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Slack was pretty much a perfect product 7 years ago. What have they added besides huddles that is actually useful? How many engineers are needed for maintaining

Slack was pretty much a perfect product 7 years ago. What have they added besides huddles that is actually useful? How many engineers are needed for maintaining an already really good product? Is it really a complex enough system to be hiring indefinitely?

taurath 3y ago
Slack sold to salesforce and became a corporate product suite. The purpose is to do integrations with as many things as possible so that you get locked in, and easy billing between your company and salesforce. It is a business angle not a product for users, like almost anything when the users are not the ones directly paying for the product.
williamcotton 3y ago
Thirteen. Instagram had thirteen employees when acquired by Facebook. I’m sorry, but most tech companies are clueless when it comes to management. Cost analysis as it relates to the actual activities of an engineering labor force are brushed to the side as overhead, which makes no sense since these are direct costs. What’s the cost of a poorly specified product? What’s the cost of a meeting? What’s the cost of involving engineers in the hiring process? What’s the cost of multiple programming languages? What’s the cost of having separate teams for front-end, back-end, operations? What’s the cost of adding another engineer to a team? I’ve never seen any effort put into any of the above. This is underpants gnomes territory: 1.) acquire new engineers 2.) ? 3.) profit Hence massive overhiring with unaccounted for costs that lead shortly to layoffs and hiring freezes. The more I learn about managerial accounting (thanks dad!) the more dysfunction I see at most organizations. Apparently Oracle does attempt to uncovers these costs, but I can’t find the case study. All of this has an incredibly large impact on financial reporting, hence rosy projections based on EBITDA followed by the sobering realizations when those projections are not met. Most tech firms actually base internal management on EBITDA! This is borderline insane internally and borderline fraud externally.
- 0xy 3y ago
  You couldn't build a true Instagram clone today with 13 people. The Instagram of the time was more akin to Flickr than the modern Instagram with live streaming, stories, video content, messaging, groups, recommendations, creator tools and localization. TikTok, an Instagram competitor, had over 1,000 people working on it in 2020 (grown 130x since).
  - williamcotton 3y ago
    Sure, but the product was incredibly well marketed, designed and implemented with just those original 13 employees and sold for $1 billion. Those features you’ve listed were added in the 11 odd years since. I think that the original set of employees could have implemented every aspect of the application since the date of sale!
    - siva7 3y ago
      Implementing a feature is only a small part of the story. It doesn't scale that way. The more features and users you got, the more people you need to maintain it. 13 won't do the trick on insta scale.
    - 0xy 3y ago
      I don't think so. Let's take just one slice of what I mentioned -- video content. Dailymotion, a relatively small competitor, has over 200 employees. Vimeo has over 1,000. That's a single feature. Could 13 people clone Instagram's featureset at the time of the sale? Yeah, it could probably be done by 3 people in a weekend. But you'd need thousands to emulate their current featureset.
  - rconti 3y ago
    So, all the junk that made Instagram worse.
- bin_bash 3y ago
  When Instagram was acquired they had 30m MAU, no monetization, and were being crushed with scaling problems that were too much for the small team to bear. Whatever the number is, it's a lot higher than 13.
_fat_santa 3y ago
> What have they added besides huddles that is actually useful? I really like the new Canvas feature they have. I realize it's more updated version of posts that they already had but seems to work much better than posts IMHO.

taurath 3y ago

Slack sold to salesforce and became a corporate product suite. The purpose is to do integrations with as many things as possible so that you get locked in, and easy billing between your company and salesforce. It is a business angle not a product for users, like almost anything when the users are not the ones directly paying for the product.

williamcotton 3y ago

Thirteen. Instagram had thirteen employees when acquired by Facebook. I’m sorry, but most tech companies are clueless when it comes to management. Cost analysis as it relates to the actual activities of an engineering labor force are brushed to the side as overhead, which makes no sense since these are direct costs. What’s the cost of a poorly specified product? What’s the cost of a meeting? What’s the cost of involving engineers in the hiring process? What’s the cost of multiple programming languages? What’s the cost of having separate teams for front-end, back-end, operations? What’s the cost of adding another engineer to a team? I’ve never seen any effort put into any of the above. This is underpants gnomes territory: 1.) acquire new engineers 2.) ? 3.) profit Hence massive overhiring with unaccounted for costs that lead shortly to layoffs and hiring freezes. The more I learn about managerial accounting (thanks dad!) the more dysfunction I see at most organizations. Apparently Oracle does attempt to uncovers these costs, but I can’t find the case study. All of this has an incredibly large impact on financial reporting, hence rosy projections based on EBITDA followed by the sobering realizations when those projections are not met. Most tech firms actually base internal management on EBITDA! This is borderline insane internally and borderline fraud externally.

0xy 3y ago
You couldn't build a true Instagram clone today with 13 people. The Instagram of the time was more akin to Flickr than the modern Instagram with live streaming, stories, video content, messaging, groups, recommendations, creator tools and localization. TikTok, an Instagram competitor, had over 1,000 people working on it in 2020 (grown 130x since).
- williamcotton 3y ago
  Sure, but the product was incredibly well marketed, designed and implemented with just those original 13 employees and sold for $1 billion. Those features you’ve listed were added in the 11 odd years since. I think that the original set of employees could have implemented every aspect of the application since the date of sale!
  - siva7 3y ago
    Implementing a feature is only a small part of the story. It doesn't scale that way. The more features and users you got, the more people you need to maintain it. 13 won't do the trick on insta scale.
  - 0xy 3y ago
    I don't think so. Let's take just one slice of what I mentioned -- video content. Dailymotion, a relatively small competitor, has over 200 employees. Vimeo has over 1,000. That's a single feature. Could 13 people clone Instagram's featureset at the time of the sale? Yeah, it could probably be done by 3 people in a weekend. But you'd need thousands to emulate their current featureset.
- rconti 3y ago
  So, all the junk that made Instagram worse.
bin_bash 3y ago
When Instagram was acquired they had 30m MAU, no monetization, and were being crushed with scaling problems that were too much for the small team to bear. Whatever the number is, it's a lot higher than 13.

_fat_santa 3y ago

> What have they added besides huddles that is actually useful? I really like the new Canvas feature they have. I realize it's more updated version of posts that they already had but seems to work much better than posts IMHO.