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Ask HN: How JetBrains with just 500 employees can do this all?

• netspider 9y ago
  Hi they all based on intellij ide platform
• Zekio 9y ago
  Most of the Products are basically IntelliJ IDEA with only features pointed at a specific language, so you have a smaller install really
  • notdang 9y ago
    Still a company like Soundcloud had 420 employees before layoffs. Spotify: more than 1600
• traviswingo 9y ago
  How many people do you think it takes to make a single product? From what you listed, they average 26 employees per product. The products aren't released at the same time. Most of their products are the same, with minor differences depending on the language they're supporting. IMO they have too many employees...
  • edpichler 9y ago
    Just to maintain, evolve, support and do release testing of only one product: Intellij IDEA, checking the thousand of details and flows, between frameworks and platforms it runs, to me, it seems a good amount of work. And a company have more departments than Software Development: Finance, Administration, RH, Marketing, etc.
    • smacktoward 9y ago
      But a lot (the majority even, maybe?) of JetBrains' products are just IDEA plus some extra language-specific tooling. So presumably they have a relatively large number of people hacking on the core of the whole product line, IDEA, and then just a small number of people to add whatever language-specific polish each IDEA-based product requires.
    • blibble 9y ago
      the changes for each new release of IntelliJ IDEA gets smaller each year there's a reason they moved to a subscription model
• dsacco 9y ago
  That's about the amount of employees I'd expect, actually. You might be surprised at how many products or engineering initiatives can be accomplished by an efficient 300-500 person team.
• peoplewindow 9y ago
  Very experienced and skilled devs. Plus they build everything on the Java platform and always have, so they get a big productivity boost over many companies that use less effective tools. Also, not VC backed. A 'real' company, that actually makes money because people buy their products. Our expectations of how many developers are needed for things is inflated by the prevalence of unprofitable venture backed firms that over hire.
  • quickthrower2 9y ago
    They also make .NET products. Like Resharper.
    • eat_veggies 9y ago
      And python! Pycharm is really slick but I don't think I'll ever give up Sublime Text.
  • Justsignedup 9y ago
    They built Kotlin because writing pure java was being too inefficient for them and had too many null pointer exceptions. They build language parsers, why not build a language :P They are also based in Russia so their costs are a bit lower probably. Also as peoplewindow mentioned they grow based on need, so we know they didn't hire 200 developers just because.
    • marmaduke 9y ago
      Prague actually. I've heard informatics is pretty strong there so unsurprising that such a strong PL company is also in Prague. https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/ https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/
      • peoplewindow 9y ago
        JetBrains was and largely still is a Russian company. The Kotlin developers are all based in St Petersburg for example.
• rl3 9y ago
  I love JetBrains, but that number isn't that impressive. If you were to assume only half of that 500 were actual developers, that's still 13 developers per each product you listed. All of their products tend to use the same core technology as well. Consider that Todd Howard's team that built Skyrim consisted of roughly 100 people. Epic Games employed 250 people as of 2016. Most of those are not developers. Yet, their Unreal Engine 4 changelogs are mind blowing: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Support/Builds/index.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Support/Builds/inde...
• quantummkv 9y ago
  All of their complex products are actually plugins on top of a single base called the intellij Platform(which is open source). Any changes they make to it automatically percolate to all their products. This allows them to keep small teams for every product that focus only on the specific language plugin.
• dasmoth 9y ago
  The linked Wiki page now says 700 (looks like it was updated fairly shortly after this was posted). I'm curious how this breaks down between developers, customer support, marketing, and admin. My guess is that developers might be a fairly small fraction of he 700...
• LoSboccacc 9y ago
  "Just"
• xiaoma 9y ago
  Look at how much more Microsoft did before reaching 500 employees. They wrote not only compilers and languages, but also games and productivity apps for poorly documented platforms and even OSes. Jetbrains is doing well for themselves, but it's far from unprecedented.
• edpichler 9y ago
  Update: they ended 2016 with 650 employees: https://www.jetbrains.com/annualreport/2016/ https://www.jetbrains.com/annualreport/2016/