TechTalk 💻 #Telegram #LeanTeam
Have you ever wondered how Telegram manages to operate with less than 100 engineers and no HR department while serving a whopping 900 million users? 🤯 Let’s dive into this fascinating topic and see what we can learn from their approach!
According to Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, their team operates like a "Navy SEAL team" – super efficient and compact. But how do they pull it off? Here are a few possible reasons:
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Clear Communication: With a small team, communication is key. Telegram likely has streamlined communication channels, reducing the need for a separate HR department.
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Focus on Automation: Leveraging technology and automation tools can help streamline processes and reduce the need for manual intervention.
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Remote Work Culture: Embracing a remote work culture can attract top talent globally and eliminate the need for a physical HR department.
- Innovative Hiring Practices: Perhaps Telegram has unique hiring practices that allow them to quickly identify and onboard top talent without the need for a traditional HR department.
What do you think is the secret sauce behind Telegram’s success with such a lean team structure? Share your thoughts and insights below! 🚀
Let’s put geopolitics aside for a moment (because no doubt this post may derail into that).
They survived because they built something the world truly needed.
Their target was never to become a public company and in turn didn’t hire mindlessly.
They probably recruited engineers solely from recommendations, which in turn leads to quality hiring.
For a lot, I think this is a dream job. The arch-nemesis of “empire building”
I dream of working on a team where everyone pulls their own weight.
If you have that you’d be surprised how much can be accomplished.
It’s also the best messaging app. Didn’t use it much until I moved abroad. Not sure how it isn’t insanely popular in the US
its because making an app that sends messages is trivial af in 2024. same reason why twitter could get rid of so many people and be ok
Because HR is useless
First I’ve heard of Telegram, but I’ll take a crack at it.
Telegram, at the end of the day, is a messaging system. This is technology that the internet was invented for. IRC has existed since 1988. Yes, you need to scale for billions of tiny messages/pieces of work, but they’re all individually small pieces of work. I don’t want to downplay how difficult it is to process billions of messages in a timely manner but Telegram has 30 engineers over 10 years to solve this problem.
And they’re very specialized. They had 10 years and 30 engineers to solve this one problem. They do one thing and do it well. They’re not splitting their efforts by starting up a self-driving car wing of their company. All of their eggs are in this one basket. All of their employees can be focused on their singular product.
Lastly, they dodge laws.
> After Pavel left Russia in 2014, he was said to be moving from country to country with a small group of computer programmers consisting of 15 core members. While a former employee of VK claimed that Telegram had employees in Saint Petersburg, Pavel said the Telegram team made Berlin, Germany, its headquarters in 2014, but failed to obtain German residence permits for everyone on the team and moved to other jurisdictions in early 2015. Since 2017, the company has been based in Dubai. It has a complex corporate structure of shell companies to delay complying with government subpoenas.
If you don’t have to comply with governmental laws and regulators, then you don’t need the staff and complexity of complying with those laws. They don’t have to comply with GDPR and all of the complexity involved with that. They don’t have to comply with judges subpoenaing data and fighting in court to ensure that only relevant data is released. They don’t have to deal with laws about child pornography which is distributed on their systems. Or deal with terrorist groups that use their messaging system.
It’s not necessarily meaningful to compare the entire staff of one company to the engineering staff of another.
H.R. is textbook definition of “Bullshit job.”
Just guessing here but I assume they use AWS or Azure. A lot of the heavy lifting can be done with Paas services.
Tbf Durov had years of experience operating Vkontakte, the most popular social media site in Russia, and his brother is like a genius level smart programmer who is also a co-founder of Telegram. I doubt they would have any problem finding good talent and sounds like the two make a great team with one of them handling the technical side of things and the other the business.
i think they need to hire some scrum masters
While it sounds like paradise, I can also imagine those devs working 100h weeks.
*public software companies, every private software company is run similarly to telegram assuming it doesnt have a lot of venture.
Because we’re used to massive bloat in tech at this time, on all levels. If you need to you can do a lot with less, this has been proven many times. Once the company starts to bloat, it’s the beginning of the end.