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Comment by hyperbovine | Hacker News Reader

Just like Twitter is one guy hacking on RoR for two days... we've heard this old canard before.

Whatsapp used to service 900 million users with literally 50 engineers. Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired. The old canard is true if you focus on a core product and make smart architectural choices. (in Whatsapp's case they credit a lot of their efficiency to Erlang).

[1]https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

Simplistic messaging apps aren’t really a good model to run off of. Designing WhatsApp and Instagram are common system design questions because they’re trivial in comparison to design Uber/Lyft, etc.

Even Waze isn't complex enough to compare with Uber. Waze has to process real time data but doesn't have to deal with processing payments and complying to regulations worldwide.

Could it be that introducing compliance at a later stage in development is just that much more expensive?

That's after shitting on compliance for years as part of your business model.

Don't conflate scale complexity with business complexity

There's a bunch of reasons why this model doesn't hold up in the long run, and I'll give one of them: accessibility. Once your business decides that your app must be sufficiently accessible to reach the many people who need accessibility work, your backlog explodes.

So ignore accessibility. It's not a legal requirement and it doesn't pay.

McDonald's restaurants have handicap accessible ramps but they don't staff ESL speakers. Apps and web services are no different.

Clubhouse, for example, isn't accessible to the hearing impaired and that's ok.

Technically it isn't: if you run an American business, you are subject to the Americans With Disabilities act as it is pursuant to electronic services [1].

Uber specifically would definitely fall under a "public transportation" service - accessibility is non-optional if someone decides to sue. [2]

[1] https://www.ada.gov/2010ADAstandards_index.htm

[2] https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/10900-ada-website-requirem...

>> So ignore accessibility. It's not a legal requirement and it doesn't pay.

Firstly that is just plain incorrect in a lot of areas (of business) and jurisdictions. Secondly your outlook on accessibility is just ... SMH and walks away from keyboard.

says who? accessibility is not that hard to achieve if you know what you're doing and make efforts from the very beginning to build your product in an accessible fashion

The problem is that accessibility is not a common high priority requirement for most software, making people with accessibility experience rare.

Show me a single piece of successful software that didn't suffer the "new business requirement upends everything about how we built it" problem.

And MS Notepad is servicing billions of people with one engineer.

Do you think complexity of Uber is comparable to that of Whatsapp?

>> Whatsapp used to service 900 million users with literally 50 engineers. Instagram had 13 employees when it was acquired.

There is a big difference here -- revenue. Real transactions. Financial reporting. Country-by-country regulations and reg reporting.

Yes, it would be impossible to do something as complex as the Uber app with only 10,000 employees. Better to run the company into the ground.

It’s just some text on the web! And they wonder why software engineers are bad at estimates

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