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A comment on Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users. Parent comment

Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users by Lio on Sunday January 29, 2023 @07:48AM (#34567602)
I agree and would expand that argument to say that add that head count doesn't scale linearly. That is adding people to a project means that you have to add even more people to deal with the management complexity.

I guess that theoretically it's possible to have a productive very large organisation but it's really hard to do that compared with the simplicity of a smaller team.

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Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users by pieterr on Sunday January 29, 2023 @09:40AM (#34568510)
That is adding people to a project means that you have to add even more people to deal with the management complexity.

Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month (1975)

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Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users by Lio on Sunday January 29, 2023 @10:42AM (#34569068)
Yep that's exactly what I had in mind. It's like a fundamental law of project management that for some reason still gets ignored a lot today.
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Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users by ghaff on Sunday January 29, 2023 @09:42AM (#34568527)
Exactly. You can obviously do things with a small team but, if you want to go beyond that, you start to accrete a lot of headcount that's to some degree just a function of having a larger organization that can't work on the basis of every knows everyone and what their role is.
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Re:Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users by naijaboiler on Sunday January 29, 2023 @01:52PM (#34571339)
It may take 2 people to do 100 units of work. To do 200, takes 10 people.
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