14 ms·

What the heck do close to 10k people do at LinkedIn? Serious question. Why does this site/company require 10k people?

by 12xo 6y ago

CrackpotGonzo 6y ago
Sales.
- 12xo 6y ago
  Its mostly self-service and partner driven (programmatic). As an ex VP of Ad Sales, I just dont see the need... My guess is that they have several thousand offshore devs and a lot of fat from acquisitions.
blizkreeg 6y ago
you don't think $7B of revenue in 2019 merits 10k people? Do you think you can run that size of a business with 500?
- 12xo 6y ago
  Yes you can. Look at Craigslist or POF.com for examples. But I also forgot that LI owns Lynda.com, so there are a lot of redundancies over there.
  - yibg 6y ago
    Neither craigslist nor POF generates 7 billion in revenue. Latest number I can find for craigslist is around 700m in 2016, let’s assume it’s 1b now. And let’s assume they have 1 employee. You don’t think hiring an additional 10k employees to get an extra 6b in revenue is worth it?
    - 12xo 6y ago
      CL has approx 50 employees, operate around the globe and are on track to do in excess of 1b in revenue this year... So I disagree with your assessment. There are many businesses that operate in the 10figure range that dont require 10's of thousands of employees. To me LI is more indicative of bloat. Especially since they are owned by MSFT.
      - yibg 6y ago
        Yes but can they scale to 7B with 50 employees? And specifically can they run a business like LinkedIn with 50 (or 500 or whatever small number) employees. I would argue the answer is no. If CL has a way to scale to that kind of revenue you'd think they would be doing it. One possible answer is the business they run just doesn't scale like that regardless of how many employees they have so it's better to keep things lean. I'm all for running a lean business, and there are certainly plenty of examples. CL, Stack overflow, POF etc, and they have impressive revenue to employee ratios. But they don't necessarily scale linearly, and they don't have to. CL has 20m revenue per employee, that's impressive. But they likely won't be able to carry that ratio up to 10b in revenue. They also don't need to. The additional employee just need to bring more revenue than they cost. If someone knows how to run a multi billion dollar global business with 50 people (and more specifically if they know how to do it with linkedin), there will be plenty of people lining up to talk with them and giving them money to do it.
- cpach 6y ago
  500 might be a bit low. But maybe 5000?
- Dragory 6y ago
  They didn't say anything about whether it merits 10k people, they were curious what all those 10k people are doing. I'm curious about that as well - clearly LinkedIn is doing much more than I was aware of.
sct202 6y ago
I know that one of my friends got a swag box (card, candle, and a metal water bottle) from LinkedIn when he got hired at a company that used LinkedIn's recruiting services. I'd imagine there's a lot of other random things they do at low scale to excite their customers.
TulliusCicero 6y ago
This article is so damn useful: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ > I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into FooCorp, for any given value of FooCorp, that sounds like a plausible statement. After all, what product could possible require hundreds, or even thousands of engineers? > ... > Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend. There's also a wide body of research that's found that decreasing latency has a signifiacnt effect on revenue over a pretty wide range of latencies for some businesses. Increasing performance also has the benefit of reducing costs. Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize. > And that's just performance. Features also matter: when I talk to engineers working on basically any product at any company, they'll often find that there are seemingly trivial individual features that can add integer percentage points to revenue. Just as with performance, people underestimate how many engineers you can add to a product before engineers stop paying for themselves. > Additionally, features are often much more complex than outsiders realize. If we look at search, how do we make sure that different forms of dates and phone numbers give the same results? How about internationalization? Each language has unique quirks that have to be accounted for. In french, “l'foo” should often match “un foo” and vice versa, but American search engines from the 90s didn't actually handle that correctly. How about tokenizing Chinese queries, where words don't have spaces between them, and sentences don't have unique tokenizations? How about Japanese, where queries can easily contain four different alphabets? How about handling Arabic, which is mostly read right-to-left, except for the bits that are read left-to-right? And that's not even the most complicated part of handling Arabic! It's fine to ignore this stuff for a weekend-project MVP, but ignoring it in a real business means ignoring the majority of the market! Some of these are handled ok by open source projects, but many of the problems involve open research problems. > There's also security! If you don't “bloat” your company by hiring security people, you'll end up like hotmail or yahoo, where your product is better known for how often it's hacked than for any of its other features. > Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and see latencies in the microsecond to millisecond range. When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years1. When people imagine how long it should take to build something, they're often imagining a team that works perfectly and spends 100% of its time coding. But that's impossible to scale up. The question isn't whether or not there will inefficiencies, but how much inefficiency. A company that could eliminate organizational inefficiency would be a larger innovation than any tech startup, ever. But when doing the math on how many employees a company “should” have, people usually assume that the company is an efficient organization.
