Is there really the need to use 80 people for this feature? Why it seems to me that is just because of excessive programming hours in total available at Facebook rather than the real need for this new feature. Just curious.
About 3-10 people worked on this full time depending on which day in the 3 week development cycle you looked at. Most of the others helped out in their spare time in one way or another
There are no excessive programming hours at Facebook. I assume most of those people worked on the massive backend challenge, not on making the videos (but that's my guess).
I understand that the difficulty of making this new feature is scaling the backend, but at this point wouldn't Facebook already have sort of some processes or "frameworks" to follow when making a new feature.