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I agree with a lot of the discussion here around what 150 employees are/were actually doing. I also wonder – as some other commenters have mentioned – what Face

I agree with a lot of the discussion here around what 150 employees are/were actually doing. I also wonder – as some other commenters have mentioned – what Facebook/Twitter/Google do with their many thousand employees. However, the more I reflect on it the less I feel this is isolated to tech. What on Earth do 55,000[1] employees find to do at Morgen Stanley for example, or 200,000[2] employees at Ford? I see two possible options: 1. This is just a limit of human perception. Companies do so much stuff it is hard for us to conceptualise. 2. Some combination of bullshit jobs & making work for ourselves. I find the former believable simply because there are a hell of a lot of humans and 90% ish have a job. The latter quickly leads to me to wonder: do we as a society bias towards job creation regardless of its function. I therefore suspect both are the case, at least to some extent. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Stanley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Stanley [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Company

ascorbic 10y ago
It's mostly 1 in your examples. Morgan Stanley and Google do lots of different things, which requires lots of different people. Ford does lots of labour intensive stuff with a heavily unionised workforce. Facebook and Twitter do more than you'd think, but more importantly do it at massive scale. Medium, however, has one relatively simple website, at a scale nothing like Facebook/Twitter/Google. I struggle to imagine what they all did.
- bluedino 10y ago
  >> at a scale nothing like Facebook/Twitter/Google Medium - 150 Google - 55,000 Facebook - 15,000 Twitter - 4,000
- k__ 10y ago
  I don't know about Twitter. I don't have the feeling they are moving very fast. They could probably still do good with 1000 people.
hawski 10y ago
Ford has about 65 factories. Assembly plant in Chicago employs about 4500 people. If factory has to work 24h/day you have to have 3 shifts and probably something extra for the weekend and holidays. For me 200k employed at Ford seem reasonable.
- bluedino 10y ago
  >> For me 200k employed at Ford seem reasonable. On top of this think of how much work they have contractors doing that don't count towards the 200k
  - fuzzfactor 10y ago
    The fundamental difference with Ford. Even though most of the Ford employees are not devoting their full effort toward physically adding value to natural-resource-derived materials, some of them are, that's where the wealth is generated and the reason money comes in. At a company with none of these type employees generating the profits, wealth originates from markets, not materials themselves. Ford may appear to be a bureaucracy (because it is), but it is not a pure bureaucracy. The non-material companies CAN be operated as pure bureaucracies, and the more pure, the greater degree that success comes from streamlined and efficient bureaucratic processes. Companies like Ford might also need to have as streamlined and efficient bureaucratic processes as possible (simply because many types of bureaucracy can often be a dead weight). For that reason, either type of company might also profit most when the smallest amount of bureaucracy actually is imposed on the fraction of employees who are devoting their full effort toward adding value, whether it is through materials processing, data processing, etc. Even though facebook and Google might be making a profit on every piece of hardware they are involved in, that is not where significant amounts of their money comes from. They are huge but it didn't come from them creating wealth from scratch. Market-dependence of course applies to either type of employment organization, but there are extremely different weightings between capital markets, materials markets, and sales markets between such diverse industries, depending on where the money is coming from at the time. Ford & Morgan, Stanley also are large and successful companies that were founded before most anybody living was ever born. Which is also huge, but everybody knows that. There could still never have been companies like Morgan, Stanley until after companies like Ford were developing a need or desire for these service providers to exist. Wealth is always traceable back to natural resources, whether renewable or not.
on_and_off 10y ago
I watched a talk from jon blow [1] where he mocks twitter & facebook for their huge number of employees. I too think that Facebook in particular seems to employ a lot of mobile engineer for a meh result. However, he also mocks the complexity of displaying a feed. This is not trivial at all on mobile, at least if you want to : - display a highly customized feed of basically unlimited size where each item is slightly different - keep it running fast, even on low end devices It is a problem faced by all the major apps and there are a number of techniques you can use in order to improve performances but those are hard trade-off that are difficult to get right. Making such a feed work can keep a lot of engineers occupied. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA

ascorbic 10y ago

It's mostly 1 in your examples. Morgan Stanley and Google do lots of different things, which requires lots of different people. Ford does lots of labour intensive stuff with a heavily unionised workforce. Facebook and Twitter do more than you'd think, but more importantly do it at massive scale. Medium, however, has one relatively simple website, at a scale nothing like Facebook/Twitter/Google. I struggle to imagine what they all did.

bluedino 10y ago
>> at a scale nothing like Facebook/Twitter/Google Medium - 150 Google - 55,000 Facebook - 15,000 Twitter - 4,000
k__ 10y ago
I don't know about Twitter. I don't have the feeling they are moving very fast. They could probably still do good with 1000 people.

hawski 10y ago

Ford has about 65 factories. Assembly plant in Chicago employs about 4500 people. If factory has to work 24h/day you have to have 3 shifts and probably something extra for the weekend and holidays. For me 200k employed at Ford seem reasonable.

bluedino 10y ago
>> For me 200k employed at Ford seem reasonable. On top of this think of how much work they have contractors doing that don't count towards the 200k
- fuzzfactor 10y ago
  The fundamental difference with Ford. Even though most of the Ford employees are not devoting their full effort toward physically adding value to natural-resource-derived materials, some of them are, that's where the wealth is generated and the reason money comes in. At a company with none of these type employees generating the profits, wealth originates from markets, not materials themselves. Ford may appear to be a bureaucracy (because it is), but it is not a pure bureaucracy. The non-material companies CAN be operated as pure bureaucracies, and the more pure, the greater degree that success comes from streamlined and efficient bureaucratic processes. Companies like Ford might also need to have as streamlined and efficient bureaucratic processes as possible (simply because many types of bureaucracy can often be a dead weight). For that reason, either type of company might also profit most when the smallest amount of bureaucracy actually is imposed on the fraction of employees who are devoting their full effort toward adding value, whether it is through materials processing, data processing, etc. Even though facebook and Google might be making a profit on every piece of hardware they are involved in, that is not where significant amounts of their money comes from. They are huge but it didn't come from them creating wealth from scratch. Market-dependence of course applies to either type of employment organization, but there are extremely different weightings between capital markets, materials markets, and sales markets between such diverse industries, depending on where the money is coming from at the time. Ford & Morgan, Stanley also are large and successful companies that were founded before most anybody living was ever born. Which is also huge, but everybody knows that. There could still never have been companies like Morgan, Stanley until after companies like Ford were developing a need or desire for these service providers to exist. Wealth is always traceable back to natural resources, whether renewable or not.

on_and_off 10y ago

I watched a talk from jon blow [1] where he mocks twitter & facebook for their huge number of employees. I too think that Facebook in particular seems to employ a lot of mobile engineer for a meh result. However, he also mocks the complexity of displaying a feed. This is not trivial at all on mobile, at least if you want to : - display a highly customized feed of basically unlimited size where each item is slightly different - keep it running fast, even on low end devices It is a problem faced by all the major apps and there are a number of techniques you can use in order to improve performances but those are hard trade-off that are difficult to get right. Making such a feed work can keep a lot of engineers occupied. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k56wra39lwA