mason55 6y ago
This question comes up on every post about a big tech company. LinkedIn in a global company operating commercially in probably almost every country. The "social network for work" part is easy but when you start talking about things like job listings across the world and then the sales and account management and local office management and compliance and the internal tools and billing and everything else, it's quite easy to get to 10k. I wouldn't be surprised if they have 1000 people in the US just dedicated to sales & account management for the job listings.
- 12xo 6y ago
  I am not surprise, just amazed that a site which is mostly self service and runs on UGC needs anywhere near this many people to operate. But then again, most of the people are probably hold-overs from acquisitions. As an ex VP of Ad Sales, I dont see how they'd need this many people in sales. Its almost all automated self-serve and partner driven. Even with a large US based team to manage the big spends, you're still not needing a large staff... But then again, these types of orgs tend to be filled with a lot of mediocre talent and suffer from BigDumbCompany syndrome...
  - brandnewlow 6y ago
    I think we’ve seen that UGC is and always has been a bit of a myth. Social media companies have always quietly employed armies of people to moderate user posts, persuade famous people and Companies to post, to actually do the posting and “media strategy” for those VIPs and companies, and then of course to sell the ads and pro services that come with it all.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- three_seagrass 6y ago
  It's the perennial HN question that ignores how much global companies need in-market sales, marketing, and support teams to grow.
  - 6y ago
decafninja 6y ago
I've interviewed for roles at several top tech companies and what surprised me was that there were entire teams dedicated to working on what seemed like a tiny feature or functionality. In some cases, two entire teams - one for frontend, one for backend. Granted, I understand there is a HUGE mind boggling level of scale involved. But still, after going on such interviews, and talking with friends who work at FAANG, etc. it sounds like my boring mediocre job as a bank SWE is more involved and exciting than some of these FAANG jobs. But I'd still jump through flaming hoops to jump ship to a FAANG or similar tech company.
- ptmcc 6y ago
  A lot of FAANG and FAANG-adjacent dev jobs are not any more glamorous than other dev jobs. A lot of the day to day looks the same, just keeping the lights on. Sometimes a really interesting technical problem does come up, but a lot of the complexity of the job is working within a huge complicated environment, both technically and organizationally. I will say, completely anecdotally, that the average bar for competency and work ethic is higher. Day to day stuff just gets done faster and more thoroughly with more accountability. But that's just personal experience, YMMV. I worked on cooler and more diverse stuff at various start ups and contract gigs, but I get paid literally double (or more) in big tech sooooo yeah riding it out for a bit. I don't see doing this for 20 more years, though.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    Yeah, I imagine day to day work isn't profoundly different wherever you go, but rather it's intangibles like culture and work environment and working mentality that make the difference. Most of my coworkers are simply there to collect a paycheck. Not that there's anything strictly wrong with that, but there is distinctly a lack of interest in doing anything beyond the bare minimum to satisfy technical requirements. Grass is greener on the other side, but my interactions with employees of tech companies has given me the impression that they're just a lot more enthusiastic about their work than many equivalent SWEs at companies where tech is a cost center.
    - deleted 6y ago
hindsightbias 6y ago
The question to ask is how many VPs and Directors they have. Once you have that answer, you’ll know why there are so many employees.
mandeepj 6y ago
They actually have 16,000 people. Unfortunately, it'd send you even more intense shock waves.
jldugger 6y ago
To expand on https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/, 10k people aren't required per se, they're there to make more money than they cost. Specifically: - sales & billing for linkedin premium, lynda, and other paid products - billing fraud detection, to cut the cost of chargebacks - security, to prevent that one leak from happening again, to keep PCI compliance, etc. - spam filtering, tuned to balance keeping paying customers (recruiters) happy with keeping suppliers (candidates with a resume) happy - Writing new features, to keep engagement and signups up - fixing things that keep breaking, like the email contact scraper - testing code for new features to make sure they, IDK, don't break the signup page - a/b testing the hell out of any and every thing - collecting and storing the massive analytics datasets they generate daily - analyzing daily datasets to determine which a/bs to promote - coming up with new features - testing anything at all - deploying corporate networking in all the offices buildings and such - optimizing infra costs - deploying actual physical datacenters because the cost is cheaper than paying the profit margins of AWS - moving back to cloud (azure) because after you were acquired, the markup dropped and the calculus on on-prem vs cloud flipped - managing all the projects associated with above - recruiting staff to handle all the above - managing all the staff associated with above - acquistions (lynda, fliptop, glint, drawbridge)
- notyourwork 6y ago
  > they're there to make more money than they cost. This is the key most people ignore. If each employee generates revenue greater than their cost of employment, why not keep them around? The goal isn't keeping the lights on, its making money.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    Yes, I feel like developers tend to evaluate tech businesses from the perspective of the tech that they generate, since that is the goal of a developer. It's sometimes hard to remember that making tech is simply the means to an end.
