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I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations. When you have a lot of users (especially when they rely o
by rtpg 6y ago
I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations.
When you have a lot of users (especially when they rely on you to get money from you!) even 0.1% of them asking questions and having difficulties is a huge work generator!
It's not "oh it's easy to write a for loop". It's "my for loop now has 20 non-orthogonal options, and a user is saying we emptied their bank account and now we gotta make sure if we did". Also a content host, a CMS, and reporting software for taxes and the like.
I mean I bet you could get away with 100 people or something for this but there's _so much_ that can go wrong and would require lots of intervention.
- crazygringo 6y agoExactly this. A lot of people don't seem to realize, when you're dealing with communities -- especially communities that involve money flying around -- there's tons of work in managing it. You've got employees trying to grow the community in different areas (genres?) and different geographies, reaching out to people, giving advice to get them on board. You've got employees giving support. You've got employees looking for irregularities and fraud among all the finances. Sales, marketing and operation are huge parts of businesses that many engineers don't often think about.
- imtringued 6y agoThat argument makes sense when you are Reddit which has 400 employees. Patreon has no excuse.
- TylerE 6y agoIf 0.1% of your customers cause 80% of your effort maybe rethink that retention?
- sk5t 6y agoDepending on the business, this can be like poking out your eyes to save money on eyeglasses.
- rtpg 6y agoThese customers are usually top billing and are just indicators of going upmarket. They’re also probably hitting problems loads of your users are hitting and simply dropping out of the funnel from. “Fire your users” is a thing, but at one point you gotta actually have things work
- manigandham 6y agoThat's usually balanced against how much money they bring in. If they are profitable customers then it makes sense to hire enough to support them.
- x0x0 6y agoOr done financial audits. Or moved money, let alone between countries. Or done taxes in multiple countries.
- justapassenger 6y agoThis is hacker news. Under each article you see people being surprised why companies have employees. Common knowledge is that all you need is to write some code and you can start earning billions!
- s17n 6y agoYeah it still sounds like a pretty easy problem (I work at a super operationally heavy company and at time my workload has been 90% ops 10% eng). If the 300 count includes all the support agents then I maybe I can see it but the common Silicon Valley practice would be for none of those people to actually be employees of the company. On the other hand my company has zero marketing, which obviously won't be the case for Patreon - I have no idea what headcount levels are involved there - at Google marketing had a ton of people like running promotions and campaigns but again the entire bottom layer was TVC's...
- imtringued 6y ago> I feel like this sort of comment can only come from somebody who's never had to deal with operations. If you really think that way then the company is doomed. The primary reason for technology companies to exist is the fact that the number of users is disconnected from the number of employees in the company. Companies like Patreon completely waste this huge advantage and just set money on fire. You are no longer a tech company anymore and if you are not a tech then you don't deserve unicorn valuations. This is why the company is doomed.