I hear this a lot. I get that it is helpful. But I know people run large projects without it in Elixir and seem to do fine. Discord and remote.com seem likely to be fairly massive. Last I spoke to Remote they did 70 releases a day and no type static typing.
I know from Elm that it does change how things feel. I could see an upside. But coming from a dynamic life I can't quite grok considering it a requirement.
It really depends on your definition of your massive. Discord seems to have a few hundreds to a thousand employees in total. I am from a typical tech company. So I could estimate that their total engineers count is probably just a couple of hundreds, which is about our director/senior director's team size.
In our definition of massive, we could have even hundreds of ppl to touch the same portion of the code base frequently. We regularly have to deal with code which are about 10 years old and it's a moving target. You have to deliver quickly with migration requirement in mind. Also we frequently collaborate with the other teams and you have to be able to understand others' code quickly.
Typing is critical as you don't have time to deal with the constant stream of the new projects to dig deeper in to the objects. And you really want to have some understanding of the code in the first glance. We also want to offload lots of the things to compiler and ide as much as possible.
It doesn't have to be full on static typing like Java, type annotation in python/ruby already helped a lot
> massive as in the top 10% of tech companies in the entire globe
But are you talking about the size or the impact of the project? I am in the fintech space and the complexity and cruft is just incredible thick. We just needs so many ppl to do the dirty work. There is no way for you to shrink the code base fundamentally
> quote: WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers [1]
Again, are we talking about the size or the impact? Are you saying all the projects for in faang can be handled like this? Meta currently have about 70k engineers. What do you think that all those people are doing?
> What do you think that all those people are doing?
justifying the salary of middle managers.
at my current job the number of employees has increased 30x in just 5 years.
there's no important single task we couldn't do when we were 1/30th of now, 2.5x would have been the perfect number to make all of us work no more than 3 days/week, now we are just working on more tasks that are basically DOA or scratch the itches of higher ups who want their name on something when they meet with other higher ups but are useless. Moreover, more often than not, they are a minor variation of something that already existed for a long time, works better, serves a real business purpose and it's written in legacy languages because it just works (I'm sure many of us have attended the and now with AI! BS meeting).
We also know Facebook's 70k employees are there so that many of them won't end up working somewhere else and help the competition (see the Silicon Valley No-poaching Case).
I'm an advocate for not burning up your employees and hire more than you need so everyone can relax, I'm a union representative (on of the) in the company I work for (yes, my country is highly unionized and thanks god it is) so I deeply support the needs of the workers against the absurd demands of the companies, but at some point too many people becomes a burden and severely hinders communication, it basically creates a layers of bureaucracy that resembles much more politics than the job you were hired for, ending up stressing people more, creating harmful frictions, complicated workflows, absurd chains of indirection and countless authorization requests that in the end reduce everyone's output, regardless of the commitment of the single employee.
Also, larger companies get a lot more slack taxation wise and receives a lot more cuts from the government, because unemployment makes us look bad.
That's just ridiculous if you think this applies to all projects. We have incredible amount legal, tax, sanction etc in the code. Have you seen how complex real world financial and legal system can be, do you know how much work to translate those into code? And keeps updating it?
And to just to interface with other financial system worldwide, we have to keep the old system in place, at same time upgrade as the industry move forward. It's a also a big challenge. Despite the above and we had to ship fast, we are actually still SHORT on people. Our engineer to manager ratio is also high. The world is a complex place, sometimes you just have to deal with it.
Again, why do you think 50 man team applies to all projects? What is it so hard to believe that some complexity cannot be reduced?
> We also know Facebook's 70k employees are there so that many of them won't end up working somewhere else and help the competition
You get this from the TV show. Have you actually worked in the companies at Meta caliber? Do you really think most faang employees just do nothing everyday?
> Have you actually worked in the companies at Meta caliber
you're taking it personally.
I work for a > 30k employees company, not based in the US.
All I'm saying is companies optimize for what's better for them, so at some point you'll have on payroll thousands of people you don't need for your core business because they solve a lot of non-core functions. such as dealing with authorities or devise a strategy to reduce the pool of talents competition can pick from. HR, accounting and legal departments will also increase in size a lot consequentially. so their massive size doesn't says much about the complexity of the tech problem they are solving.
the fact that Discord runs on Elixir at that scale is remarkable, regardless of how many people work at Discord.
