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Comment by rdsubhas | Hacker News Reader

My experience is, # of engineers is directly related to # of product people, which is in turn related to quantity (not quality) of ideas that the founders/leaders are desperate to try out.

Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers.

WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do. No desktop, no browser (until after reaaaaaaallly long), no account creation (your phone number is enough, thanks), no hidden ad engine, no hundreds of stupid features that product people stuff down in the name of experimentation.

There are some leaders who want anything and everything: Throw 100 darts in the wall. Leave what sticks (don't touch or nurture it). Go back to throwing 100 more. The other guy does that? We want that too. Mobile? Yes. Desktop? Yes. Browser? Yes. Different affiliate channels? Yes. Custom features for B2B partners? Yes. Merchandizing? Yes. Build a mini Ad engine? Yes. Multi user profile management systems? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, every requirement is a go.

The crucial difference is: What happens when you have a restricted pool of people, but insist on doing 100s of things? Some leaders simply treat this as an "org structure" problem, not a problem of focus. They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step – just so that more quantity of features can be seen on paper. This is how most startups are, except for those rare few which don't "talk" about focusing, but actually focus.

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It’s comical that all of the replies to what you’ve written claim you’re wrong, because you’re actually 100% right. And this is even more true when you remember that the company had fewer than 20 people for a long time, and that there was only one real goal, that seems to be forgotten: they needed to clone BlackBerry Messenger and get it working on every platform possible. That was it. That’s all they needed to do, and that’s really all that they did.

I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man.

Nice story. What are you doing now?

Post-FAANG digital infrastructure. This is that moment, when the cycle starts all over again.

Anything of note we humble readers should take a look at?

I’m having one of those “why can’t there be 36 hours in a day” moments in life, but I’ve got to publish more about this very soon, so, it’s on the way.

When you combine the story of WhatsApp’s small team / high impact development with the remote work shift of the past few years, it seems that the next cycle (regardless of when/what it is) will be the first that isn’t centered on SF/SV/California. It’s interesting to think of how that’ll affect the psychology of the area.

> will be the first that isn’t centered on SF/SV/California.

I've heard this every 5 years for the last... 25 I think?

Still hasn't happened.

Looking forward to reading it, plz let us know once done

What specifically?

Thanks for sharing your insights. With all kindness, this sounds like post-UnionPacific. The neo robber barons have won. To go on with the metaphor, not sure the future holds a car to fulfill point-to-point transportation demand, as our digital information needs are vastly oversupplied.

What kind of unmet demand you see out there?

Also can't overlook that for many SMS was ludicrously overpriced, but the early basic smartphones (palm and symbian) often had wifi capability; WhatsApp provided secure, ludicrously cheap instant messaging across all meaningful handsets.

And that's all it had to do; the telecoms weren't interested in making SMS cheap or secure, RIM didn't want BBM on anything but their devices, ICQ/AIM/MSN/etc were similarly unavailable.

> WhatsApp provided secure, ludicrously cheap instant messaging across all meaningful handsets.

You can scrap secure from this, the vast majority of users don't care or even know what that means.

If SMS was more secure I 100% would still expect whatsapp to win. Convenience and cost are the biggest drivers here.

TBH, I was incredibly disappointed when I discovered that BB shared the same encryption key for all users unless you were on their enterprise system. While I’m just one user, I also discouraged others from buying into them too.

> You can scrap secure from this, the vast majority of users don't care or even know what that means.

Until you get sued or called in front of legislative bodies to testify about why your customer data was breached.

But maybe you're big enough at that point to ride it out.

On the other hand, it's very very hard to add in robust security after reaching critical mass.

I have no idea how your point connects to mine. We're talking about consumers choices here.

Ensuring user privacy _from you_ can be an effective defensive measure for small companies who cannot afford to mount a meaningful legal defense.

"Here's all the data we have, officers. We don't have the keys. Good luck."

Again, how does this connect with why Whatsapp won as an app?

Consumers didn't follow this logic. At all. They went for the convenient and free option.

I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me.

>I'm so confused by this thread. It's like you guys are pasting the output of an ML model with only the input "secure" at me.

