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Software engineer here, of the kind who works for companies similar to Reddit.
I don’t know more than anyone else about their financials, and I can surely believe that Reddit has been wasteful in a lot of ways in the past financial climates, since they didn’t have to optimize for profitability. But I can tell this firsthand: people tend to drastically under-estimate how much constant innovation is required to get past bottleneck after bottleneck just to keep the lights on, on very high-scale services.
Reddit’s scale is humongous, so I can see how it would require hundreds of employees just to keep it up and going.
This might be a stupid question, but how much waste (if any) is there typically in corporations like this? Useless HR cruft and the like.
Definitely not a stupid question, it’s a big topic, and there are people whose entire job is dedicated to removing that cruft as much as possible.
At a micro level, for instance if you only look at the people I directly know and work with, there’s actually little cruft at all. We sometimes get stupid wasteful mandates from execs, and they waste a bit of everybody’s time, but it’s rare, and typically very small amounts of time. Other than that, I can tell you what every single person is useful for, and I can’t think of a single person who isn’t pulling their weight.
But at a macro level is the hard part, and I don’t think anyone can really know. An organization can’t scale if it doesn’t get seriously decentralized. As a worker, you need to make bold decisions for yourself and the teams around you, without having to know what the hundreds of other teams are up to. That means I can’t tell you for sure that there isn’t another team far from mine (for instance, from an acquisition or something), who is doing 95% the same thing my team does, but that we don’t know about.
Execs are constantly trying to identify those possible collaborations and introduce relevant teams with each other, but even they can’t know what everybody is doing.
I worked at Apple for a while, and since it’s a very secretive company, they had a very odd way of embracing it completely, which I’ve never seen elsewhere. I worked part-time 3 months on a project, before finding out that a team under the same VP had already solved the problem years ago. I whined about how inefficient it is to my director and he basically told me that unlike other companies, at Apple it’s by design. Basically, they’d rather have duplicate efforts, in order to maintain the project secrecy for the goal of “surprising and delighting” customers, and also in order to find always new and innovative ways to solve problems if the new solution turns out to be better. (Mine definitely was not. 😂) Apple really has an unusual innovation culture in general, I liked some of it, but definitely not that part.
This is probably the best summary for how tech business works
Thank you!