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are you the type to ask that question about google and facebook too? uber is facebook minus a few years and has similiar numbers
by oculusthrift 9y ago
are you the type to ask that question about google and facebook too? uber is facebook minus a few years and has similiar numbers
- rwmj 9y agoAbout Facebook, yes. Google does genuinely seem to have fingers in very many pies so their headcount is not really a surprise.
- fixermark 9y agoFacebook also has fingers in many pies (their main product, the messenger, ads, VR...)
- komali2 9y agoI ask that about Twitter - these companies always seem to have more than I would expect necessary.
- mattzito 9y agoi think you underestimate the massive amount of backend and internal optimization that's required. Sure, the MVP of Twitter is a few thousand lines of code, but think about ad buying, ad display, abuse detection, customer service, content management, APIs, mobile, mobile web, etc., and that's just on the engineering side of things. For every engineer you'll need business folks, PMs, designers, operations, etc.
- fixermark 9y agoHell, Twitter is a great example. We know what Twitter looks like without enough staff: an unreliable MVP that fail-whales all the time. Twitter acquired the staff and capital to scale up and they became far more stable. The economies of scale large computer systems offer are counter-weighted by the n-squared complexity of larger systems.
- icebraining 9y agoYet Whatsapp managed to support 500M users sending 10 billion messages/day using five mobile apps with only 50 engineers.
- austenallred 9y agoAdding manpower doesn't make product/shipping grow linearly. At a certain point the majority of work is coordination costs, but is mostly requisite to eke out a wide range of coordinated and successful products. At scale things can become massively difficult.
- sulam 9y agoFacebook had ~2000 employees just before their IPO IIRC. Just as a data point.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]