You talked about encryption on HN. What do you expect? Might as well have brought up gun control at a Republican rally.

(Not that you were anything but 100% right. The general public didn't care about encryption at all until the Snowden leaks.)

They still don't!

I think that depends on how you define "general public". My mum doesn't, but my (far more digitally savvy) teenage cousin does.

Back in 2009, though, this was a very different story. Even tech-savvy people didn't care.

Well, FWIW, the first people I knew using WhatsApp were my friends who were drug dealers or chinese nationals, and both lauded the encryption features.

having the messages encrypted end to end also free WhatsApp from being asked to do censorship or moderating

Explains how they doubled down on hardware and lost.

BB’s market cap is currently a bit over 1/3rd of whatsapp’s acquisition price. And BB has minimal long term debt.

> I tried to convince the CEO of Research In Motion, who I worked for, that WhatsApp would end up destroying his business. He thought I was insane for thinking something so small and simple could have such a big effect on his big, important company. Yeah, well, whatever you say, man.

I remember selling every BlackBerry stock I had when I got my hands on their touchscreen phone (the Storm was it?).

3 years behind the original iPhone, while Apple had just launched the 3G with the App Store. Guess which phone (and stock) I purchased then?

Was there really no-one at BlackBerry following what was going on in the valley at that time?

There's a number of stories about the insane level of hubris at RIM. Before the iPhone smartphones were seen as "business" phones. RIM reportedly felt like hot shit because they had managed to just not fuck up while Palm, Microsoft, and Nokia tripped over themselves to try to make a BlackBerry But Better.

RIM was so focused on the "business" market they really couldn't conceive of a real consumer device. Their upper management apparently looked at the billions of feature phones sold (IIRC Motorola had sold a quarter billion RAZRs by then) and said "nah let's double down on the order of magnitude smaller business market". They dipped their toe in feature phones with the Pearl but it was a joke compared to the original iPhone with its original software that didn't even support MMS.

By starting with more consumer friendly features (Web, media player, phone features) Apple had an extremely competent baseline of functionality. As soon as they added workable Exchange integration (iOS 3 or 4?) the iPhone (including older models) instantly became workable business devices. RIM had far more ground to make up for going from business to consumer than Apple had going consumer to business.

https://archiveprod.canadianbusiness.com/technology-news/how...

https://techland.time.com/2013/09/29/the-inside-story-of-the...

https://sites.psu.edu/global/2018/02/09/blackberry-and-the-i...

Well, he had a point. What killed BB was the iPhone, not that their chat app was going to lose out to the competition. They simply had a product that was inferior in every single important way.

People owned a BB because of its built-in message service.

A lot of people liked the keyboard

It's attack from both directions:

BB and BBM are network effect. iPhone alone is not enough to disrupt the social-media aspect of BBM (which was very sticky at that time in quite a few countries).

WhatsApp + Android actually killed BB+BBM in those countries and not the expensive iPhone

Mike might have taken longer to get it than Jim but he eventually understood the existential threat they faced. He realized this at a time they could have possibly changed course but was unable to do so because the board did not have faith in such a drastic change. The plan to cannibalize device sales today vs promise of future software revenue did not sound so promising for the board, who I imagine were interested only quarterly profits and their stock price.

Mike wasted a ton of my time, and squandered the opportunity to use the brain trust of Facebook insiders, including the guy who designed Facebook, who I assembled to jump ship and build a new future on top of BBM.

A few months later he sent me a message letting me know his private jet had just landed in Palo Alto... Did he want me to be proud of the fact that he seemed to be selling out all of RIM’s IP to Zuckerberg? I never got what that was about.

Both of Mike and Jim were in over their heads. And too arrogant to let people younger and smarter operate the ship. A tale as old as time itself. I’ll write about this in detail at some point, I promise.

This is why, after being both an engineer and a product manager (and VP of Product), and now a CTO of a seed stage startup, I’m fairly convinced PdMs are unnecessary. At least for the the type of company I’d like to build (WhatsApp as a primary example of that).

