Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I can't find it now, but someone in another post on Twitter pointed out that these comparisons aren't very meaningful: Twitter's social topology is any-any between users. A major (and unique) aspect of Twitter is that everybody on Twitter can talk to just about anybody else, and is encouraged to. This is also a critical value proposition for advertising on Twitter, and probably explains the size of their ads team.

This is very different from WhatsApp's topology, which is a relatively traditional chat system (small groups of shared state). Instagram's is closer, but still favors smaller social groups over a global feed.

Beyond that, Twitter is well known for running its own DCs, etc. It doesn't seem inconceivable that all of this, plus internationalization, mature platforms teams, etc. all adds up to four figures.

It boggles my mind how much people think "active users" is like some kind of fungible unit for engineering work required.

Sometimes it is, until you start comparing between wildly different companies and business models.

It's absolutely an OKR which implies higher workloads, are you kidding me‽ I'm sure you can build some architectural rat's nest where you need 100 engineers to maintain systems that barely serve a dozen requests a second (kind of like the blockchain) but that doesn't mean you couldn't do a much better job.

Everything else being equal, sure, more traffic is harder. But everything else is generally not equal. And despite your sleight of hand in this comment, your original claim about what's "delusional" was based on asserting an equivalence between the WhatsApp and Twitter workloads.

I don't think there's a inviolable ratio between active users and engineers, but you do absolutely need more engineers as your user base increases: you need more people on call, more people maintaining the servers you're running (especially if, like Twitter, you run your own DCs), more people doing QA and reliability engineering because of increased load, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com