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There's an important lesson in the WhatsApp story: It's scope that increases headcount, not users. WhatsApp could scale to 900M users because the app they bui

There's an important lesson in the WhatsApp story: It's scope that increases headcount, not users. WhatsApp could scale to 900M users because the app they build didn't do a lot. It was for sharing plaintext messages between groups of people. That's quite hard at scale but you can solve it with 50 people as they demonstrated. When they started adding more features, that's when they needed more people. If you keep the scope of your app small you don't need many people to build it.

Lio 4y ago
I agree and would expand that argument to say that add that head count doesn't scale linearly. That is adding people to a project means that you have to add even more people to deal with the management complexity. I guess that theoretically it's possible to have a productive very large organisation but it's really hard to do that compared with the simplicity of a smaller team.
- pieterr 4y ago
  That is adding people to a project means that you have to add even more people to deal with the management complexity. Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month (1975)
  - Lio 4y ago
    Yep that's exactly what I had in mind. It's like a fundamental law of project management that for some reason still gets ignored a lot today.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Exactly. You can obviously do things with a small team but, if you want to go beyond that, you start to accrete a lot of headcount that's to some degree just a function of having a larger organization that can't work on the basis of every knows everyone and what their role is.
  - naijaboiler 4y ago
    It may take 2 people to do 100 units of work. To do 200, takes 10 people.
jbverschoor 4y ago
Management increases headcount. Architecture increases headcount. Bad quality of product and operations increase headcount. Skill level of employees increase headcount. It’s very similar to a proper algorithm cs some naive way of solving things. You can throw a few million on hardware to it, and still only get mediocre results, or solve something in a way that actually works
- kris_wayton 4y ago
  The really large explosions in size seem to come from internal politics to me. Where leaders of individual internal groups start to have their own goals and agendas separate from the company goals...and start empire building.
  - lumost 4y ago
    In a sufficiently large corporation - it’s impossible to distinguish what empires are nascent independent and massive corporations from non-sense. You’d think that teams closer to the companies core would be more competent and higher value… but often you find groups of thirty pushing inconsequential metrics. Alternately, you’ll find small groups on the fringe that appear to be doing nothing, but occasionally spit out the next huge product. For these reasons, investors have historically penalized large conglomerates for inefficiency. The growth of big tech through the ‘10s may have been due in part to negative interest rates which valued discounted future free cash flow at approximately infinite dollars. In a high interest rate environment, one would expect cash flow to be redirected to investors who will then invest the money. If big tech executive pay drops, then there is limited reason for tech executives not to move into startups.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And dealing with customers (and prospective customers) in much beyond an automated and low-touch way increases headcount. Enterprise sales, personalized support, marketing programs, etc. Oh, and you probably have a legal team now. And you need to enable those sales reps and manage them. Oh, there's HR now too. And a docs team becomes more important...
aldanor 4y ago
It always baffles me how there are 3k people working at, say, Dropbox. What are they all doing? There's a product, it simply syncs files, it synced files pretty much the same way 10 years ago, give or take some polishing and optimisation.
- rabuse 4y ago
  It's mostly other roles outside of engineering.
  - zepolen 4y ago
    Managers that manage managers that manage the manager that manages the guy managing to do all the work.
    - galleywest200 4y ago
      Maybe. Usually its a ton of sales people.
      - xeromal 4y ago
        Probably a bit of support staff as well
    - aldanor 4y ago
      You forgot HR!
- mr_mitm 4y ago
  You'd think you could do the same with three lines of rsync
- cx201 4y ago
  Have you taken a look at what Dropbox actually does today? Just open their website and hover "Products" and you will see that the company does much more than "just" file syncing today (and they're profitable doing so).
brazzy 4y ago
> It's scope that increases headcount, not users. This is obviously untrue if you want to offer and kind of support at all. I also strongly doubt it's true you can scale up your application arbitrarily without needing more people, though I'll readily believe that it's a limited increase compared to what will happen if you have 20 product managers and designers trying to find ways to justify their salaries.
domtom1 4y ago
I can't beleive more people who think tech companies are bloated dont use this argument. Its super obvious to people who can build a Twitter clone or even a website. Even if you wanted to get a product off the ground you could probably hire a bunch of people and then let 75% of them go once its built, keep 25% for maintenence. Google however I think is different. They built a simple UI with some algorithmic genius behind it. Much like we are seeing with openAi and ChatGPT. Then they started to just diverge into seperate things like AI for instance. But they maintained their best product.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Even what people think of as Google.com - simply "search" is a decently diversified product (not business, it's all ads). There's traditional web search. Maps. Images. Video (which is essentially YouTube integrated into Google Search). Each of these products would be Fortune 250 companies on their own. Obviously, it's all powered by the Ads team / business. But that's two majorly different parts - Google's 1P ads (including video), and the display network (3P ads). None of this is useful without a gigantic analytics org. And that's just "search". Cloud & G-suite would each also be Fortune 100 businesses.
