Comment by bauerd

1 day ago

>What on earth do you do with that many devs on a project like Messenger? I mean, really?

What makes you think it's a simple system to develop at scale?

12 comments

bauerd

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unreal37  1 day ago

Cause it's developed. It's been a stable product for a decade. It's like having 10,000 construction workers on a completed building.

  • theendisney  1 day ago

    10 years ago i wrote a php web chat in 2 hours or so. I pretty much never look at it but the tinestamps suggest it always worked.

    I could add more features to it and those will also work.

    A friend once worked on an application with a huge team. He often pointed out the window at a large costuction site with a comparable number of people working. He made countless jokes about real work, a real system, real organisation etc Then one day the building was finished and their application kept crashing in production.

  • bauerd  1 day ago

    It's part of a constantly evolving ecosystem. It's a stable product because reliability engineers make it so and software engineers get the integrations right.

    • lifeformed  1 day ago

      But a messaging program like Signal is fairly similar in scope, but only has like a couple dozen of devs, compared to Messenger's thousands(?).

      4 replies →

    • aylmao  14 hours ago

      It still doesn't take a team that large.

      When I was at Facebook they decided to re-write Messenger in C. There were people who thought it was a waste of time. There were people who thought it was a great idea. It was a lot of work, took a while, and I wouldn't be suprised if by now it's been re-written to something else.

      It's not that hard to make up work, and there's people whose whole job is pretty much just that.

    • MichaelZuo  1 day ago

      There is no way messenger features or functionality is changing that much year over year.

      It’s almost entirely bloat.

  • overfeed  1 day ago

    > Cause it's developed

    You can napkin-math this. How many different team-sized components do you think go into it? If the code were on GitHub, and all they had to do was just update dependencies below them in the stack, and bump the version number for components above them,how many Dependabot PRs would be opened per week for software that's "done"