No Stupid Questions

I did all of the development for Sync myself. It blows my mind the mobile team is around ~200 people and ~70 on Android.

And yet Apollo was made by one guy and it’s far better than anything they’ve made

If it's anything like my workplace, about 25% of them are doing 75% of the work while the rest do powerpoints and stand around bullshitting all day.

Let's see. Reddit right now has:

• NFT
• real time chat
• image and video hosting (imgur used to handle these). needs manpower to make sure they're not hosting something illegal like cp
• various one-off functionalities (r/place, polls, etc)
• react-based frontend (and the mobile counterpart)
• mobile apps for Android and iOS (seemingly a separate codebase)
• ads/marketing departments that case around big companies to place ads on Reddit
• various virtual goods (gold awards, profile pics customization)
• probably a community team that monitor what's reddit users currently up to, like banning subreddits that breaking TOS or insulting spez.

and perhaps many more I'm not aware about. With those whole sets of "features", 2000 seems to be quite reasonable IMO. The marketing stuff is especially all about numbers.

I’d wager a lot of them are looking for new jobs. Those who aren’t are probably making dumpster s’mores.

Reddit's a huge site with ilots of distributed infrastructure, CDN, storage, synchronization, networking, back end services, custom code, etc. That's probably a few hundred folks right there.

Then there are nontechnical administrative areas like advertising, media, marketing & branding, legal, HR, payroll, financial AR and AP, clerical support. Probably another several hundred or so there as well.

2000 is probably a generous estimate, but I could see it easily being 1500 or more.

They are building Ads products, Avatars, NFT stores, Chat, Talk, RPAN. All the "growth" features that no one uses.

Then when no one uses them, they switch projects to shut them down (Talk, RPAN).

That's every bigger software company. As my first job on a startup(ish) company we were 5 devs working on a desktop application and embedded software. This entailed working all the way up from firmware, to Linux distribution and higher level onboard software. After 8 or so years I went for a bigger company on similar market. They had 4 teams of 6 devs each doing a much worse job than we ever did. There was lots of friction and corporate bullshit. The only thing I felt didn't work out on smaller teams was customer support.

An addendum to the non-devs here:
As anyone who has worked in a large company knows: You can easily get a team like this that spends more than half of its time in meetings:
1 Project Manager
3 Business Analysts for different languages
1 BA for tickets
1 QA Lead
2 QA Tester(Intern)
1 Mockup Designer
1 Front End layout specialist(CSS)
1 Javascript developer
1 Backend developer / Team Lead

But that doesn't factor in that with teams like that you can end up with 1/3 to even 2/3 of those dev teams being devoted to development and management of internal tools used to facilitate the end product, or that the project manager will be at the bottom of their own tree of people that spend almost all of their day in meetings. More if you make your own analysis tools.

Diminishing returns. The more employees you add, the harder they are to manage efficiently and in-sync. You need to add more managers to manage more employees, which adds more layers and fragments the business more.

However, the numbers still don't add up to me. The app shouldn't be worse than 3rd party apps. The platform shouldn't have all these downtime issues. The website shouldn't be an accessibility failure.

The tech industry has been under the spell of cargo cult cheap investment money for the better part of two decades. The most cynical but simple and probable reason they have 2000 employees is because almost every other tech company has about 10x-20x the number of employees they actually need to be sustainable and profitable companies.

TLDR: they're throwing shit at the wall until something sticks

So they're just doing what everyone else is doing. It would look very suspicious to investors if leadership said "You know what, we actually can run this thing with a team of 100 people and make a few tens of millions in profit a year!". That's not what investors want to hear. They want to hear "If we have a 100 person company making a few tens of millions in profit a year, imagine how much revenue we could make if we were ten times bigger. We can easily scale operations!".

Investors want the kind of financial growth that would make cancerous tumour cells envious. And most tech leaders have figured out with cheap money that the best strategy for obtaining this growth is by having smart people throw shit at the wall until something sticks. The more smart people you have throwing shit at the wall, the better your chances at stumbling on a product or service that levels up your company.

