I think most seasoned game developers would be faster making a simple 3D game with Unity rather than just openGL + C ( mainly because with Unity you get soon much boilerplate-y stuff out of the box)
The language and the amazing properties of failure tolerance could be productivity multipliers ( think of the times you've had to deal with catastrophic failures of software)
You example, unity, isn't a language, but instead an off the shelf engine and toolchain.
But just like the development on an individual game seem less impressive technologically the more they rely on existing tech [1], admitting "Yeah, we forked ejabberd and rigidly fight scope creep" doesn't have the same ring as hyping up features in the runtime of a hip yet obscure programming language.
[1] Fun side note: If you watch the games press interviews devs, pay attention to when they ask about what engine they use. The press don't and viewers often don't know anything about software projects, so the devs are reluctant to to admit how much they've relied on off the self components for their admittedly-huge undertaking. Fun to watch the paid hype men try to talk around that.
WhatsApp only needs 50 engineers because of who they hire. Even using Erlang, I pretty sure they would need more than 50 engineers if they hired mainly around average engineers.
I haven't heard of anyone who has figured out how to measure an engineer's abilities.
Some people test algorithms. Others test how often they've shipped things. Most just look for years of experience. A few even test whether you know certain facts.
Who doesn't say that though? No company says they hire average engineers.
But I agree that their success does kind of prove that they succeeded in that.
Right. There's not even a way to adjust notification levels based on person or group. I ended up turning off notifications for the whole app, so it stopped serving the same use cases that text messages do. People still need to text or call me if they need an urgent answer.
That was just an example anyway. I could easily have pointed to the ambiguous end-to-end encryption (are my messages even being encrypted?) or the lack of encryption in group chats.