormous number of applications, some of which are data science/ML-based, that rely on stream and batch processing of incoming and pre-existing data to render recommendations and timelines. This is far more than an algorithm, this is an entire ecosystem, more complicated than a single individual can grok without an enormous amount of time on their hands (and the experience to understand it all).
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    You're missing the point. They don't need to release the actual code, but releasing "these are the inputs we use, these are the high level functions of the pipeline, these are the outputs" would be enough. And the fact that pipelines that drive how people consume an increasingly large majority of their content have become this convoluted, should get you annoyed at social media companies: not people who don't understand how bad its gotten
    - korla 4y ago
      Isn't the point that companies should be judged by the cost of their actions, and not the details of their implementations?
raverbashing 4y ago
I wonder how much of it is WhatsApp requiring much less frontend work than fb or twitter I'm not even sure if it uses react/angular or something else
- yen223 4y ago
  The web version of whatsapp on web.whatsapp.com uses React
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
They don’t. Ask them what they do and they wouldn’t be able to tell you.
voz_ 4y ago
You may be interested in learning about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect - 3 guesses as to where I think you are!
LAC-Tech 4y ago
You think the huge number of divs in the html they output are going to nest themselves!?
coffeeblack 4y ago
We just learned that Twitter actually doesn’t.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  Twitter still has 550 full-time engineers[1]. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-than-550-full-time-engineers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...
nickjj 4y ago
On a related note, think about something like S3. As an end user you just hit a "simple" API to store files. In a 2022 AWS conference they announced that S3 is currently powered by 235 microservices[0]. It started with 8. I think it's a great case of something that looks easy from the outside but has a mega iceberg of complexity under the hood to operate at the scale and reliability that S3 has. It's also a good example of if you don't need that scale you can go with a much easier solution of literally uploading a single file to 1 server and being done with it. [0]: https://youtu.be/RfvL_423a-I?t=995 https://youtu.be/RfvL_423a-I?t=995
- twelve40 4y ago
  this still doesn't shine light on why Twitter had 7000 people and whatsap had 50. I know about the ads and tools, that doesn't explain two orders of magnitude (besides I heard they were pretty basic)
  - ianburrell 4y ago
    Twitter had 7000 in 2022, WhatsApp had 50 in 2015. WhatsApp has more now and Twitter has less. Twitter had less in the past, 30 in 2009, 150 in 2011, 2700 in 2013 after IPO. Twitter and WhatsApp are both way more complicated than used to be both in terms of features and usage. They also make way more money, which both takes more people and supports more people.
- renonce 4y ago
  Are all these 235 microservices necessary for the bulk of features that 99% of users are using? AWS is not the only S3 provider, nor the best, and it would be interesting to see how much engineering is involved in other S3 providers.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
Well, as Elon Musk just convincingly demonstrated, you can let go of half of them and nothing really bad happens. There's no good reason for Twitter to employ huge tech teams with thousands of people. As Elon Musk probably reasoned, micro blogs are not rocket science. And he would know a thing or two about the difference. Twitter's main competitor is something that was built by volunteers over the course of a few years. Mastodon of course has its limitations but in terms of features it's actually doing most of the important things that Twitter does. That project has hundreds of competitors but most of the work gets done by a handful of people. A lot of these big companies accumulate people almost as fast as they accumulate wealth. It's a weird dynamic where they basically recruit themselves into being slow, bureaucratic, and ultimately ineffective. Once you have thousands of people, change and taking risks become very hard . That's why the startup model is so popular. Startups make things happen that big companies struggle to make happen.
pancrufty 4y ago
Twitter maybe, but my guess is that you haven’t used Facebook in a while. Its scope is massive and they keep moving stuff around. There’s always something new to break. 50 developers can’t break things fast enough at Facebook’s scale.
dan-robertson 4y ago
I think a large part of the sites are the bits that only advertisers get to see or use - ie the bits that make the money. It is possible that the companies could be much smaller and cheaper to run if they dropped the ad-selling and the associated data recording and analysis infrastructure. But it seems to me that currently insufficiently many people are willing to pay for something like that.