    - notyourwork 6y ago
ogre_codes 6y ago
Delivering the part of LinkedIn which provides value to end users is relatively trivial. A small number of engineers (20-30) could do that. The problem is ironically how much profit they make. Look at ad-blocking for example. You as the user won't see how this affects LinkIn, but they likely devote dozens (hundreds?) of employees to fighting ad-blockers and optimizing the site so people don't notice how their anti-ad-blocker solution completely destroys performance. But as a company that kind of investment in staff is profitable because the cost of those engineers is vastly lower than the cost of losing 1% of their advertising revenue. Likewise, ad fraud, and a dozen other issues which might impact LinkedIn's revenue flows. When you hire your 4000th developer, they aren't providing as much value to the company as engineer #50, but they are providing enough value to cover the cost of employing them (at least net, it's likely 50% of them at that point are dead weight but hard to identify). Multiply this kind of decision making over 500 other decisions and engineering "Bloat" makes a lot more sense. And that's before you start adding in things like sales, HR, marketing, etc. Remember, each additional person doesn't need to provide as much value as the first 50, they just need to provide $100-500k worth of value.
symlinkk 6y ago
Nothing, it’s bloat. People will twist themselves into a pretzel performing mental gymnastics to tell you otherwise, but it’s bloat, plain and simple.
vasco 6y ago
Look at an up to date org chart of a tech company of 1.3k people and what they do: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/ If you now think that all business divisions have more work to perform due to scale, and that for development, you want to have more parallel streams of work, this should give you an approximate idea of what an order of magnitude larger company uses 10k people for.
- sireat 6y ago
  Looking at that chart I was puzzled at some of the roles. Why would there be a person who is only doing pricing? - ie Pricing Manager. Yet if you read the job description: https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/product/pricing-manager/ https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/product/pricing-manage... you can start to understand how crucial pricing could be to a large organization that they could dedicate a person(and a whole team underneath!) solely to pricing goods and services. EDIT: At the same time you wonder if pretty much all jobs follow Parkinson's role: job filling up to fill up the time. You have a whole team of talented front end guys at Youtube (or Gmail or Dropbox or ..) and front-end will change and features will be added or dropped because well something needs to be done. So wouldn't this same principle apply to other jobs? Pricing Manager would keep fiddling with prices if there is nothing else to do. Obviously there would be justifications to higher ups.
- jsnell 6y ago
  Thanks, that's great! Having a concrete example really drives home the point.
spicymaki 6y ago
This might sound naive, but I would like to advocate for more employment than less. Optimizing jobs from 10k to 500 as some people in the thread are advocating seems horrific to me. The ideal is that you would have 500 people that are efficient enough to perform 20x the work, and optimize the work efficiency, and automate some things. What I have seen personally is that employers just overload staff. They reach a crisis point and have to hire more people. That just hurts employees and there families. I do not want to make baseless assumptions on who was laid off. People could be laid off for something as trivial as a site consolidation and the person could not relocate, or an acquisition where multiple people had the similar roles. Using laid off status as a scarlet letter is a worrisome trend and only serves to harm all of us in the long term. I personally do not want to live in a zero sum economy.
fennecfoxen 6y ago
Besides the usual, LinkedIn is running an e-learning operation for business these days (LinkedIn Learning), and generally trying to be another vehicle through which Microsoft expands its offerings — moving away from simply being the "recruiting" social network and instead moving to be the social network for every phase of your life as an employee.
jedberg 6y ago
Last year LinkedIn made $6.8B in revenue. If they hire someone who can make a process .01% more efficient, they would save $680,000. If they pay that person even $400,000/yr plus benefits, they are coming out ahead. If you find someone who can make things .002% more efficient and pay them $100,000 a year, you've still come out ahead. At that revenue, it doesn't take much to get an ROI on a new employee.
- jsnell 6y ago
  Making "a" process .01% more efficient is not sufficient in your example. You need (the weighted average of) everything to become that much more effective. Somebody improving e.g. the build speed by that amount will not be paying back their salary in improved productivity of other developers. While a person who increases the click through rate on ads by 0.02% probably does.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    The point is that at that level of revenue, even the smallest contribution pays itself back.
barrenko 6y ago
Every big company just wants to die, don't believe anything else.
peter303 6y ago
I a medium size vertical software company I worked at no more than 20% were software engineers when it reached the mature stage. Some were software support people like program managers, testers, technical writers, Training. Some were company support like executive, HR, sales, IT. And then were services side of People who used the software embedded within customer companies because the customers wanted to outsource that role.
toephu2 6y ago
10k? LinkedIn has 16k employees..

