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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

Facebook developers seem to have a surprising amount of free time to go around reinventing things that are not obviously social network features. (Or to have had it in the 2010s, at least.)

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It's not particularly surprising that a surprising amount of infrastructure is needed to run a social network.

Note WhatsApp had 35 employees when they were acquired and Instagram had 13. At that size you need to be productive at managing servers but you're probably not thinking how great it'd be to have a "whole new programming language and source control system" team.

WhatsApp and Instagram at the point of acquisition were simpler than Facebook is (and was), or even compared to what it is now. Once you scale you start to need a lot of engineers to help keep things standing up and everyone on the same page.

WhatsApp had like half a billion monthly active users when they were acquired, that could be considered fairly large scale, no? But I agree with your point in general.

Yes, but WhatsApp is a point-to-point communication tool with mostly small groups. Each individual message doesn't need to be distributed to a potentially very large audience like in Facebook, making processing and coordination of nodes smaller and simpler.

Note though that other large projects with similar scaling-git problems tended to just write wrapper tools to work around it, see how Chromium and Android do it.

Android and Chrome are small projects in this context :P

That’s still Google, though. I suspect non-MetaBet companies would try harder to avoid scaling the development team in the first place.

(My other two posts in this thread are -4 and +7 although they both have the same point. Never sure how to interpret that.)

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