Off loading the founders vision to someone else is a failure of both communication and org structure (at the seed-SB stage). People may not think hiring their first PdM is offloading their vision, but it is. That person is going to come up with their own ideas, validate their own assumptions, and push for product updates that directly serve their own self interests. To think that this won’t happen is naive.

What I’ve found works the best is hiring competent engineers, giving them adequate business context, a decent design spec, and letting them figure it out.

>> adequate business context, a decent design spec, and letting them figure it out.

I wish more PM's thought like you.

Ditto. As an engineer, it feels like product managers often feel a need to keep cranking out new features as a way to justify their seat at the table. I would love to work in an engineering culture which found a way around that problem. If that means the job falls on me instead, so be it.

They had me at adequate design spec.

> If that means the job falls on me instead, so be it.

Precisely this. I don’t know when “engineer” turned into “order taker”. There’s no reason to have a Product Manager define and engineers work. Good engineers are more than capable of defining their own work.

> There’s no reason to have a Product Manager define and engineers work

The PM isn't supposed to define features in isolation, but crystalize them into consensus between engineers and stakeholders the PM is accountable to.

If your PM isn't your peer, the org is setup wrong. Tech leadership should be helping define this, but people don't know what they don't know and so things end up with PM's becoming de-facto "team leads".

This is always a controversial opinion, at least in some circles, but: I've long said that the PM role was created solely because companies can't find enough good engineering talent.

That isn't to assert that PMs don't do fantastic, necessary work. More-so that there's a more ideal reality where the engineers should be doing that work; the outcomes, in my experience, are better in orgs where engineering is not just influential in, but responsible for, customers, business outcomes, product planning, etc.

This isn't always possible. Most orgs don't resemble Whatsapp; they resemble Google. A hundred product divisions building a thousand different things. Its already difficult to hire engineering talent to fill an org like this, let alone the additional number you'd have to hire in order to account for the fact that a double-digit percentage of an engineer's role should be PM-like stuff.

So, throw away idealism; outsource that part of the engineer role to another specialty which is easier to hire for: PM. Its reasonable.

But the issue has arisen in that industry has forgotten than this was a necessary sacrifice; its not desirable. We've now got university and bootcamp programs dedicated to training for PM roles. Many companies have entrenched the idea that every team/org needs a PM. Tons of people are now adding financial momentum to this idea that their skillset is valuable and necessary; the ship can't be turned so easily.

At the end of the day, this is a disservice to many engineers, as their people, product, and business skills fall out of practice and they're further relegated into code-monkey positions. Its actually a disservice to PMs as well; they could have been trained in engineering and unlocked far more professional mobility. In the worst cases, it leads to PMs resembling the Office Space "what is it, exactly, you do here" guy ("I bring the specs from the client, to the engineers!" "Then, why don't the engineers just talk to the clients?" "Well, they're not people people!" mhm)

> Most orgs don't resemble Whatsapp; they resemble Google.

When they were a startup, Google didn't resemble Google, either.

For large organizations, I'm a fan of the "internal startup" management structure. This just means each product team should be largely self contained, but has the resources of the larger organization to fall back on.

So the leader of each product team can act like a mini-founder, defining and driving the product without being tightly coupled to any other product teams release cycle.

I can attest Product Managers were the downfall of one startup I worked at. The company had dozens of millions in funding and managed to piss it all away with ill-founded escapades driven by a handful of Product Managers. If anything, the Product Managers seemed to be managing their careers, not the product. They babied engineers until most of the engineers stopped caring about the product and just gave up working hard at all. All the brilliant ideas were trite insights you could read on two year old Gartner reports -- "release a cloud version".

CEO and CTO beware, do not let Product Managers happen to your company.

On the flip side, my old PM had an incredibly deep understanding of both the product and the customers buying it (an area in which us SWEs were lacking), in addition to a semi-hands-on understanding of the engineering process too.

He wasn't a professional software engineer, but he took the time to actually learn how to program through some side projects and through this gained a real understanding of what would be trivial for us to implement and what wouldn't.

To top it all off, he had good rapport with the CEO and was adept at managing upwards.

The product wouldn't be half as good as it was if not for him.