What the heck do close to 10k people do at LinkedIn? Serious question. Why does this site/company require 10k people?

by 12xo 6y ago

What the heck do close to 10k people do at LinkedIn? Serious question. Why does this site/company require 10k people?

CrackpotGonzo 6y ago

Sales.

12xo 6y ago
Its mostly self-service and partner driven (programmatic). As an ex VP of Ad Sales, I just dont see the need... My guess is that they have several thousand offshore devs and a lot of fat from acquisitions.

blizkreeg 6y ago

you don't think $7B of revenue in 2019 merits 10k people? Do you think you can run that size of a business with 500?

12xo 6y ago
Yes you can. Look at Craigslist or POF.com for examples. But I also forgot that LI owns Lynda.com, so there are a lot of redundancies over there.
- yibg 6y ago
  Neither craigslist nor POF generates 7 billion in revenue. Latest number I can find for craigslist is around 700m in 2016, let’s assume it’s 1b now. And let’s assume they have 1 employee. You don’t think hiring an additional 10k employees to get an extra 6b in revenue is worth it?
  - 12xo 6y ago
    CL has approx 50 employees, operate around the globe and are on track to do in excess of 1b in revenue this year... So I disagree with your assessment. There are many businesses that operate in the 10figure range that dont require 10's of thousands of employees. To me LI is more indicative of bloat. Especially since they are owned by MSFT.
    - yibg 6y ago
      Yes but can they scale to 7B with 50 employees? And specifically can they run a business like LinkedIn with 50 (or 500 or whatever small number) employees. I would argue the answer is no. If CL has a way to scale to that kind of revenue you'd think they would be doing it. One possible answer is the business they run just doesn't scale like that regardless of how many employees they have so it's better to keep things lean. I'm all for running a lean business, and there are certainly plenty of examples. CL, Stack overflow, POF etc, and they have impressive revenue to employee ratios. But they don't necessarily scale linearly, and they don't have to. CL has 20m revenue per employee, that's impressive. But they likely won't be able to carry that ratio up to 10b in revenue. They also don't need to. The additional employee just need to bring more revenue than they cost. If someone knows how to run a multi billion dollar global business with 50 people (and more specifically if they know how to do it with linkedin), there will be plenty of people lining up to talk with them and giving them money to do it.
cpach 6y ago
500 might be a bit low. But maybe 5000?
Dragory 6y ago
They didn't say anything about whether it merits 10k people, they were curious what all those 10k people are doing. I'm curious about that as well - clearly LinkedIn is doing much more than I was aware of.

sct202 6y ago

I know that one of my friends got a swag box (card, candle, and a metal water bottle) from LinkedIn when he got hired at a company that used LinkedIn's recruiting services. I'd imagine there's a lot of other random things they do at low scale to excite their customers.

