I believe it. I've never worked at Google, but I was the engineer for SMS/Voice registration at WhatsApp, ocassionally with one other engineer (I believe the team was 3 when I left, not sure if it grew); I think there were two engineers doing my job for Facebook; although they had a little bit more scope, since there were more kinds of SMS they sent. That doesn't have a huge request rate, but it is super important.
Something like DNS or BGP is going to have a tiny team and a huge impact. Load balancers probably has a bigger team, maybe 10-20 engineers, and almost everything goes through load balancers. And that's just the things that are easy to enumerate. I can think of lots of small teams when I was at Yahoo that worked on bits of software that are hard to explain, but were critical.
Exactly, there’s really like three dozen or so people globally who really should never be in the same room at the same time as the risk is too great they get hit by the same asteroid.
I’d put “person who makes sure WhatsApp verification codes work” on that list.
> I’d put “person who makes sure WhatsApp verification codes work” on that list.
Thanks! That part of my job really wasn't too hard though, once I got things in order; but it was the easiest part of my job to describe. Just a lot of debugging from sparse data, and trying to get things to work a smidge better, because smidges here and there add up. It really helped to have a great customer service team that bubbled up usable information from users.
Debugging things from sparse data gets you involved in a lot of different systems though... That and I told people I worked at an ISP in the before times, so guess who got to fight with sendmail, and guess who got to own our Domain accounts and DNS accounts and guess who got to get x.509 certificates, and who had to fight with Google Apps to make mandatory 2fa usable, etc. Basically everything without a person and server adjacent got me. :P
Anyway, I've moved on (replaced by a team of three on the SMS stuff amyway, much better bus factor) and am semi-retired and no longer in any critical path, which is a lot less stress.
Something like DNS or BGP is going to have a tiny team and a huge impact. Load balancers probably has a bigger team, maybe 10-20 engineers, and almost everything goes through load balancers. And that's just the things that are easy to enumerate. I can think of lots of small teams when I was at Yahoo that worked on bits of software that are hard to explain, but were critical.