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Do you also have a source showing that the number of engineers required scales linearly with number of users?



It in fact scales exponentially.

Internal sources only, but topics like regionalization, localization, bespoke caching implementations, hardware-level optimizations, content moderation, policy adherence (e.g. GDPR, CCPA), long-term monetization (especially if supporting advertisers as a direct customer), 3P support, public APIs, documentation, SRE (a fledgling product doesn't need 5 9s), analytics (internal and for advertisers and 3P partners) and for the most part, security, are non-exhaustive examples of things you can mostly ignore when your product supports 10M users that are unavoidable when your product supports half of the US, a good chunk of the rest of the world, and other large businesses that consume you at large business scale.


You listed a bunch of requirements without an argument that fulfilling those requirements actually entails an exponential growth in employees.




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