TulliusCicero 6y ago

This article is so damn useful: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ > I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into FooCorp, for any given value of FooCorp, that sounds like a plausible statement. After all, what product could possible require hundreds, or even thousands of engineers? > ... > Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend. There's also a wide body of research that's found that decreasing latency has a signifiacnt effect on revenue over a pretty wide range of latencies for some businesses. Increasing performance also has the benefit of reducing costs. Businesses should keep adding engineers to work on optimization until the cost of adding an engineer equals the revenue gain plus the cost savings at the margin. This is often many more engineers than people realize. > And that's just performance. Features also matter: when I talk to engineers working on basically any product at any company, they'll often find that there are seemingly trivial individual features that can add integer percentage points to revenue. Just as with performance, people underestimate how many engineers you can add to a product before engineers stop paying for themselves. > Additionally, features are often much more complex than outsiders realize. If we look at search, how do we make sure that different forms of dates and phone numbers give the same results? How about internationalization? Each language has unique quirks that have to be accounted for. In french, “l'foo” should often match “un foo” and vice versa, but American search engines from the 90s didn't actually handle that correctly. How about tokenizing Chinese queries, where words don't have spaces between them, and sentences don't have unique tokenizations? How about Japanese, where queries can easily contain four different alphabets? How about handling Arabic, which is mostly read right-to-left, except for the bits that are read left-to-right? And that's not even the most complicated part of handling Arabic! It's fine to ignore this stuff for a weekend-project MVP, but ignoring it in a real business means ignoring the majority of the market! Some of these are handled ok by open source projects, but many of the problems involve open research problems. > There's also security! If you don't “bloat” your company by hiring security people, you'll end up like hotmail or yahoo, where your product is better known for how often it's hacked than for any of its other features. > Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and see latencies in the microsecond to millisecond range. When I talk to higher-ups and compare what they think they're saying to what my coworkers think they're saying, I find that the rate of lost messages is well over 50%, every message gets corrupted, and latency can be months or years1. When people imagine how long it should take to build something, they're often imagining a team that works perfectly and spends 100% of its time coding. But that's impossible to scale up. The question isn't whether or not there will inefficiencies, but how much inefficiency. A company that could eliminate organizational inefficiency would be a larger innovation than any tech startup, ever. But when doing the math on how many employees a company “should” have, people usually assume that the company is an efficient organization.

mason55 6y ago

This question comes up on every post about a big tech company. LinkedIn in a global company operating commercially in probably almost every country. The "social network for work" part is easy but when you start talking about things like job listings across the world and then the sales and account management and local office management and compliance and the internal tools and billing and everything else, it's quite easy to get to 10k. I wouldn't be surprised if they have 1000 people in the US just dedicated to sales & account management for the job listings.

12xo 6y ago
I am not surprise, just amazed that a site which is mostly self service and runs on UGC needs anywhere near this many people to operate. But then again, most of the people are probably hold-overs from acquisitions. As an ex VP of Ad Sales, I dont see how they'd need this many people in sales. Its almost all automated self-serve and partner driven. Even with a large US based team to manage the big spends, you're still not needing a large staff... But then again, these types of orgs tend to be filled with a lot of mediocre talent and suffer from BigDumbCompany syndrome...
- brandnewlow 6y ago
  I think we’ve seen that UGC is and always has been a bit of a myth. Social media companies have always quietly employed armies of people to moderate user posts, persuade famous people and Companies to post, to actually do the posting and “media strategy” for those VIPs and companies, and then of course to sell the ads and pro services that come with it all.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
three_seagrass 6y ago
It's the perennial HN question that ignores how much global companies need in-market sales, marketing, and support teams to grow.
- 6y ago

decafninja 6y ago

I've interviewed for roles at several top tech companies and what surprised me was that there were entire teams dedicated to working on what seemed like a tiny feature or functionality. In some cases, two entire teams - one for frontend, one for backend. Granted, I understand there is a HUGE mind boggling level of scale involved. But still, after going on such interviews, and talking with friends who work at FAANG, etc. it sounds like my boring mediocre job as a bank SWE is more involved and exciting than some of these FAANG jobs. But I'd still jump through flaming hoops to jump ship to a FAANG or similar tech company.

