Technology

proprietary encryption algorithm

Oh God why would you do this.

Just use signal ffs.

It's not even about the quality of individual people. The organizational structure of large companies encourages pointless work.

Internal mobility and cross department collaboration are frowned upon. So you get many people doing duplicate work, new ideas don't propagate, and even if someone has an idea it's quickly shut down.

The only way to achieve anything substantial is to be both: 1. assertive and energetic, and 2. at the correct level of hierarchy. And make no mistake even if you pull a miracle there will be no reward. Maybe a 3% raise at the yearly review.

Sorry for the rant, I currently work in a company like this.

30? Sometimes very less, 2 or 3. It's incredible that some piece of software used by milions/billions of people, have been written and sometimes maintained by 2 or 3 guys.

Even if every employee was equally competent, decision making needs to be consolidated enough that it can be decisive and shared throughout large companies. Complex systems that need to change rapidly gain no benefit from having too many people wanting to make decisions, you only need most of them to be competent enough to complete the work based on the decisions of a small group or the work will end up getting too convoluted and unmaintainable.

There really isn't a benefit to have everyone understand all of the parts of a large and complex system, if they only have time to work on a portion or to facilitate decisions that take into account the knowledge of the people in the different parts.

I see this parroted now and then. Often the people I've heard it from are the type of folks who would drastically underestimate the complexity and effort needed to make things. I've also seen and worked on codebases made by such folks and usually it ain't pretty, or maintainable, or extensible, or secure, or [insert fav cut corners here].

that wasn't a very good movie, specially matrix 5

As a furry, real

Furries are the ones that have escaped the matrix via their fursona

And lawyers are pretty likely not staff at all.

I can understand if someone like Google or Microsoft employs lawyers directly, as they have the resources and scale to do so. But someone like Telegram should really not do that. They should use an external legal office when needed. Even keep them on retainer, but definitely not open a legal office inside the company.

30 engineers. You lose half that to people managing the infrastructure alone. That leaves 15 code monkeys. Of 2 are dedicated to deployment and 3 to setting up unit tests (that's not many btw) you are left with 10 people. If say for a global platform that's not many at all.

30 engineers is startup-sized. 30 engineers to deal with the needs of a sensitive software being used by millions worldwide, and is a huge target for cyberattacks? That's way below the threshold needed.

What if its not e2e encrypted if they dont care. I know a bunch of chatrooms where you can watch paid movies that was released recently for free and Telegram dont care

Yes, e2e encryption in Telegram only works in secret chats.

The regular chats are encrypted though, just with an (encrypted) server in the middle. Telegram also claims in their FAQ, that no one singular person has the power to decrypt and the keys are stored such that no singular government could force them to give up any data.

How far that is true is a different question though.

Experts say that is not possible.

Headline is terrible

They do explain though that given how below average their headcount is, it means they're likely understaffed, overworked, and have zero capacity to respond to intrusion attempts.