- propogandist 4y ago
  > But they maintained their best product. maybe years ago, this is not the case now.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Yes, the internet turning to garbage is the aggregators' fault. When I go to Spotify and modern music sucks, I blame Spotify for aggregating it.
mbesto 4y ago
> It's scope that increases headcount, not users. 100% And adding a way to accept payments (which WhatsApp never really did) and have functionality for businesses is an increase in scope. So, 50 engineers is terribly understaffed for an economically sustainable business. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, etc. have hundreds of engineers who literally just work on how the company gets paid. And no, this isn't just "well they can just insert Stripe.js into their app" - it's way more complicated than that.
- metalspot 4y ago
  this is an important observation. if wathsapp wasn't subsidized by facebook and had to start pay-walling their app, then they would have lost market share and universality and the network effects that go with it, and they would have to be continually iterating on the app to optimize the monetization (in terms of driving away the fewest number of users) and to add features to compete with other competitors, who would be much more prevalent if whatsapp was not universally free. whatsapp is further subsidized in emerging markets by facebook paying carriers to give users free data for facebook apps. without monetization that subsidy would not exist, and once again you would have far more competition, that would require more engineering to respond to.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    WhatsApp did have people pay some trivial annual fee before they were bought by Facebook. IIRC, it was free for the first year after which people presumably knew whether it was worth ~$2 per year to them. Perhaps that fee wasn’t economical but 900M * $2 covers 50 engineers pretty easily. I don’t have a good estimate for whether it would cover bandwidth or other staff for liaising with police in every country or whatever.
    - metalspot 4y ago
      i never used it back then, so i never had to pay a fee, but the fee was $1 per year according to https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ and the fee was only being charged in some countries, and not in India and "many other developing countries." actual revenue might have been more like 100M * .7 (after app store take) so $70 million per year, which might be barely profitable. if they hadn't sold to FB, FB or another company would have run them out of business by doing the same loss-leading advertising and subsidies for their own product that they did for WA.
WeylandYutani 4y ago
The reason why WhatsApp scope increased is because of other apps like Telegram and iMessage. People want to share videos and now even uncompressed photos. Considering Facebook paid a lot of $ for the service they can't let it slide into obscurity.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Even then, it’s not _that_ much extra complexity. It’s more data, but ultimately it’s still largely shuffling opaque binary blobs between, at most, small groups.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Eh, everytime a product manager says 'add this new feature, it will be easy and low impact' I cringe. Try as you might, you cannot fully measure complexity impact before a change occurs, only after. You can never know how much one of those little changes will drastically change user behavior. The product I work with had one of those small changes. We implemented better PDF report generation. The new report generation was even more efficient per file created than the old version. It lead to performance issues at almost all of our large customers..... See, before that point customers would just export the XML statistics and generate their own reports, but now with the reports being good, they pushed report generation back to our product. Report generation had always been coupled with another service before that point so a team had to be split off to separate these services and API controllers so they could run standalone. This required a fast feedback loop with the customers to ensure we understood their storage requirements and the ability to access secondary SQL datastores instead of the primary. Now we have a much more scalable, but far more complicated product so we had to train the support team handle these issues.
- robocat 4y ago
  > Considering Facebook paid a lot of $ for the service they can't let it slide into obscurity. Fallacy: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost It is hard to learn to avoid biased thinking in our own lives! I think that cutting one’s losses is a very important skill to learn.
dehrmann 4y ago
> It's scope that increases headcount, not users. This is 100% true. Where scope creeps in is someone realizes that adding feature X will increase usage by enough that it's ROI-positive, even with a team of 10 supporting it.
weatherlight 4y ago
It also helps they were using a platform/language that was incredibly well suited for the problem.
the_jends 4y ago
I agree. As an engineer the recent layoffs in hindsight felt inevitable because I was working with product managers whose careers rely on them shipping new features every quarter even when customers stopped caring about them years ago (they care about paying less for the main functionality). Now it is us who feels the pressure of having to decrease infra costs while still maintaining support for features when even the PM has left for better pastures.

Lio 4y ago

I agree and would expand that argument to say that add that head count doesn't scale linearly. That is adding people to a project means that you have to add even more people to deal with the management complexity. I guess that theoretically it's possible to have a productive very large organisation but it's really hard to do that compared with the simplicity of a smaller team.

pieterr 4y ago
That is adding people to a project means that you have to add even more people to deal with the management complexity. Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month (1975)
- Lio 4y ago
  Yep that's exactly what I had in mind. It's like a fundamental law of project management that for some reason still gets ignored a lot today.
ghaff 4y ago
Exactly. You can obviously do things with a small team but, if you want to go beyond that, you start to accrete a lot of headcount that's to some degree just a function of having a larger organization that can't work on the basis of every knows everyone and what their role is.
- naijaboiler 4y ago
  It may take 2 people to do 100 units of work. To do 200, takes 10 people.

jbverschoor 4y ago

Management increases headcount. Architecture increases headcount. Bad quality of product and operations increase headcount. Skill level of employees increase headcount. It’s very similar to a proper algorithm cs some naive way of solving things. You can throw a few million on hardware to it, and still only get mediocre results, or solve something in a way that actually works

kris_wayton 4y ago
The really large explosions in size seem to come from internal politics to me. Where leaders of individual internal groups start to have their own goals and agendas separate from the company goals...and start empire building.
- lumost 4y ago
  In a sufficiently large corporation - it’s impossible to distinguish what empires are nascent independent and massive corporations from non-sense. You’d think that teams closer to the companies core would be more competent and higher value… but often you find groups of thirty pushing inconsequential metrics. Alternately, you’ll find small groups on the fringe that appear to be doing nothing, but occasionally spit out the next huge product. For these reasons, investors have historically penalized large conglomerates for inefficiency. The growth of big tech through the ‘10s may have been due in part to negative interest rates which valued discounted future free cash flow at approximately infinite dollars. In a high interest rate environment, one would expect cash flow to be redirected to investors who will then invest the money. If big tech executive pay drops, then there is limited reason for tech executives not to move into startups.
ghaff 4y ago
And dealing with customers (and prospective customers) in much beyond an automated and low-touch way increases headcount. Enterprise sales, personalized support, marketing programs, etc. Oh, and you probably have a legal team now. And you need to enable those sales reps and manage them. Oh, there's HR now too. And a docs team becomes more important...

aldanor 4y ago

It always baffles me how there are 3k people working at, say, Dropbox. What are they all doing? There's a product, it simply syncs files, it synced files pretty much the same way 10 years ago, give or take some polishing and optimisation.

rabuse 4y ago
It's mostly other roles outside of engineering.
- zepolen 4y ago
  Managers that manage managers that manage the manager that manages the guy managing to do all the work.
  - galleywest200 4y ago
    Maybe. Usually its a ton of sales people.
    - xeromal 4y ago
      Probably a bit of support staff as well
  - aldanor 4y ago
    You forgot HR!
mr_mitm 4y ago
You'd think you could do the same with three lines of rsync
cx201 4y ago
Have you taken a look at what Dropbox actually does today? Just open their website and hover "Products" and you will see that the company does much more than "just" file syncing today (and they're profitable doing so).

brazzy 4y ago

> It's scope that increases headcount, not users. This is obviously untrue if you want to offer and kind of support at all. I also strongly doubt it's true you can scale up your application arbitrarily without needing more people, though I'll readily believe that it's a limited increase compared to what will happen if you have 20 product managers and designers trying to find ways to justify their salaries.

domtom1 4y ago

I can't beleive more people who think tech companies are bloated dont use this argument. Its super obvious to people who can build a Twitter clone or even a website. Even if you wanted to get a product off the ground you could probably hire a bunch of people and then let 75% of them go once its built, keep 25% for maintenence. Google however I think is different. They built a simple UI with some algorithmic genius behind it. Much like we are seeing with openAi and ChatGPT. Then they started to just diverge into seperate things like AI for instance. But they maintained their best product.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Even what people think of as Google.com - simply "search" is a decently diversified product (not business, it's all ads). There's traditional web search. Maps. Images. Video (which is essentially YouTube integrated into Google Search). Each of these products would be Fortune 250 companies on their own. Obviously, it's all powered by the Ads team / business. But that's two majorly different parts - Google's 1P ads (including video), and the display network (3P ads). None of this is useful without a gigantic analytics org. And that's just "search". Cloud & G-suite would each also be Fortune 100 businesses.
propogandist 4y ago
> But they maintained their best product. maybe years ago, this is not the case now.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Yes, the internet turning to garbage is the aggregators' fault. When I go to Spotify and modern music sucks, I blame Spotify for aggregating it.