ptmcc 6y ago
A lot of FAANG and FAANG-adjacent dev jobs are not any more glamorous than other dev jobs. A lot of the day to day looks the same, just keeping the lights on. Sometimes a really interesting technical problem does come up, but a lot of the complexity of the job is working within a huge complicated environment, both technically and organizationally. I will say, completely anecdotally, that the average bar for competency and work ethic is higher. Day to day stuff just gets done faster and more thoroughly with more accountability. But that's just personal experience, YMMV. I worked on cooler and more diverse stuff at various start ups and contract gigs, but I get paid literally double (or more) in big tech sooooo yeah riding it out for a bit. I don't see doing this for 20 more years, though.
- decafninja 6y ago
  Yeah, I imagine day to day work isn't profoundly different wherever you go, but rather it's intangibles like culture and work environment and working mentality that make the difference. Most of my coworkers are simply there to collect a paycheck. Not that there's anything strictly wrong with that, but there is distinctly a lack of interest in doing anything beyond the bare minimum to satisfy technical requirements. Grass is greener on the other side, but my interactions with employees of tech companies has given me the impression that they're just a lot more enthusiastic about their work than many equivalent SWEs at companies where tech is a cost center.
  - deleted 6y ago

hindsightbias 6y ago

The question to ask is how many VPs and Directors they have. Once you have that answer, you’ll know why there are so many employees.

mandeepj 6y ago

They actually have 16,000 people. Unfortunately, it'd send you even more intense shock waves.

jldugger 6y ago

To expand on https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/, 10k people aren't required per se, they're there to make more money than they cost. Specifically: - sales & billing for linkedin premium, lynda, and other paid products - billing fraud detection, to cut the cost of chargebacks - security, to prevent that one leak from happening again, to keep PCI compliance, etc. - spam filtering, tuned to balance keeping paying customers (recruiters) happy with keeping suppliers (candidates with a resume) happy - Writing new features, to keep engagement and signups up - fixing things that keep breaking, like the email contact scraper - testing code for new features to make sure they, IDK, don't break the signup page - a/b testing the hell out of any and every thing - collecting and storing the massive analytics datasets they generate daily - analyzing daily datasets to determine which a/bs to promote - coming up with new features - testing anything at all - deploying corporate networking in all the offices buildings and such - optimizing infra costs - deploying actual physical datacenters because the cost is cheaper than paying the profit margins of AWS - moving back to cloud (azure) because after you were acquired, the markup dropped and the calculus on on-prem vs cloud flipped - managing all the projects associated with above - recruiting staff to handle all the above - managing all the staff associated with above - acquistions (lynda, fliptop, glint, drawbridge)

notyourwork 6y ago
> they're there to make more money than they cost. This is the key most people ignore. If each employee generates revenue greater than their cost of employment, why not keep them around? The goal isn't keeping the lights on, its making money.
- kube-system 6y ago
  Yes, I feel like developers tend to evaluate tech businesses from the perspective of the tech that they generate, since that is the goal of a developer. It's sometimes hard to remember that making tech is simply the means to an end.
  - notyourwork 6y ago