I'm always more impressed that sites like twitter and facebook need so many engineers for what are fundamentally fairly simple platforms that haven't hugely changed in years

Beaver117 4y ago

Ads, sales, new partnerships with companies, etc WhatsApp doesn't have any of those

bierjunge 4y ago
They have at least sales and partnerships: https://business.whatsapp.com/ https://business.whatsapp.com/
- IceWreck 4y ago
  They do now. The article is from 2015.
- darkwater 4y ago
  Nowadays that it's Meta. Back in the day it was just a end-user chat platform, and pretty simple.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
They used to have the 1 dollar per year payment for users. With the amount of users they had, that probably covered all of their cost and then some.

GoToRO 4y ago

All those people and the X button to close a picture preview is not working now for quite some time.

fsociety 4y ago

Ignoring the fact that Facebook/Meta also includes several other businesses, the amount of work required for their adtech alone is non-trivial and the AI play is going to be crucial for that. Plus having the global outreach requires a fair bit of work around compliance and privacy.

jimbob45 4y ago

On the other hand, Twitter Bootstrap, React, and GraphQL have helped immeasurably in the greater tech world and they didn’t need to create/support/release those to achieve their goals.

simplotek 4y ago
> (...) and they didn’t need to create/support/release those to achieve their goals. I'm not sure about that. These framework projects sound like internal projects developed to meet internal needs and improve internal processes. The GraphQL concept and use case in particular, as well as API management tools, is something I've seen reinvented internally by companies to be able to simplify processes. You just hear about GraphQL because Facebook decided to release it publicly. Everyone else has been more or less reinventing the wheel to meet the same needs.

tshaddox 4y ago

There’s a famous comment or blog post from years ago that communicates this better, but the gist is that the question these companies are asking isn’t “what’s the least amount of engineers needed to maintain the product most commonly associated with our company?” but rather a question more like “how many engineers can we get more value from than what we pay them?”

huevosabio 4y ago
yup,in theory you keep hiring until the value of the marginal engineer is equal to its cost.
- AmericanChopper 4y ago
  This certainly isn’t any type of business theory. In theory you should spend as much money as you possibly can on the things that provide the most return. You shouldn’t be hiring any engineers if hiring a salesman has a greater return, or running a marketing campaign, or buying new hardware… Hiring an engineer has a significant opportunity cost.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    Note that they didn't give a time constraint. You're right that in the short term you aim to hire where the return is highest, but in the long term that means they're right that you'd want to keep hiring as long as you get a positive return.
    - AmericanChopper 4y ago
      No it doesn’t. It means you want to keep _spending money_. You want to spend it on whatever has the highest return, which will frequently be on an expense other than hiring, and when it is on hiring, it will frequently be on hiring roles other than engineers.
      - vidarh 4y ago

ocimbote 4y ago

Scale, for the most part. Adding yet another zero to your user headcount is costly and a true engineering challenge. Also, organizational inefficiencies are very costly and require more and more people to fill more and more layers of cintributoand managers alike. But mostly managers. Edit: Third, product space exploration should not be forgotten.

PeterisP 4y ago
They had 900M users, so at that point scale is effectively done - you're not ever going to add yet another zero to the user headcount as there simply aren't that many possible users in the world, it might triple and that's it forever. And demonstrably 50 engineers was sufficient for handling stuff at scale.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >you're not ever going to add yet another zero to the user headcount but you could add another 0 to the message count. You could add another 0 to the image count.
  - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
    Do you think it's likely that the behaviour of ~1B people on an existing service changes so much that one component of the service scales another order of magnitude? That seems highly unlikely unless they launched a new product, or this was a gradual shift over many years.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      Yes, new features get added over time. Discord supports servers with over 500k users in them while having a 10th of the MAU of Whatsapp. Whatsapp only supports communities with a max of 1024 users. That's a 2 orders of magnitude difference.
      - ZephyrBlu 4y ago

simplotek 4y ago

> I'm always more impressed that sites like twitter and facebook need so many engineers for what are fundamentally fairly simple platforms that haven't hugely changed in years The bit that you get wrong is assuming that Facebook or Twitter are simple platforms, and that their main and most complex features is allowing users to post, search and read messages. This is entirely wrong as these platforms are actually ad-selling platforms and thus include region-specific services, localized ranking, all sorts of data harvesting, etc etc. Also, as companies grow they start to feel the need to implement efficient development processes, and thus start to allocate resources to stuff like putting together their own build farms, CI/CD infrastructure, deployment auditing, etc etc etc. They also develop things like front-end and back-end frameworks. It's not like a random team at Facebook just signs up for gitlab and does all it's business from there.

