Ask HN: How much development is enough?
So I offered to do it for $5k max. Tinder pays minimum $100k annually per engineer. That's a huge difference!
I'm wondering where my calculations went off. Obviously they're paying a premium for the best talents and have the money. Let's not discuss money, but rather why engineering is endless.
It's an interesting case study when you limit it to just apps.
A back end might be endless work - it needs to be scaled to handle 1M photos per hour and have 99.99% uptime and so on.
Front end has no issues with scale. Whether there's 10 users or 1M users that hour, it just handles what the back end gives it. Users won't notice most optimizations. Heck, you can have a memory leak and most users won't mind a couple crashes. At some point, further development stops translating into money.
If Tinder suddenly fired all Android engineers tomorrow, would their users notice?
Similar question goes for other mature apps. Why does Trello have multiple Android developers? Why are mature companies like Facebook and Uber still hiring more app developers?
When does a company have enough developers?