ogre_codes 6y ago

Delivering the part of LinkedIn which provides value to end users is relatively trivial. A small number of engineers (20-30) could do that. The problem is ironically how much profit they make. Look at ad-blocking for example. You as the user won't see how this affects LinkIn, but they likely devote dozens (hundreds?) of employees to fighting ad-blockers and optimizing the site so people don't notice how their anti-ad-blocker solution completely destroys performance. But as a company that kind of investment in staff is profitable because the cost of those engineers is vastly lower than the cost of losing 1% of their advertising revenue. Likewise, ad fraud, and a dozen other issues which might impact LinkedIn's revenue flows. When you hire your 4000th developer, they aren't providing as much value to the company as engineer #50, but they are providing enough value to cover the cost of employing them (at least net, it's likely 50% of them at that point are dead weight but hard to identify). Multiply this kind of decision making over 500 other decisions and engineering "Bloat" makes a lot more sense. And that's before you start adding in things like sales, HR, marketing, etc. Remember, each additional person doesn't need to provide as much value as the first 50, they just need to provide $100-500k worth of value.

symlinkk 6y ago

Nothing, it’s bloat. People will twist themselves into a pretzel performing mental gymnastics to tell you otherwise, but it’s bloat, plain and simple.

vasco 6y ago

Look at an up to date org chart of a tech company of 1.3k people and what they do: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/ If you now think that all business divisions have more work to perform due to scale, and that for development, you want to have more parallel streams of work, this should give you an approximate idea of what an order of magnitude larger company uses 10k people for.

sireat 6y ago
Looking at that chart I was puzzled at some of the roles. Why would there be a person who is only doing pricing? - ie Pricing Manager. Yet if you read the job description: https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/product/pricing-manager/ https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/product/pricing-manage... you can start to understand how crucial pricing could be to a large organization that they could dedicate a person(and a whole team underneath!) solely to pricing goods and services. EDIT: At the same time you wonder if pretty much all jobs follow Parkinson's role: job filling up to fill up the time. You have a whole team of talented front end guys at Youtube (or Gmail or Dropbox or ..) and front-end will change and features will be added or dropped because well something needs to be done. So wouldn't this same principle apply to other jobs? Pricing Manager would keep fiddling with prices if there is nothing else to do. Obviously there would be justifications to higher ups.
jsnell 6y ago
Thanks, that's great! Having a concrete example really drives home the point.

spicymaki 6y ago

This might sound naive, but I would like to advocate for more employment than less. Optimizing jobs from 10k to 500 as some people in the thread are advocating seems horrific to me. The ideal is that you would have 500 people that are efficient enough to perform 20x the work, and optimize the work efficiency, and automate some things. What I have seen personally is that employers just overload staff. They reach a crisis point and have to hire more people. That just hurts employees and there families. I do not want to make baseless assumptions on who was laid off. People could be laid off for something as trivial as a site consolidation and the person could not relocate, or an acquisition where multiple people had the similar roles. Using laid off status as a scarlet letter is a worrisome trend and only serves to harm all of us in the long term. I personally do not want to live in a zero sum economy.

fennecfoxen 6y ago

Besides the usual, LinkedIn is running an e-learning operation for business these days (LinkedIn Learning), and generally trying to be another vehicle through which Microsoft expands its offerings — moving away from simply being the "recruiting" social network and instead moving to be the social network for every phase of your life as an employee.

jedberg 6y ago

Last year LinkedIn made $6.8B in revenue. If they hire someone who can make a process .01% more efficient, they would save $680,000. If they pay that person even $400,000/yr plus benefits, they are coming out ahead. If you find someone who can make things .002% more efficient and pay them $100,000 a year, you've still come out ahead. At that revenue, it doesn't take much to get an ROI on a new employee.

jsnell 6y ago
Making "a" process .01% more efficient is not sufficient in your example. You need (the weighted average of) everything to become that much more effective. Somebody improving e.g. the build speed by that amount will not be paying back their salary in improved productivity of other developers. While a person who increases the click through rate on ads by 0.02% probably does.
- jedberg 6y ago
  The point is that at that level of revenue, even the smallest contribution pays itself back.

barrenko 6y ago

Every big company just wants to die, don't believe anything else.

peter303 6y ago

I a medium size vertical software company I worked at no more than 20% were software engineers when it reached the mature stage. Some were software support people like program managers, testers, technical writers, Training. Some were company support like executive, HR, sales, IT. And then were services side of People who used the software embedded within customer companies because the customers wanted to outsource that role.

toephu2 6y ago

10k? LinkedIn has 16k employees..