mbesto 4y ago

> It's scope that increases headcount, not users. 100% And adding a way to accept payments (which WhatsApp never really did) and have functionality for businesses is an increase in scope. So, 50 engineers is terribly understaffed for an economically sustainable business. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, etc. have hundreds of engineers who literally just work on how the company gets paid. And no, this isn't just "well they can just insert Stripe.js into their app" - it's way more complicated than that.

metalspot 4y ago
this is an important observation. if wathsapp wasn't subsidized by facebook and had to start pay-walling their app, then they would have lost market share and universality and the network effects that go with it, and they would have to be continually iterating on the app to optimize the monetization (in terms of driving away the fewest number of users) and to add features to compete with other competitors, who would be much more prevalent if whatsapp was not universally free. whatsapp is further subsidized in emerging markets by facebook paying carriers to give users free data for facebook apps. without monetization that subsidy would not exist, and once again you would have far more competition, that would require more engineering to respond to.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  WhatsApp did have people pay some trivial annual fee before they were bought by Facebook. IIRC, it was free for the first year after which people presumably knew whether it was worth ~$2 per year to them. Perhaps that fee wasn’t economical but 900M * $2 covers 50 engineers pretty easily. I don’t have a good estimate for whether it would cover bandwidth or other staff for liaising with police in every country or whatever.
  - metalspot 4y ago
    i never used it back then, so i never had to pay a fee, but the fee was $1 per year according to https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/ and the fee was only being charged in some countries, and not in India and "many other developing countries." actual revenue might have been more like 100M * .7 (after app store take) so $70 million per year, which might be barely profitable. if they hadn't sold to FB, FB or another company would have run them out of business by doing the same loss-leading advertising and subsidies for their own product that they did for WA.

WeylandYutani 4y ago

The reason why WhatsApp scope increased is because of other apps like Telegram and iMessage. People want to share videos and now even uncompressed photos. Considering Facebook paid a lot of $ for the service they can't let it slide into obscurity.

rsynnott 4y ago
Even then, it’s not _that_ much extra complexity. It’s more data, but ultimately it’s still largely shuffling opaque binary blobs between, at most, small groups.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Eh, everytime a product manager says 'add this new feature, it will be easy and low impact' I cringe. Try as you might, you cannot fully measure complexity impact before a change occurs, only after. You can never know how much one of those little changes will drastically change user behavior. The product I work with had one of those small changes. We implemented better PDF report generation. The new report generation was even more efficient per file created than the old version. It lead to performance issues at almost all of our large customers..... See, before that point customers would just export the XML statistics and generate their own reports, but now with the reports being good, they pushed report generation back to our product. Report generation had always been coupled with another service before that point so a team had to be split off to separate these services and API controllers so they could run standalone. This required a fast feedback loop with the customers to ensure we understood their storage requirements and the ability to access secondary SQL datastores instead of the primary. Now we have a much more scalable, but far more complicated product so we had to train the support team handle these issues.
robocat 4y ago
> Considering Facebook paid a lot of $ for the service they can't let it slide into obscurity. Fallacy: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost It is hard to learn to avoid biased thinking in our own lives! I think that cutting one’s losses is a very important skill to learn.

dehrmann 4y ago

> It's scope that increases headcount, not users. This is 100% true. Where scope creeps in is someone realizes that adding feature X will increase usage by enough that it's ROI-positive, even with a team of 10 supporting it.

weatherlight 4y ago

It also helps they were using a platform/language that was incredibly well suited for the problem.

the_jends 4y ago

I agree. As an engineer the recent layoffs in hindsight felt inevitable because I was working with product managers whose careers rely on them shipping new features every quarter even when customers stopped caring about them years ago (they care about paying less for the main functionality). Now it is us who feels the pressure of having to decrease infra costs while still maintaining support for features when even the PM has left for better pastures.