Rather than tarring an entire profession with the same brush, I think a much fairer "warning" to founders is to make sure the people you're hiring are competent and that the job they are doing is something that actually adds value to the organisation. PMs, when deployed appropriately, can be worth their weight in gold.

What you describe is the ideal PM. Someone who understands the business and customers and some of the technology. There are two kinds of PMs that are good. The one you describe who understands the business and the former developer who has been with a company many years and has made transition to PM role. However in a lot of companies this is not always the case.

I've always called this Feature Cram, and it's standard procedure at basically every company I've ever worked, small and large, B2B or B2C. Nobody is willing to say "Our software is a success and it's done. Let's fix the major bugs, put it into maintenance mode and start a new, separate, great idea!" Nope, instead it's always "OK the MVP is going well. Let's jam ten other unrelated things into it and see what takes off and what are the dogs (and be stuck with the dog features as technical debt forever). Then, when none of them reach the success of the original actually solid idea, they hire moar people and jam 40 more feature ideas in. Eventually, the original great thing that brought the company success is so hard to find and use because of the weight of the other crap, that a new upstart that Just Does One Thing Well comes in and eats their lunch.

Then, at that new upstart, someone asks "What else can we bolt on to this thing to make it really grow??"

This may very well be unpopular, but this is what happens when you pay someone in measures tied directly to share price, or even more directly in shares; they have every incentive to do whatever it takes to juice the share price up. VC money has even more extreme growth expectations.

There's absolutely no good reason why the same team can't just make another great focused product under the same company umbrella instead of ruining the original

Yes, although there is a balance - lest we forget that you couldn’t use WhatsApp on your computer unless your phone was turned on until a month ago, and there is still no iPad app.

I think WhatsApp is in the place where it is so ubiquitous in some social circles that it faces less competitive pressures than other apps and can afford some of these pretty large gaps.

> Our software is a success and it's done

Because no such state exists. Imagine if Photoshop stopped with updates twenty years ago, or even five.

> They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step

This is the key mistake. Having teams of 2-3 with a manager each is way too many managers. If you have a clear focus, small teams are great because they can work autonomously, with little management and good results. You can't hire your way out of coordination hell.

I was at WhatsApp between 2011 and 2019; for the most part early on, we had essentially the CEO who does a mix of product management and engineering management and engineering, an actively engineering server manager (who also did some client work), and a client engineering manager. Android team grew enough to have an engineering manager and we also ended up with one product manager. Post aquisition, staff grew and so did management.

Post acquisition WhatsApp had to start making money.

For all the doom and gloom Facebook is still too scared of putting ads in there.

At least they can use it to harvest people’s networks and interests. Even more efficiently than Facebook itself.

Not letting a Facebook competitor get ahold of it has value in itself.

That's all nice and well, but some of your examples are not things that save effort -- using phone numbers is surely better for network effects, but not in any way simpler then having regular account registration, unless you just completely ignore security.

WA apps are not better than the competition. Basic stuff like a way to disable automatic downloading of media for groups you are in is still missing. No desktop app. The web frontend is still crap. Outsourcing account registration to mobile phone companies is ridiculous (same as Signal) -- in most of the world, it makes it pretty much impossible to preserve your privacy while using WA. Endless nagging about plain text cloud backups makes WA E2E encryption completely worthless, since even if you opt-out, 99% of your contacts will have them enabled.

The impressive part, considering the size of their team, was their backend stuff and scale.

Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC. (Their Android app was laughably bad for the longest time as well.)

> Discord, with similar team size, was able to build something that succeeded in displacing IRC

I think they displaced Skype, mumble and teamspeak too.

Discord displaced Slack in our organization and we're never looking back at Slack ever again.

In my experience it displaced Mumble and Teamspeak only for casual gaming. If your group is strict enough about muting/kicking people who refuse to fix their mic settings, Mumble or Teamspeak is generally better -- better quality, local volume adjustments, less resource hungry, open mic not being the default, etc. Think tryhard esport players, or just people with old hardware (probably 90% of CSGO players )).

