3 ms·

Wait Yelp has 6000 employees? They haven’t changed their site in a decade! What percentage of that is engineering? Seriously, I thought they have maybe 1000 at

Wait Yelp has 6000 employees? They haven’t changed their site in a decade! What percentage of that is engineering? Seriously, I thought they have maybe 1000 at best.

runawaybottle 7y ago
They have a cold calling sales staff mostly comprised of interns or new grads. They call up restaurants and try to up sell them on some package, I don’t know the details. They aren’t paid well.
dntrkv 7y ago
Have you (and anyone else posting this same exact comment on any article that mentions employee count) ever worked at a large company? Once things operate at a large enough scale, it requires dedicated teams to focus on very specific parts of the application. Take SEO for example, it's not just putting H1 and title tags on every page. You most likely have dedicated services that are generating millions of sitemaps, daily. You probably have separate infrastructure dedicated to serving the crawlers so that you can optimize the content and aren't serving your users and bots from the same pool of resources. You have analytics dedicated to monitoring the crawlers and running tests / adjustments as you see results. You likely have services that generate the SEO data for every page (meta tags, titles, canonical links, headings, etc). And in addition to this you have AB testing, legacy systems, and technical debt to deal with. My point is, it's easy to brush these things off as unnecessary and large company waste (and some of it might be) but to say things like "It's just a CRUD app, why do they need a 1000 engineers. I could do it with 10" is ignoring the vast complexity involved in running at scale.
- aprdm 7y ago
  meanwhile I am sure other companies running an app that is comparable to yelp scale do so with much fewer engineers. Whatsapp comes to mind as an obvious example.

3 ms·

Wait Yelp has 6000 employees? They haven’t changed their site in a decade! What percentage of that is engineering? Seriously, I thought they have maybe 1000 at

by yalogin 7y ago

Wait Yelp has 6000 employees? They haven’t changed their site in a decade! What percentage of that is engineering? Seriously, I thought they have maybe 1000 at best.

runawaybottle 7y ago
They have a cold calling sales staff mostly comprised of interns or new grads. They call up restaurants and try to up sell them on some package, I don’t know the details. They aren’t paid well.
dntrkv 7y ago
Have you (and anyone else posting this same exact comment on any article that mentions employee count) ever worked at a large company? Once things operate at a large enough scale, it requires dedicated teams to focus on very specific parts of the application. Take SEO for example, it's not just putting H1 and title tags on every page. You most likely have dedicated services that are generating millions of sitemaps, daily. You probably have separate infrastructure dedicated to serving the crawlers so that you can optimize the content and aren't serving your users and bots from the same pool of resources. You have analytics dedicated to monitoring the crawlers and running tests / adjustments as you see results. You likely have services that generate the SEO data for every page (meta tags, titles, canonical links, headings, etc). And in addition to this you have AB testing, legacy systems, and technical debt to deal with. My point is, it's easy to brush these things off as unnecessary and large company waste (and some of it might be) but to say things like "It's just a CRUD app, why do they need a 1000 engineers. I could do it with 10" is ignoring the vast complexity involved in running at scale.
- aprdm 7y ago
  meanwhile I am sure other companies running an app that is comparable to yelp scale do so with much fewer engineers. Whatsapp comes to mind as an obvious example.