Besides programmers there is probably a small army of sys admins to handle their data centers in additional to daily operational IT, business development folks working with partners, the entire ad/sales platform, lawyers and accountants. Plus all of the facility staff for that crazy office (kitchen staff, janitorial, gardeners, etc).
I agree though. That is a lot of people and it's hard to wrap my brain around that since I work at a very small software company of less than 10 people.
Sounds like a lot, but apparently they have 738k employees, up from 275k a decade ago, which seems just wild to me. (I don't have a clear idea of what they even do. IT consulting firm?)
How do they have sooo many employees. They are running a few websites and a bunch of apps. I can understand how they would need a hundred people for that. They have a massive userbase. So I can understand how they would need a thousand people just to deal with tech at scale and support.
But how do you manage to have so many people that you can fire 10k ?! If I googled well, they appear to have 72k employees. Where did you find the management that thought having 72k employees is reasonable to operate a bunch of websites and apps ?!
They're (relatively speaking) tiny. About 12,000 employees. That's in the ballpark of 10% the size of Microsoft and Alphabet, 20% the size of Facebook. That's about the same number of employees as you'll find at a lot of tech companies you'd consider medium-sized at most.
IMHO 100 people isn't a big company at all... two dozen programmers can still comfortably fit in a room and know eachother. My current company has 200k employees, we spend a large amount of time just looking for whoever is responsible for something...
Given this, I think it's rather impressive that they only have 71 employees (imgur is impressive too).
In that context, I agree it's impressive. I still don't understand why would one need so many people considering there's next to none (except AMA, and that's gone) interaction with users on site. Code definitely doesn't need that many people (I know this firsthand, because it took me ~two months (less) to make a complete clone from scratch with all of the functionality of reddit for internal use and I'm not much of a coder anymore). Devops might be hairy, I admit that - but even with shifts and redundancy... I've seen sites with much more monetization in ads run on 10 sales people or less. So genuine question is still here, what do these people actually do?
I understand facebook is all over the place and is a lot more than meets the eye on their site, so I can understand their headcount. I can see that with youtube as well, especially if they curate some of the content. Reddit is, well, reddit - next to no interaction with userbase, third party ios app they bought (or something), no android app, codebase already built and not all that hard to build anyways, they did build reddit gold (how much of an effort is that anyways)... and we're left with devops. I'm sure most of those 71 people aren't even technical to begin with and they struggle with ads. I genuinely do not understand need for that many people on board considering the impression of what they do.
According to LinkedIn, Shazam has around 400 employees! [1] Why does an app like that need that many employees? What do they do all day?
Or some other tech companies: MongoDB had 820 employees as of July 31st [2]. StitchFix had 5,800 employees as of July 31st [3]. Facebook had 17,048 employees as of December, 2016 [4]. Oracle has 136,000 employees [5]!
And many other tech companies are like that. For many of them (although of course not all), their product could be built by a small team in a matter of months. Even counting for things like scaling to larger user counts, having 10 or 100 times the number of employees hardly makes sense to me.
Meanwhile, SpaceX, which is making rockets to send people to Mars, has only around 5,500 employees [6]. It's hard to see that rocket engineering is simpler than a clothing app.
So what are all of those employees working on all day?
That bit surprised me also. I don't have much experience with companies of this size so I have no real idea; how many people would you expect to work on source control at a company of this size? I had a look at Linkedin, they have 4,345 employees.
Yea, if true, that 230 figure is shocking. I wouldn’t have thought they’d have more than 25% of that. What on earth are all these employees doing?
I worked at an avionics manufacturer that had a dozen or so products (things like physical displays and map systems that go into airplanes) that had less than 10 full time engineers. A few software devs, a few EE’s and an industrial engineer who did the chassis. Sure it’s not an apples to apples comparison but wow. Does it really take that many people to maintain an already-working web site? Isn’t the promise of “cloud” that your staff can scale far slower than your user base?
Craigslist has what, 50 people? Better comparison. Even that seems to be a lot.
Me too. I was very confused when I heard that number. I was thinking maybe 200 people if they have multiple dev teams and a corporate marketing/sales side for advertising.
My employer has slightly fewer people, but we have dozens of clients with sites/apps far more complex than reddit. It just doesn't make sense.
It's almost certain that only a small fraction are actually technical people, because you don't need many tech people to keep such a site actually running.
But you do need people doing:
* Marketing/sales/advertising
* Finance/accounting
* Customer service
* Public relations
* Compliance
* etc., etc.
You also need at least some management to keep things running. And, at that size, human resources. And probably facilities/B&G people. And... well, let's just say I'm not surprised that there'd be 750 people.
I don't think it scales linearly anywhere. A significant part of the workforce is just there to provide services to the workforce itself. You have full-time engineers just maintaining tools for performance management, or for booking conference rooms, or requesting new laptops, you have legal teams for basically every country you operate in, etc. And then once these bureaucracies grow large enough, you hire people whose job is just to help others navigate the internal processes...
I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.
Knowing a few people there work there... They have teams that work with specific customers to customize their product. I'm guessing a large client like Google could have a team of 100+ folks alone working on that client (across sales, tech, support).
The other thing is that they do stuff outside of just signing documents. They are a software company. They work in the enterprise space too. That ends up pulling in a ton of people to support those large clients.
Could they cut a lot of folks? Sure. But just about every large company could.
It didn't look like a 2000 person company when I went to their office. They do a lot of random platform integrations / clients & testing themselves, which probably increases the engineering team size a bit.
I am glad I'm not the only person who has had this thought, and I think it every time I see how many people some of these random tech companies employ. Those are the kinds of employee numbers I would expect from a much larger company than Twilio.
For reference, in the past I worked for an immensely profitable eCommerce business and I don't think our entire engineering department ever reached more than 40 people at its absolute largest.
I know all those employees aren't engineers, and I've been around long enough to know that what we see from the outside is just the tip of the iceberg. But if we assume even 25% of them are engineers directly working on the product, that is still nearly 2,000 people. That must be a huge iceberg.
So what on Earth are all those people doing? I am not being sarcastic or obtuse, I am genuinely curious because the only organization that I have ever worked for that was that size or larger was the US government. Is it administrative/managerial bloat? Are there a bunch of different pivot projects going on? What does Twilio have going on that needs nearly 8,000 employees?
I will totally fulfill that HN clichee of people in disbelief that any tech company has employees... But: TIL they have 250 of them. It's a fully automated site, huh.
Besides programmers there is probably a small army of sys admins to handle their data centers in additional to daily operational IT, business development folks working with partners, the entire ad/sales platform, lawyers and accountants. Plus all of the facility staff for that crazy office (kitchen staff, janitorial, gardeners, etc).
I agree though. That is a lot of people and it's hard to wrap my brain around that since I work at a very small software company of less than 10 people.
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