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I tthink the reality of modern development, especially one plugged into the Meta ecosystem is that there is probably a tonne of integration work to be done. -

I tthink the reality of modern development, especially one plugged into the Meta ecosystem is that there is probably a tonne of integration work to be done. - monetization - finance - analytics - ad placement - ad bidding - android client - apple client - browser client Just off the top of my head in 2 mins that's a few of the extra concerns I can come up with... I remember meeting someone who was responsible for writing an ultra performant JS WhatsApp client for firefox OS. When you have 2B users, the long tail is long... OG Instagram was pre-monetisation. So yeah maybe a simple image hosting service needs fewer engineers but maybe a profitable business that can monetise the service needs more...

JimDabell 3y ago
Remember Instagram was iOS-only for a good long while. So no need for Android developers or front-end web developers.
- djtango 3y ago
  Didn't know that, I still don't use Instagram lol. So yeah exactly - it's easy to run a simple app with a few devs. Iirc in Singapore, Netflix has a reasonably sized team just dealing with payments. Presumably for a global business, payments is a pretty gnarly long tail of integrations (never worked with payments so pretty ignorant on the subject) not to mention I wonder whether they also are onboarding content distributors onto some kind of automated payment platform so they can very quickly churn content libraries or attribute some kind of viewing related payment... I guess tldr doing business is complex and needs lots of engineers vs making a small and focused app.
notacoward 3y ago
You hit the nail on the head. I'd add moderation to that list. Also, when you're in revenue mode and scaling from 14M users to billions it's no longer sustainable to outsource most of your infrastructure - OS, storage, other basic services - to a cloud provider. So you're going to need people to develop and manage those, even if you tell yourself you don't have to count them because they're elsewhere in a large company (as I was once). Then you have things like observability tools, non-trivial deployment tools, etc. that are also Other People's Effort. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that we live in a world where there's infrastructure lying around that makes it possible for a three-person team to achieve so much so quickly, and that team deserves a ton of credit for doing it. But it's not the "these companies are so bloated" lesson that some people are going to try to take away from it. That's just Tall Poppy Syndrome.

JimDabell 3y ago

Remember Instagram was iOS-only for a good long while. So no need for Android developers or front-end web developers.

djtango 3y ago
Didn't know that, I still don't use Instagram lol. So yeah exactly - it's easy to run a simple app with a few devs. Iirc in Singapore, Netflix has a reasonably sized team just dealing with payments. Presumably for a global business, payments is a pretty gnarly long tail of integrations (never worked with payments so pretty ignorant on the subject) not to mention I wonder whether they also are onboarding content distributors onto some kind of automated payment platform so they can very quickly churn content libraries or attribute some kind of viewing related payment... I guess tldr doing business is complex and needs lots of engineers vs making a small and focused app.

notacoward 3y ago

You hit the nail on the head. I'd add moderation to that list. Also, when you're in revenue mode and scaling from 14M users to billions it's no longer sustainable to outsource most of your infrastructure - OS, storage, other basic services - to a cloud provider. So you're going to need people to develop and manage those, even if you tell yourself you don't have to count them because they're elsewhere in a large company (as I was once). Then you have things like observability tools, non-trivial deployment tools, etc. that are also Other People's Effort. Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that we live in a world where there's infrastructure lying around that makes it possible for a three-person team to achieve so much so quickly, and that team deserves a ton of credit for doing it. But it's not the "these companies are so bloated" lesson that some people are going to try to take away from it. That's just Tall Poppy Syndrome.