Telegram's founder Pavel Durov says his company only employs around 30 engineers. Security experts say that raises serious questions about the company's cybersecurity.
There are good reasons to dislike Telegram, but having “just” 30 engineers is not one of them. Software development is not a chair factory, more people does not equal more or better quality work as much as 9 women won’t give birth to a baby in a month.
Edit:
Galperin told TechCrunch. “‘Thirty engineers’ means that there is no one to fight legal requests, there is no infrastructure for dealing with abuse and content moderation issues.”
I don’t think fighting legal requests and content moderation is an engineer’s job. However, the article can’t seem to get it straight whether it’s 30 engineers, or 30 staff overall. In the latter case, the context changes dramatically and I don’t have the knowledge to tell if 30 staff is enough to deal with legal issues. I would imagine that Telegram would need a small army of lawyers and content moderators for that. Again, not engineers, though.
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.
This sounds like the devs are personally, sword and shield in hand, defending the application from attacks, instead of just writing software which adheres to modern security practices, listening to the Security Officer and occasionally doing an audit.
They’re not just writing the software, they’re responsible for the infrastructure it’s running on. And keeping that running and secure IS a full time job.
Right now, you sound exactly like one of those C level execs who looks at IT and asks “We haven’t had an issue in years, what do we need to pay them for?”
Even if you have a full-time role for continuously auditing the infrastructure (which I would say is the responsibility of either a security officer or a devops engineer), you still didn’t show how that needs a 15-person team, and an otherwise-untouched infrastructure should just keep on working (barring sabotage), unless someone really messed something up.
If CI builds or deployments keep randomly failing at your place, that’s not an inescapable reality, that’s just a symptom of bad software development practices.
There are good reasons to dislike Telegram, but having “just” 30 engineers is not one of them. Software development is not a chair factory, more people does not equal more or better quality work as much as 9 women won’t give birth to a baby in a month.
Edit:
I don’t think fighting legal requests and content moderation is an engineer’s job. However, the article can’t seem to get it straight whether it’s 30 engineers, or 30 staff overall. In the latter case, the context changes dramatically and I don’t have the knowledge to tell if 30 staff is enough to deal with legal issues. I would imagine that Telegram would need a small army of lawyers and content moderators for that. Again, not engineers, though.
I checked, Telegram has 1342 employees.
Interesting! Out of curiosity, what is the source? Is there a breakdown per role?
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.
15 engineers for managing infrastructure?? Are they setting up servers by hand?
I would not want you as my boss, that’s for sure.
Try covering a 24/7 global service window. I’d think this is on the low end.
And you als need full infra stack knowledge: Server, database, Network, connectivity.
And probably some of these schmucks will get stuck managing the corporate environment too.
This comment smells of outdated software development practices.
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.
This sounds like the devs are personally, sword and shield in hand, defending the application from attacks, instead of just writing software which adheres to modern security practices, listening to the Security Officer and occasionally doing an audit.
They’re not just writing the software, they’re responsible for the infrastructure it’s running on. And keeping that running and secure IS a full time job.
Right now, you sound exactly like one of those C level execs who looks at IT and asks “We haven’t had an issue in years, what do we need to pay them for?”
Even if you have a full-time role for continuously auditing the infrastructure (which I would say is the responsibility of either a security officer or a devops engineer), you still didn’t show how that needs a 15-person team, and an otherwise-untouched infrastructure should just keep on working (barring sabotage), unless someone really messed something up.
If CI builds or deployments keep randomly failing at your place, that’s not an inescapable reality, that’s just a symptom of bad software development practices.