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I often wonder this too, but... I think making "another Google" is not the best example. I think it's hard to argue (although some people clearly did) that mak

I often wonder this too, but... I think making "another Google" is not the best example. I think it's hard to argue (although some people clearly did) that making a search engine is easy. You need to index all of Internet, cache it maybe too, rank stuff, filter out spam, work over different languages, do something about images, parse a lot of (broken) HTML, maybe run some js to figure out what a dynamic page should show, then serve it up super quickly... google is faster than pinging a local (!) NFS server at my work. But then I remember a comparison on HN about how booking.com is O(50) people and Airbnb is O(2000) total. Or I remember the total headcounts at Twitter, an app that lets you post very short messages. Or LinkedIn, a vast company with a very subpar UX, basically an inferior clone of a dozen of other social networking sites, only kept afloat by its network/monopoly effect. I mean, searching for people by name barely works! You're better off using Google to look for people on LI that its own search box! No doubt it's just my cognitive limitation, like I can't visualize the vastness of the Cosmos, but this is a close second.

bsder 3y ago
I agree but for a different reason. Making a search engine that is good is actually a reasonable task as shown here on HN. It doesn't seem to take very many people, either. Google has set the bar really low. By contrast, making a search engine that is monetizable and good seems to be an impossible task.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
> I often wonder this too, but... I think making "another Google" is not the best example. 100% agreed. They really should have used Twitter as an example. Any competent full-stack developer could probably have a working clone of Twitter running in a weekend. The challenge I think is scaling it to millions of daily active users. But, even then, Twitter has been around for over 10 years. The scaling problem seems to have been solved. I would think that these days, Twitter engineering would just be a whack-a-mole of odd obscure bugs. I can't think of any useful new features it's gotten in the last two years. Why do they still need so many engineers?
- liquidpele 3y ago
  Not just scaling it… scaling it in a way that doesn’t immediately bankrupt you. Bit of a chicken and egg problem with advertisers.
  - MrLeap 3y ago
    This is one of those _things_ that I suspect causes many greybeards to grimace. What's a tweet? We can haggle this up and down so cut me some slack. 200 bytes? 50 bytes? gzipped -90%, 5 bytes. Holy shit what absurd amount of traffic could a 1gb fiber connection handle? oh huh 200 million tweets a second. That's silly. How wrong could I be? -- then you run down the numbers and you realize that no matter how wrong you are, a twitter-clone-for-most-people oughta be cheap. The network effects and fuzzy human reasons are their moat, nothing else. One of those fuzzy human reasons is how amazon EC2 eats your ass. Just gobbles it from stem to stern.
    - tehjoker 3y ago
      They have pictures and video now. You also have to sort them in real time, check for blocked, mutes, etc, and each tweet is amplified to followers so one tweet requires e.g. 700 copies or 1M copies depending on follower count. The text part is basically solved at this point, but not quite that easy. I hear dealing with blocks is one of the slow parts.
      - MrLeap 3y ago
        HN doesn't host pictures or video. I come here well before I do twitter, reddit, facebook, youtube or anywhere else on the internet commons. I hazard there's a verdant, halcyon prairie between the two zones. The common zone of maximum extraction, and the hypothetical 200$-a-month-operating-costs text only twitter that can service 5% of the entire planet.
        tehjoker 3y ago
        Perhaps, but you'd be missing a lot of good memes
xyzelement 3y ago
I have no idea about true inner workings of LinkedIn but the surface of LinkedIn you and I use is not the entire product and not the part that generates revenue. Off the top of my bead, they offer HR/recruiting capabilities, training capabilities, etc. They have a sales force around those, etc. That's not to say they are or aren't staffed right, just that the part we are conscious of daily isn't the entire thing.
irgolic 3y ago
> I remember a comparison on HN about how booking.com is O(50) people and Airbnb is O(2000) total Does anyone have a link to this?
- smueller1234 3y ago
  That's nonsense. Booking.com with it's subsidiaries was about 18000 or so people when I left in 2017. About 1800 of that were in engineering The vast majority of staff were working either on the supply or customer service side.
- selcuka 3y ago
  I don't know about booking.com, but when Facebook acquired Instagram for $1B they only had 13 employees. WhatsApp had 55 employees when they were bought (again by Facebook) for $19B.
- jamil7 3y ago
  Crunchbase says it's closer to 10000.
- em500 3y ago
  According to Google Finance: BKNG: Employees: 23,100, Revenue(2022): 17.1B, Net Income(2022): 3.1B ABNB: Employees: 6,811, Revenue(2022): 8.4B, Net Income(2022): 1.9B https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BKNG:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BKNG:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/ABNB:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/ABNB:NASDAQ
technion 3y ago
I had an 800GB database and developers were putting up queries that took over ten seconds to run. I can be critical of Google at times but I'll never actually properly come to terms with how Google's search index is still so fast.
Hermitian909 3y ago
> then I remember a comparison on HN about how booking.com is O(50) people and Airbnb is O(2000) total One thing to ask yourself - is the company chasing growth? A company like AirBnB or Twitter could absolutely run on a much smaller team if they agreed to mostly abandon growth. They could focus on reducing tech debt, make architectural decisions that reduced flexibility in the name of reliability and lower maintenance, and then eventually lay off a huge portion of their staff. Instead they have a growth thesis - that growth requires investment, having to favor velocity over unit economics, etc. The higher the growth target, the more inefficiencies you take on.