For my group this wasn't about mic settings but mumble being bad out of the box. Maybe because we didn't pay for the servers and used a free something, maybe because of bad luck, I don't know, but every experience we had with mumble was terrible. For teamspeak, while the voice part is great, the message part is (or was at least in ~2016) lacking compared to discord. We were coming from skype/twitter which had better support for """rich messages""".

Yeah, the text chat is just crap. I think most people use a separate thing for that, probably Steam in the PC gaming use case.

Whatsapp:Erlang as Discord:Elixir. The effectiveness of the teams might more be the effectiveness of OTP/BEAM for network applications.

almost certainly part of it but not the whole story.

Indeed. Discord even has a handful of blog posts about running into its limits.

WhatsApp was originally a super simple product. Send and receive messages. It was fundamentally a solved problem. It was all about the fact you could send free messages in a world where sms cost 10 cents a message. It wasn't that their messages were faster, their messages were anything other than free.

They had a year fee of $1. Which I never paid yet I used their service anyways. The reason they were able to scale so large with so few devs is simple, their product was super simple. 50 tech people to build a messaging system is actually a lot.

> The reason they were able to scale so large with so few devs is simple, their product was super simple. 50 tech people to build a messaging system is actually a lot.

Tell that to Twitter. Whatsapp staying at 50 instead of growing to 5000 is impressive.

Different product. One is a social media network and one is a messaging app.

You say that now, but Twitter also began as a way to send a quick message to your friends.

You used to be able to use it as a way to create a free self-managing SMS distribution list. Pretty cool, before I had phone with data capabilities.

That was even a use case I understood. Now I feel too old to understand how to use twitter. But that can't be it. Much older people seem to have no problem.

But, it wasn't built to scale like WhatsApp.

Umm it quickly pivoted to being a social networking site. Before they even were trying to scale they were a social network, micro blogging site.

That's unfair, Twitter had to wrestle scaling with Rails while WhatsApp used Erlang which is a perfect match for scalable communications.

How things would have work around if Microsoft released MSN Messenger for Android and iOS. They had the userbase and the brand already.

Why didn't MSN become what WhatsApp is today? I always wondered how they could screw this up. Smartphones are perfect for chat apps, that's basically what they are supposed to be used for, and MSN / ICQ already covered a gigantic portion of the instant messaging market. Did they just assume people would stay on desktop for chatting forever?

Yeah Microsoft was too dysfunctional before, but they’ve improved a lot recently and are killing it in many areas

Good question. I remember Microsoft had an app around 2010, but it just failed to gain critical momentum, maybe because people were already moving en masse to Facebook and WhatsApp itself.

The app was only ok-ish. There were some alternative apps in the AppStore. But people just preferred talking trough WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (which was already two years old at this point). I guess people gravitated to WhatsApp because it was less cluttered and snappier, and to Facebook because it also had a proper social network in it, but I have no idea. Two years later Microsoft would kill MSN and integrate it with Skype.

Yep. They ware the dominant instant messenger here. They would have had a massive user base from day one.

Or AOL, but maybe it died out too soon?

In my recollection it wasn‘t about saving 10 cents in the beginning, but about saving 1-2$ per message, since one of the first use cases it enabled was free international texting. That was a HUGE benefit. All the first evangelists I knew were in long distance relationships ;)

This is a great point, but I'd add that the problem isn't experimentation. Neither is it having a lot of ideas. It's that they aren't using good experiments to kill off most of the ideas.

I think of it in terms of divergence and convergence. Divergent thinking is great. If you think of an army on the march, leaders will be thinking about possible paths and sending out scouts. But when the scouts (experiments) come back with reports (results) they don't just send some soldiers along every path that looks promising. They winnow the options down, converging their thinking.

Bad leaders don't have the discipline for that. And I think a lot of them pick up that habit from sales and/or seeking investment. "What will it do? What won't it do!" That's great for manipulating the feelings of the person you're currently talking to so they'll sign the deal. But it's terrible for running an effective, focused product development organization.

I know I've seen companies die like that. And it's probably way more than we know, because as WhatsApp demonstrates, focusing hard on what's working is a great way to succeed well enough that people study and talk about you later.

There was an article about when do startup brings in their first "product manager". Before bringing in "product people", the founders are the product people. I see it as the inflection point when the founder start delegating the product making to others. This is when the organization started scaling.

