Pavel Durov

And that's why we have always been very

careful when hiring people.

I would only hire a person if I'm ultimately certain it's the best option.

If you hire somebody who is maybe a little bit distracted, unexperienced,

you may end up with inefficiencies in your code base that results in tens of millions of dollars of losses.

And think about the responsibility.

If we jump to today from the VK days, Telegram is used by over a billion people.

They open it dozens of times every day.

Imagine the app opens with a slight delay, say, half a second delay, multiplied by dozens of times by a billion.

It's centuries, millennia lost for humanity without any reason.

other than just being sloppy.

Oh yes, because when you...

manage to discover a way to simplify things, make them more efficient, you feel incredibly happy and proud and accomplished.

And to your point, I can recall a few instances in my career where firing an engineer actually resulted to an increase in productivity.

Say you have 200 engineers building their app and then

they just can't make it.

They're not keeping up with the pace of the feature release schedule.

And you think, I probably have to hire a third one.

But then you notice that one of them is really weird, falling behind the schedule, complaining some of the time, doesn't assume responsibility.

And you ask, so what if I just fire this person?