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0 pointsadam_arthur3y ago0 comments

Well, WhatsApp had ~50 employees and Instagram around ~15 when FB acquired them, and they were around the same order of magnitude of complexity as Twitter.

The only concern Id have is that by having so many people, your design probably comes to rely on them whereas a smaller team would be forced to make the system easier to maintain.

Personally, if I were Elon, I’d build an entirely new backend and point the clients to that rather than trying to incrementally improve what they have.

Get 50-100 10x engineers that are loyal to Elon, with big equity stakes, and crush it

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pclmulqdq3y ago

A lot of people who don't understand why Twitter owns two datacenters point to "complexity" as an argument and completely disregard scale. It turns out that massive scale adds a lot of complexity to a system, particularly around many-to-many pubsub systems (like social media). It also means a lot of features, like compliance with government regulations around the world.

adam_arthurOP3y ago

WhatsApp had a Billion users and 50 employees. You can say that Twitter is incrementally more complex due to wider broadcasting, but it’s also 1/5 the user count.

Everybody stating this number of employees is necessary to maintain a Twitter scale system is simply wrong.

And as technology progresses, fewer and fewer people are needed to maintain the same size system

Many just don’t want to believe that the leverage in employees favor in the tech sector is fading fast, and their labor is not going to warrant 500k comp with marginal effort anymore

pclmulqdq3y ago

Whatsapp, discord, telegram, and all other chat apps have a very easy time scaling. Using user count as a metric and comparing them to Twitter is pretty disingenuous. Instagram is a much better comparison, which had 1/50th the user count of Twitter at its acquisition.

Chat apps are well known to rely on infrastructure that scales up exceedingly well. That is why there are so many of them, and why they all have 100 tech employees or less.

Instagram at the time of the acquisition could have run on 20 servers plus S3. Today's Instagram, along with today's Twitter, does a lot of work that is super-linear in user count, and has something like 2000 engineers. Timeline building is reportedly O(n^2) in user count. The scale difference has a huge effect.

Notice that chat apps have no equivalent to "timeline building." The worst scale factor a chat app has is linear.

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0 pointsadam_arthur3y ago0 comments

Well, WhatsApp had ~50 employees and Instagram around ~15 when FB acquired them, and they were around the same order of magnitude of complexity as Twitter.

The only concern Id have is that by having so many people, your design probably comes to rely on them whereas a smaller team would be forced to make the system easier to maintain.

Personally, if I were Elon, I’d build an entirely new backend and point the clients to that rather than trying to incrementally improve what they have.

Get 50-100 10x engineers that are loyal to Elon, with big equity stakes, and crush it

0 comments

pclmulqdq3y ago

adam_arthurOP3y ago

WhatsApp had a Billion users and 50 employees. You can say that Twitter is incrementally more complex due to wider broadcasting, but it’s also 1/5 the user count.

Everybody stating this number of employees is necessary to maintain a Twitter scale system is simply wrong.

And as technology progresses, fewer and fewer people are needed to maintain the same size system

Many just don’t want to believe that the leverage in employees favor in the tech sector is fading fast, and their labor is not going to warrant 500k comp with marginal effort anymore

pclmulqdq3y ago

Chat apps are well known to rely on infrastructure that scales up exceedingly well. That is why there are so many of them, and why they all have 100 tech employees or less.

Notice that chat apps have no equivalent to "timeline building." The worst scale factor a chat app has is linear.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse