I don't mean any disrespect to people at those companies and just took examples I looked up, I just can't understand what all are doing. I see this with others too, like WeWork and Uber. Companies that are more or less one platform, employ a lot of people doing things that is not clear for the average user. What is the % of people doing what? Like how many server admins, frontend devs or customer support persons are there ? EDIT: So I do NOT mean "uhhhh I could do that so easy". I was just interested in what and how many people are doing what, and for example how much is mobile optimization work vs normal desktop site and how much is spent on AB testing, is there a team for that and so on.
How about backend?
Yes, that what I was wondering about. What are the ratios of backend vs frontend and designers and how much of the product do they work on etc
It takes like 50 people to change fonts lol, just because the change might create marginal differences in UX.... profit(?)
Especially at places where there is very little marginal costs associated with that revenue, can be quite a boost!
Let's say you are right, don't people complain about such small things? Like why it's necessary or so
Anyone can build a replica of Facebook using a handful of employees. But do you know what kind of effort it's needed to scale to billions of users ?
It doesn't take 40,000 employees to scale a website to billions of users. The question is what are those people doing percentage wise? New features? Old features? Advertising? Marketing? Sales? Support? Acquired companies?
Ok then put a number . How much should it be? I'm sure Zuckerberg would be glad to hire you as his COO
Obligatory: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
I never said it sounded easy or hard though, was just curious since people here rarely write about what they do other than how much they earn or some level
I was asked this a lot by my friends - why Facebook needs so many engineers to build one web site lol
It’s because ur friends are naive or because Facebook is creating many duplicate efforts
Duplicate effort says Google? How come Google keeps launching messaging apps & still don't succeed? Do you guys compete among yourself to launch a messaging app or G is unaware of other teams also making the app? And GCP is another duplication master-piece, you guys have multiple APIs to use one service, I scratched my head figuring out how can I solve GCP problem using just one of the correct library 😕
Have you ever actually used Twitter?
Yes since 10 years, currently it's not possible to follow a link there without refreshing the page because "something went wrong"
Not sure that’s Twitter issue but they got lots of features man.
I get this all the time. I’ve come across peeps who thought Snapchat was just an app and were shocked we had 1k+ engineers.
yes I would be too, I could imagine there is an android, ios and web team. then backend and UX and marketing, and some hardware and filter/image software stuff. Maybe max 20-50 in each. That's say 350. I couldn't guess what the rest are doing
OP this just means you are a new grad. Don’t worry you will learn the ropes soon and slowly understand how any and every company always has more employees than you originally thought they needed.
I'll give an incomplete rundown from areas I know IT: can be half dozen or much much larger maintaining the physical computer infrastructure etc Finance: easily dozen or more planning forecasting budgets etc Marketing: dozen or more branding the product company etc HR: includes recruiting, immigration, all other people initiatives can be dozens Sales: can be huge 100's selling product to enterprises or small clients Engineer: many many different things but certainly both the development and maintenance of the products if tech co Legal, Accounting, Ops, Analytics, M&A, Corp Dev etc etc . It all adds up
It’s hard to explain but here’s one way to get an idea. Go to AirBnB and Twitter. Count the number of features that you see (likes, comments, photos etc.) Multiply that number by 5. That gives you an idea for how many people are working on user-facing features (teams of 5). If they have mobile apps, multiply the total by 3 (web, iOS, Android). Then multiply the total by 4, which will include backend/infra, analytics, ops, and other products that you don’t see like advertising, recommendations, user engagement (email, SMS). That covers most of engineering. Then multiply the total by 2. That covers non-tech folks like marketing, HR, accounting, legal, recruiting, etc. And that is just the people at HQ. This will give you a barebones organization required to support a product like AirBnB at scale. Beyond that it starts to depend on the business. Twitter will have moderators, AirBnB will have local agents, etc.
Why 5 people working on likes though? What is the challenge in such feature?
It’s a proxy for quickly coming up with an estimate of how many engineers are required. For every feature that you see there are three others that you don’t. That said, “likes” are not as easy as you make it sound. Think about likes on Facebook Live. There are animations for all of those. Everytime someone likes a stream, a stupid little icon pops up and floats across your screen, and the screens of all the people watching the same stream. App notifications are sent to all the people who commented on the post. There’s a whole real-time event processing framework behind that. Your client also needs to maintain a persistent connection to receive that notification in real time. Everything needs to be persisted on the backend. When someone replays the stream, all those likes need to be replayed at the exact time they were committed to the database as well. The events also need to get pushed to the data lake, so the ML teams can recalculate recommendations for what else you might like. And then when you unlike the stream, all that stuff needs to be reversed. Add in the terms “real time” and “at scale” to any feature and shit blows up real quick.
Have you ever worked for a tech company? If yes, not sure how you don’t realize there’s always more work than people.
Could you elaborate please? I have never worked at tech company
Yes, that's what I was curious about. What are the more work parts at say AirBnb other than listing and marketing and handling traffic and complaints