If a tech leader were just content with running a sustainable and profitable business at the end of its growth curve, they wouldn't need as many employees. They just need the ones who can keep the core business going because there's nobody working on new venture pet projects.

But investors aren't interested in that because that's like putting their money into a savings account at a bank except with a lot more risk of losing it all. Right now, Reddit's investors are starting to realize that their risky investment with a chance at winning it big is looking a lot more like a dud that will pay out more meagre returns or worse, may not pay out at all. They desperately need an IPO to win it big. It's their last hope.

The investors won't throw any more money at Reddit and are at the stage where they're pressuring the leadership to start cracking the whip. The leadership has now removed any illusion of wanting to make Reddit users happy because we aren't their customers or investors. They need their customers and their investors happy. They don't need Reddit users to be happy. They just need to keep them hooked.

It will be like where I was working. On that project there were ~12 people. You could've cut in in half easily:

• AFAIK the project manager did nothing but create meetings (tbh they had no clue what they were doing)
• The QA was incompetent and instead I wrote all their tests and taught the junior dev so he could too
• 2 User Researchers set up various sessions -- but the business told them all their findings were wrong (turns out the researchers were right)
• Architect went to some meetings and never spoke to the devs about anything (turns out they were responsible for multiple projects at once, which obviously makes things hard)
• The Lead Developer seemed to be on holiday every other day, dealing with some personal issue, or in meetings
• One Dev was fresh out of a scheme (for non comp sci students, so was slow but that's understandable)

I ended up working overtime into burn out to get the project through the door (and hit issues due the architect should've informed us of). It would've honestly been easier as just me, one other developer, and a BA

Don't underestimate the amount of heads needed in ads and marketing

Well, one thing is for sure: They aren't working on the reddit video player.

My take at all that mess would probably be blaming upper management for not trusting anybody, so layers of redundancy piled up to 2000. & on the other hand there are individuals (sometimes one-man stand + community input) creating outstanding apps.

My guess is dev teams implementing doomed pet projects of the c-suite individuals.

Upper management is always the issue. Why put all my talented developers to work on improving user experience when I can implement NFT support instead and keep bloating the app?

I don't know anything about working at reddit, but I've worked at enough software companies to know generally what people do all day

HR - hires employees, deals with insurance and other perks, fires employees, probably communicates with the board or governing body.

Software - there are a few departments here, the most interesting of which is programming new features. Most will never see the light of day, but they're working on them.

• QA - tests new features and bug fixes and patches before they go live.

• IT department for when developers computers do unexpected things.

• Tickets - a team of developers/systems engineers to fix bugs and issues in the production source code. They will typically have 1-10 people on call at all times outside of normal business hours.

• Systems Engineering - they decide how and what systems to implement, upgrade, retire etc. They need to coordinate with developers to plan software/hardware upgrades to make sure they don't mess anything up unexpectedly (but it almost always happens during an upgrade)

• Accounting - Accounts Payable (when you pay money for something, like AWS); Accounts Receivable (when you receive money, like for artificially inflating posts to the front page for money); Finance - should and how much money should be borrowed/invested to run the business; and a ton more depts honestly, any of which without the business would crumble.

• Advertising - Both advertising Reddit in other media, and arranging sponsors to put their ads all over the place.

• Executives - they plan the strategy for each dept listed above. Although this being an internet service, the CIO might be slightly more inflated than a typical company.

And there's probably a lot that I'm forgetting. But really, all this is just to illustrate about one of the most trafficked websites every is "How are they running a business with only 2,000 employees"

Don't underestimate the amount of people needed to work in a website, a website, what the regular user see is just an interface to a system, and beyond that there can be an intricate company behind with technical complexity, finance, hr, sales, customer care and many other departments.

I work in tech and people that had no knowledge at all of my industry assume it takes 1 or 2 people to run a website and get amazed 1000+ people may be necessary to run the entire company.