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This kind of attitude comes up on HN a lot. They have lots of internal tooling and jobs that have to be done, especially at their scale. WhatsApp with 50 emplo
by thick 6y ago
This kind of attitude comes up on HN a lot. They have lots of internal tooling and jobs that have to be done, especially at their scale.
WhatsApp with 50 employees is an anomaly. In reality, companies need lots more employees just to get by. Not all industries are equal when it comes to responsibilities and programmers are the most ignorant but arrogant class, thinking that all you need is software. Spolsky covered this 2 decades ago in his “Developer Abstraction Layer” article.
- Barrin92 6y agothey also haven't made a single dime in what, 11-ish years? Writing software is fun, but usually companies do it to earn money. If they were building the death star it would be one thing, but they're making a taxi app. The entire company feels like a jobs program for software engineers run by Softbank instead of the government
- xwdv 6y agoProfits have to be invested back into growth. When growth is no longer possible, then you harvest profit.
- Barrin92 6y agoor you turn out to be the next MoviePass because selling a dollar for 75 cents isn't a business. I would not make the mistake and compare everything that grows fast to Amazon or Netflix. The former has logistic centres and half of the servers that run the internet, the latter a ton of content. It's not clear to me what Uber actually owns. They even sold off their self driving unit.
- xwdv 6y agoDon’t get so caught up with what a company “owns”, what matters is what they do. Owning something isn’t a guarantee that it won’t become a worthless asset later. Also MoviePass was at a good start by selling tickets at a loss, what killed them was that they couldn’t leg into the profit generating phase of their strategy and burnt out.
- dogma1138 6y agoNVIDIA has 18,000 employees...
- mosdl 6y agoAnd they make a bunch of custom hardware
- dvtrn 6y agoIs it hackneyed, improper or cliche to say this comment immediately brings the whole Man Month thing to mind?
- burgreblast 6y agoBut it's not "in reality". It's "with the mindsets and experience and architecture and tooling that are prevalent in the industry"...that's what takes more. Any given project might not require large numbers people, the headcount driver might the process. Where you have control, would recommend rethinking the model to look more like Whatsapp than to dismiss as an anomaly.
- runawaybottle 6y agoCan we ballpark how big the most critical teams would need to be? Could we really justify 21k? I’m open to believing.
- throwaway45349 6y agoI would guess a sizable fraction is regional policy, legal and marketing teams. The whole point of Uber is to operate everywhere and you simply can't run all of that in Silicon Valley without access to local knowledge. Not to mention the incredible bloat that comes from building in market-specific features across the whole planet.
- madeofpalk 6y agoIt would be handy to understand how many of those 21,000 employees are local operations vs centralised ops (like development). I'm sure it takes more developers to build and support Uber than you might initially guess, but I'm also sure that Uber just has more employees than they need "because they're successful".
- necubi 6y agoNot surprisingly, software engineers think that the only thing going on with a company like Uber is software engineering. Which is way more complex and requires way more people than it is frequently given credit for. (Uber isn't just an app; it's a bunch of apps, supporting a 2-way marketplace with complex dynamics and many millions of participants.) But the vast majority of Uber's employees are not software engineers. Running a physical service in ~70 countries is /hard/ and requires a lot of people. Support and operations eat up a lot of the headcount, and can't be scaled like software. Similarly you need a lot of accountants and lawyers to operate globally, along with all of the infrastructure to support a global workforce. [Disclaimer: I work for Lyft]
- gverrilla 6y agowhy do you think uber dynamics are complex, exactly?
- throwanem 6y agoWhy do you think they aren't?
- AlotOfReading 6y agoThey're doing complicated things, but is that headcount in proportion to it? For comparison, Apple's HQ headcount is under 20k, and entire state level governments for small to mid-sized states are in the low tens of thousands of employees. We all know human things generate lots of work to employ lots of people, but the scale still feels a bit off, even if no one can point to exactly why.
- throwanem 6y agoIt doesn't feel off to me. As others have discussed in considerable detail, operating in a lot of countries worldwide is a lot more complex than it intuitively seems to be, and the complexity scales superlinearly. I suspect they might be a few percent overstaffed, but I don't think that hurts a company focusing on growth over all else, and I don't think it's even all that uncommon for such companies. It wouldn't surprise me to see a round or two of layoffs once that growth tops out, but it would surprise me if they added up to more than 10% of headcount.
- LukeShu 6y agoUber: 21,000 Lyft: 5,700 GrubHub: 2,800 Nvidia: 18,000 (thanks 'dogma1138) 21,000 is a big number, even having considered The Development Abstraction Layer.
- lumost 6y agothe two largest employers are both the number one players in their market, being the number 1 player in a market may require that you invest for "first mover advantage". This would lead to a lot of failed/re-tooled initiatives over time. Being number 2 often just means copying the number 1 player in a more capital efficient manner, product descriptions become "X did it this way, customers want it this way". In a winner takes all market, being the first mover matters a lot.
- toyg 6y agoAlso, diminishing returns. In many markets you can "get to the table" with a small crew, but to actually win the customer you'll need bodies almost entirely dedicated to it. And it's that sort of margin, multiplied over and over, that makes one company the undisputed n.1.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y ago~10 years ago, Nintendo had only 3000 employees and was the most profitable public company per employee. They only have 6200 now. Edit: Source: https://www.ft.com/content/9d9624a4-8341-11dd-907e-000077b07658 https://www.ft.com/content/9d9624a4-8341-11dd-907e-000077b07...
- liamliamliam 6y agoDoes it have to be one or the other? This is an equally ignorant response. 21k is a lot, and to hand-wave any questioning of this as "ignorant" and "arrogant" is... those things. Lots of companies have bloat, and this is especially apparent if you've also worked somewhere that's competently managed. Recently someone was telling me about a shoe auction company employing hundreds of engineers (sorry, I forget the exact figure, want to say 300-600). I don't care how much traffic you're doing or how many shoes there are, that is a ridiculously unnecessary number.
- zug_zug 6y agoThis is sort-of hand-wavey. The truth is there are many companies with order-of-magnitude too-many employees (and software eats them). And there's some that aren't. There's no way to know which one uber is without exactly breaking down those numbers a bit more. But call me unconvinced for one.
- kitsunesoba 6y agoI don't have the experience to back my opinion, but my gut agrees. Intuitively, it would seem to me that hiring past a certain threshold increases need to hire more engineers rather than quenching it — that is, the complexity resulting from changes made to the projects to keep such a high number of engineers productive approaches or even outstrips innate complexity and becomes unsustainable, demanding ever more engineers to keep it all afloat. Following this, a company that isn't keeping an eye out for net productive decreases as a result of hiring could end up with far more engineers than they actually need. But I've always been an individual contributor, so my perspective may be limited.
- gbh444g 6y agoI have a deep suspicion that this is mostly about risk management. With just 50 employees, what you have is essentially a board of directors that have enormous leverage over you.
- busterarm 6y ago> With just 50 employees, what you have is essentially a board of directors that have enormous leverage over you. How true this is. I've seen what happens when you have a small number of very wealthy engineers in senior leadership roles in a small to midsize tech company that has gone public. They make it as difficult as possible to hire senior people from industry that's needed to fill critical skill gaps within the engineering org. Then all of the talented mid-level folks who have no internal mobility jump ship for Facebook.