bsder 3y ago

I agree but for a different reason. Making a search engine that is good is actually a reasonable task as shown here on HN. It doesn't seem to take very many people, either. Google has set the bar really low. By contrast, making a search engine that is monetizable and good seems to be an impossible task.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

> I often wonder this too, but... I think making "another Google" is not the best example. 100% agreed. They really should have used Twitter as an example. Any competent full-stack developer could probably have a working clone of Twitter running in a weekend. The challenge I think is scaling it to millions of daily active users. But, even then, Twitter has been around for over 10 years. The scaling problem seems to have been solved. I would think that these days, Twitter engineering would just be a whack-a-mole of odd obscure bugs. I can't think of any useful new features it's gotten in the last two years. Why do they still need so many engineers?

liquidpele 3y ago
Not just scaling it… scaling it in a way that doesn’t immediately bankrupt you. Bit of a chicken and egg problem with advertisers.
- MrLeap 3y ago
  This is one of those _things_ that I suspect causes many greybeards to grimace. What's a tweet? We can haggle this up and down so cut me some slack. 200 bytes? 50 bytes? gzipped -90%, 5 bytes. Holy shit what absurd amount of traffic could a 1gb fiber connection handle? oh huh 200 million tweets a second. That's silly. How wrong could I be? -- then you run down the numbers and you realize that no matter how wrong you are, a twitter-clone-for-most-people oughta be cheap. The network effects and fuzzy human reasons are their moat, nothing else. One of those fuzzy human reasons is how amazon EC2 eats your ass. Just gobbles it from stem to stern.
  - tehjoker 3y ago
    They have pictures and video now. You also have to sort them in real time, check for blocked, mutes, etc, and each tweet is amplified to followers so one tweet requires e.g. 700 copies or 1M copies depending on follower count. The text part is basically solved at this point, but not quite that easy. I hear dealing with blocks is one of the slow parts.
    - MrLeap 3y ago
      HN doesn't host pictures or video. I come here well before I do twitter, reddit, facebook, youtube or anywhere else on the internet commons. I hazard there's a verdant, halcyon prairie between the two zones. The common zone of maximum extraction, and the hypothetical 200$-a-month-operating-costs text only twitter that can service 5% of the entire planet.
      - tehjoker 3y ago
        Perhaps, but you'd be missing a lot of good memes

xyzelement 3y ago

I have no idea about true inner workings of LinkedIn but the surface of LinkedIn you and I use is not the entire product and not the part that generates revenue. Off the top of my bead, they offer HR/recruiting capabilities, training capabilities, etc. They have a sales force around those, etc. That's not to say they are or aren't staffed right, just that the part we are conscious of daily isn't the entire thing.

irgolic 3y ago

> I remember a comparison on HN about how booking.com is O(50) people and Airbnb is O(2000) total Does anyone have a link to this?

smueller1234 3y ago
That's nonsense. Booking.com with it's subsidiaries was about 18000 or so people when I left in 2017. About 1800 of that were in engineering The vast majority of staff were working either on the supply or customer service side.
selcuka 3y ago
I don't know about booking.com, but when Facebook acquired Instagram for $1B they only had 13 employees. WhatsApp had 55 employees when they were bought (again by Facebook) for $19B.
jamil7 3y ago
Crunchbase says it's closer to 10000.
em500 3y ago
According to Google Finance: BKNG: Employees: 23,100, Revenue(2022): 17.1B, Net Income(2022): 3.1B ABNB: Employees: 6,811, Revenue(2022): 8.4B, Net Income(2022): 1.9B https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BKNG:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BKNG:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/ABNB:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/ABNB:NASDAQ

technion 3y ago

I had an 800GB database and developers were putting up queries that took over ten seconds to run. I can be critical of Google at times but I'll never actually properly come to terms with how Google's search index is still so fast.

Hermitian909 3y ago

> then I remember a comparison on HN about how booking.com is O(50) people and Airbnb is O(2000) total One thing to ask yourself - is the company chasing growth? A company like AirBnB or Twitter could absolutely run on a much smaller team if they agreed to mostly abandon growth. They could focus on reducing tech debt, make architectural decisions that reduced flexibility in the name of reliability and lower maintenance, and then eventually lay off a huge portion of their staff. Instead they have a growth thesis - that growth requires investment, having to favor velocity over unit economics, etc. The higher the growth target, the more inefficiencies you take on.