Stories like this kind of make sense to me. 3 people is very few but I guess they really knew what they are doing.
Meanwhile, all these orgs with essentially a CRUD app, with 1,000s of engineers..? That I never understood.
Meanwhile, all these orgs with essentially a CRUD app, with 1,000s of engineers..? That I never understood.
Scaling is not the only challenge engineers face, but somehow it's the one that is mostly praised.
They also need to quickly respond to downtime, because unlike IG if some of those CRUD apps go down in B2B world you are often losing customers actual money not just ad views
But anyway there was never a period where Instagram had a tiny 3 dev team and handled ads at the same time. 3 devs only worked back when there were no customers, no ads, no profits and no real responsibilities.
Still, between 3 devs and thousands, that's 3 orders of magnitude. Let's take the core team and 30x them for a broader project. Add 50 (?) for billing. Another 50 for web apps. Another 30 for general devops? That takes us to a "mere" 220 devs.
Then I read that Uber had around 2,000 SEs in 2020, and Airbnb at some point was 1,200. I don't know how to grok that.
You mention AWS, my impression was that even many very large orgs run their their hardware in the cloud (surely not all but still).
Dealing with payments globally to hosts/drivers and specifically compliance is complex in itself.