beebmam 4y ago
Likewise, I get annoyed when I hear people scream "publish the algorithm!" at social media companies. There isn't an algorithm. There's an enormous number of applications, some of which are data science/ML-based, that rely on stream and batch processing of incoming and pre-existing data to render recommendations and timelines. This is far more than an algorithm, this is an entire ecosystem, more complicated than a single individual can grok without an enormous amount of time on their hands (and the experience to understand it all).
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  You're missing the point. They don't need to release the actual code, but releasing "these are the inputs we use, these are the high level functions of the pipeline, these are the outputs" would be enough. And the fact that pipelines that drive how people consume an increasingly large majority of their content have become this convoluted, should get you annoyed at social media companies: not people who don't understand how bad its gotten
  - korla 4y ago
    Isn't the point that companies should be judged by the cost of their actions, and not the details of their implementations?

raverbashing 4y ago

I wonder how much of it is WhatsApp requiring much less frontend work than fb or twitter I'm not even sure if it uses react/angular or something else

yen223 4y ago
The web version of whatsapp on web.whatsapp.com uses React

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

They don’t. Ask them what they do and they wouldn’t be able to tell you.

voz_ 4y ago

You may be interested in learning about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect - 3 guesses as to where I think you are!

LAC-Tech 4y ago

You think the huge number of divs in the html they output are going to nest themselves!?

coffeeblack 4y ago

We just learned that Twitter actually doesn’t.

amadeuspagel 4y ago
Twitter still has 550 full-time engineers[1]. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-than-550-full-time-engineers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/20/twitter-is-down-to-fewer-tha...

nickjj 4y ago

On a related note, think about something like S3. As an end user you just hit a "simple" API to store files. In a 2022 AWS conference they announced that S3 is currently powered by 235 microservices[0]. It started with 8. I think it's a great case of something that looks easy from the outside but has a mega iceberg of complexity under the hood to operate at the scale and reliability that S3 has. It's also a good example of if you don't need that scale you can go with a much easier solution of literally uploading a single file to 1 server and being done with it. [0]: https://youtu.be/RfvL_423a-I?t=995 https://youtu.be/RfvL_423a-I?t=995

twelve40 4y ago
this still doesn't shine light on why Twitter had 7000 people and whatsap had 50. I know about the ads and tools, that doesn't explain two orders of magnitude (besides I heard they were pretty basic)
- ianburrell 4y ago
  Twitter had 7000 in 2022, WhatsApp had 50 in 2015. WhatsApp has more now and Twitter has less. Twitter had less in the past, 30 in 2009, 150 in 2011, 2700 in 2013 after IPO. Twitter and WhatsApp are both way more complicated than used to be both in terms of features and usage. They also make way more money, which both takes more people and supports more people.
renonce 4y ago
Are all these 235 microservices necessary for the bulk of features that 99% of users are using? AWS is not the only S3 provider, nor the best, and it would be interesting to see how much engineering is involved in other S3 providers.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Well, as Elon Musk just convincingly demonstrated, you can let go of half of them and nothing really bad happens. There's no good reason for Twitter to employ huge tech teams with thousands of people. As Elon Musk probably reasoned, micro blogs are not rocket science. And he would know a thing or two about the difference. Twitter's main competitor is something that was built by volunteers over the course of a few years. Mastodon of course has its limitations but in terms of features it's actually doing most of the important things that Twitter does. That project has hundreds of competitors but most of the work gets done by a handful of people. A lot of these big companies accumulate people almost as fast as they accumulate wealth. It's a weird dynamic where they basically recruit themselves into being slow, bureaucratic, and ultimately ineffective. Once you have thousands of people, change and taking risks become very hard . That's why the startup model is so popular. Startups make things happen that big companies struggle to make happen.

pancrufty 4y ago

Twitter maybe, but my guess is that you haven’t used Facebook in a while. Its scope is massive and they keep moving stuff around. There’s always something new to break. 50 developers can’t break things fast enough at Facebook’s scale.

dan-robertson 4y ago

I think a large part of the sites are the bits that only advertisers get to see or use - ie the bits that make the money. It is possible that the companies could be much smaller and cheaper to run if they dropped the ad-selling and the associated data recording and analysis infrastructure. But it seems to me that currently insufficiently many people are willing to pay for something like that.