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Comment by secabeen | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the messenger team is ~40 people, as compared to WhatsApp having 32 engineers at the time of their sale to FB.

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The photo caption says that's just the infrastructure team. I'd imagine the product team is much larger given how many features are crammed into Messenger.

I wish it was the other way around. We'd have fewer, but faster features.

Seems like Messenger is getting WeChat-ized - in China, WeChat [0] is your one-stop shop to getting anything done - chatting, following celebrities, booking housekeeping, payments, even "mini-programs". And now many Western messaging apps are starting to take inspiration from this [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat

[1]: https://blog.ycombinator.com/lessons-from-wechat/

Is it working though? Just because Facebook keeps adding features doesn’t necassarily mean that people are using those features at the same scale as WeChat. I avoid Facebook messenger entirely, but are others using it for all these ancillary things like sending friends money?

My (non-technical) friends & family, as anecdotal evidence, seem almost universally happy about switching to Facebooks Lite Messenger. (An app that only provides messaging functionality.)

They perceive it as less confusing.

Afaik the real team name is Messenger Foundation. FB has the concept of foundation teams, with the only goal of keeping a part of the service working no mater what.

/edit: been informed by some of the people in the picture that technically there are 2 teams there: Messenger Infra and Messenger Foundation

I can see some MySQL Infrastructure people in it :-)

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