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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

A few days ago, an article was posted how WhatsApp has scaled to nearly a billion users and is still running with only 50 engineers. Isn't running 4chan more impressive feat being run, if I am not wrong, by just one engineer, and that too from a time when web development tools weren't anywhere close to what we have today.

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Yes and no. For some crazy reason it's easier to run server infrastructure when you're not doing hyper-aggressive data collection and running computationally complex operations to fetch and decide the data to display.

It's impressive in the sense that the staff size is in the order of magnitude you would expect given their publicly-visible product. Many companies will brag about their ops staff being big (because they're so great that their system has to scale) or small (because they're so great at building scalable systems), but operate so opaquely you have zero way to judge the impressiveness of the number and you have to trust the opinion of a journalist that doesn't even care to know.

Most of the chans (2ch/8ch/4chan/420chan ect) are just FreeBSD boxes and cgi/perl scripts

http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/interviews/moot-4chan.h...

2ch has been, for over a decade, one of (if not always the absolute) largest discussion forums in Japan. No matter what the base system is, there's some serious infrastructure there.

Plenty of people have ran huge sites by themselves. Marcus Frind of POF comes to mind. He had over 30 million users a month back in 2007 and no employees. It's not that hard if you know what you're doing.

I wasn't aware that they made a Fundamentals of Engineering certification exam for web developers.

First, just as a point of fact, WhatsApp is mostly mobile development and network engineering messaging systems, not web development. Disciplines that one would normally classify under "software engineering".

Second, you appear to be confusing Fundamentals of Engineering exams and Principles of Engineering exams. There is no Fundamentals of Engineering exam for any engineering discipline, including structural, electrical, etc. Only the PE exam focuses on individual disciplines. FE is for...fundamentals.

Finally, and ironically, they do in fact make a Principles of Engineering certification exam for software engineers[1]. It's been offered for almost 5 years now. As of last year, the majority of states offered the exam and license software engineers just as they do other engineering candidates.

1. http://ncees.org/about-ncees/news/ncees-introduces-pe-exam-f...

I am sorry but I still don't get what OP was referring to?

I think that he was trying to be pedantic about the use of the word "engineer" in the context of software development.

It's a test that university graduates in the traditional engineering disciplines (civil, mechanical, etc.) usually take in the USA. After 5 years of work experience, you take another test, then your state's licensing board gives you a stamp and the credential "Professional Engineer" (P.E.). You can then take on liability for project documents that you stamp, so you charge clients/employers more money.

It's mainly useful if you work for a consulting company.

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