Doing one thing good is a thing in the past. Venture capital has pushed basically all start-ups into 100-feature shops

Uh yeah, but it was only possible to have such a simple product because they reached mass adoption. Without network effects, you've got to differentiate and thus add complexity to gain users.

But then how did they reach mass adoption in the first place? It’s not like they were a Swiss Army knife and before and stripped features once they got big.

That's a totally different question. A larger company such as Microsoft could have easily grabbed the market first, but they didn't.

This comment flies in the face of actual history. While your point about Microsoft may be right (who knows with how they’ve ruined their messaging platforms?) it certainly doesn’t hold true for iMessage which came out in roughly the same timeframe as WhatsApp (2011 vs 2009).

iMessage still has yet to come to other platforms, and at least for a few years after the iPhone's launch, many people viewed it as a luxury product and were unlikely to spend the money to get one compared to cheaper phones (which WhatsApp supported).

They had fantastic product-market fit.

As dleslie and that_guy_iain have mentioned, it was expensive to send an SMS text back then, especially in Europe when your friends have different country codes. So WhatsApp was a free alternative that tapped the unmet need for millions.

And signing up with only a phone number seems like a nobrainer nowadays, but the mindset of the time was still email + password. Sure, Microsoft could have launched a competitor, but they would most certainly require you to use an MSN account, thus adding friction to adoption.

Ultimately though WhatsApp ended up with a billion users and 0 revenue.

They charged $1 per year before Facebook removed the fee.

Not true. They were charging $1/year from users in the richer markets. They could easily reach hundreds of millions per year in revenue if they followed this model.

~$30M revenue in 2014 from 600M users.

The vast majority of people will leave your service if it goes from $0 to even $1. So no, I don't think they could "easily" scale that up.

Yes, but when I was younger, everyone that I knew, even digital illiterate people, paid that fee. Why? Because WhatsApp was (and is) everywhere.

It didn't go from $0 to $1. It was always "$0 to most, $1 for those that really didn't care about paying because they knew that anything else would have much higher real costs"

Hell, If WhatsApp ever got to say "Facebook wants to buy us, but we are also considering changing to a pay-what-you-want model to avoid selling out", I'd easily give them $10/year without batting an eye.

Except for that $19 billion exit. Companies don't need to be turning a profit anymore -- they just need to prove they can scale, and someone else will figure out how to monetize it after a buyout. Hell, you don't even need to be a startup aiming for a buyout anymore to get away with being financially incompetent. Reddit is about to file their IPO at a valuation of $10 billion, even though they've been losing money for nearly two decades and are noticeably (and unsuccessfully) scrambling to find any presentable evidence that they're not complete buffoons.

A billion users IS a goldmine. Ask Google, facebook, twitter, reddit. None of these companies had any significant revenue for the first couple years.

> What happens when you have a restricted pool of people, but insist on doing 100s of things? Some leaders simply treat this as an "org structure" problem, not a problem of focus. They slice and dice the org until the 30 people become split into teams of 2-3 with a manager for each, running into coordination hell on each step

1,000 times this.

> Higher quantity of ideas == More engineers. Higher quality of ideas == Fewer engineers.

Part 1: By definition: more engineers = more ideas.

Part 2: Not so much.

On the one hand, mediocre engineers are sometimes sequestered into small teams where they can't interfere with the important projects that all the smart people and other resources are being thrown at. They just sit there and churn out crappy ideas and crappy non-vital tools. Like daily indicators.

On the other hand, I can see that as more of a tautology: ideas come from one person and are grown by a team. So be definition a quality idea comes from one person, and turns into a team.

I think there is something else that I find hard to explain, but it stems from the same vein.

The best way I can call it is the impedence mismatch between what business people imagine and envision, and what the real products, their code, their systems are actually doing and are actually designed to do.

It creates a kind of cost explosion in the velocity needed and it is often solved by throwing more developers at it instead of rethinking the actual design of the products so that they can better grow to support additional use cases and scale.

You can't totally call it a hack, but it kind of is. A system was designed in a way that doesn't scale to the user demand and to the additional features or the new abstractions that it wants to grow into. Instead of rethinking holistically about how that system should be re-designed to now encompass all of this new stuff, and then put the work into changing it from its current model to that new one. What people do is they break up the current system in two, so now you have two service where you had one before. And now they hire a new team of engineers, manager, PM, etc. to start working on this new half. This repeats again where each of those two half are split in half again, hiring a new team, now there are four teams and four service, etc.

As that happens, you can no longer redesign the way the systems fundamentally work, so each team accrues more and more complicated workarounds on their individual pieces and all new feature becomes cross team projects where you now need someone to coordinate the work between all teams for each little project.

Once you start down this path, there is no way out, the only solution becomes throwing even more teams at it, breaking things down again and again into smaller pieces with a whole team behind it as each piece becomes more and more complex to all work around the inherent holistic limitations that were never reconsidered.

It's a vicious cycle, the piece cannot grow in it's current state because it is too complex, break it up, have two teams tackle each half, now they can take the complexity until they themselves add more stuff to it which makes them too complex once more, break it again, add another team, rinse and repeat.

The issue is often that complexity is accidental, due to the design in place and the tech dept accrued till now, as opposed to being inherent to the domain problem. But instead of addressing the accidental complexity, it is simply broken down in two so we can throw more people behind taming it.

> no hundreds of stupid features that product people stuff down in the name of experimentation.

Amen to that!

As an end user I think WhatsApp is a terrible product for some the reasons you mentioned (tied to phone number, no desktop client) but I cannot deny that it was the smart thing to do from a business perspective.

I really don't like working for those 100 darts people. They are a royal pain in the ass.

Much better are the folks with a solid vision who can drive folks to execute on it, successfully.

And then I look at Dropbox and wonder why they ve made the product into a bloated mess that can't get some basic things right.

They also famously had no meetings, like at all.

Like, 5 engineers never huddled together to figure out how to solve a problem?

Getting together with your peers to discuss a problem is entirely different than being called into a meeting with someone who can only use a iPad to evaluate progress on things they cant understand while several other people sit idle waiting for their turn.

There is no need to turn this into an argument by suggesting that somehow WhatsApp banned its engineers from getting together. That never happens, ever. We are obviously discussing scheduled meetings and scrums.

By the way, this is mentioned here: https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

This confuses the mistakes of a mature company. Different dynamics.

For example Google had thousands of engineers back when they had only 3 products: search, auction, and AdWords. I remember Travelocity having over a thousand developers and not being able to redesign a webpage.

Its deeper than a product problem. Its an execution problem. It’s the ability to do what works with great criticality opposed to what’s expected, standard, normal, or comforting.

you're perfectly right

I get scared every time that senior leadership pushes a new member on the team, because I know that overall quality will drop; their view is completely related to how much things they want to done on every cycle, and they don't care about quality (until it blows up in their face)

So is SpaceX a low quality idea? Some problems are just not feasibly solved by a handful of people. Does that make them low quality ideas?

no iPad app either :/

The WABetaInfo account on Twitter said one is finally coming. And I think it seems likely considering we don't need the phone to be on while using Whatsapp Web.

Correct

this

>WhatsApp success is not about what WhatsApp did, it's about everything they didn't do.

I wrote something similar [1] about its success not long ago on HN,

>WhatApp grew because it was the only IM that worked on Smartphone. Thanks to Erlang. Yes. ICQ didn't bother. Microsoft refuse to accept Smartphone is the future of computing hence there never was MSN on Smartphone. Other contender tried but none of them managed to Scale. I still remember all my colleagues and friends used to download instant messenger on our phone to test them out, creating a group and basically DDoS each other until the system or network crash. No IM was able to handle the traffic load, not only WhatsApp did it many times better than their competitors, they also had almost all platform support, from Symbian to Blackberry.

There is another part of the story that dont get much appreciation, is how they managed 2 million connection per box on a what is now a relatively slow server. The latest M1 Max would have been a lot faster. I often wonder if they could have pushed to 10 Million connection per box with same latency under current CPU and Memory. ( Not saying it is a good idea. )

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25984924

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