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Right on cue, HN armchair experts underestimating the complexity of real world businesses.
by sergiomattei 5y ago
Right on cue, HN armchair experts underestimating the complexity of real world businesses.
- tmp_anon_22 5y agoYes but don't underestimate the number of wastefully run businesses either.
- xeromal 5y agoIDK, I mean, people are employed. That's a good thing right?
- umvi 5y agoNot really unless it is gainful employment. Toll booth worker is employment, but it isn't gainful employment. It's mindless soul crushing work.
- xeromal 5y agoUnionized work sounds pretty gainful. Less chance of getting screwed over. Anyways, I'd agree that gainful is ideal, but I think most humans prefer to be employed and occupied over having nothing to do.
- triceratops 5y agoI'm certain there's at least one toll both worker that loves their job.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tengbretson 5y agoWhat business?
- kesselvon 5y agoLots of companies overhire for empire building purposes and for tasks that offer marginal or zero value to the company. I'm sure plenty of people here can attest to the cascade of overhiring that happens to startups all the time.
- Spivak 5y agoAnd that’s fine, every company finds their balance. Usually a year down the road they’ll have a round of layoffs and get closer to their equilibrium.
- duxup 5y agoIt's a common question for sure. I wouldn't necessarily pull out "armchair experts" type comments for someone expressing curiosity / wondering what they're all up to.
- mtberatwork 5y agoWhat was the question even? It was just pure snark. Nothing about their site indicates a Wordpress blog for that matter.
- duxup 5y agoCuriosity / wondering what they're all up to.
- criddell 5y agoIt seems to take a headcount increase of at least an order of magnitude to turn a product into a business and I have a hard time understanding that. For example, when Instagram was purchased by Facebook they only had 13 employees and now they have something like 500.
- triceratops 5y agoI'm amazed Instagram has only 500. I assume that's because a lot of things like operations, infra, payroll, IT, facilities, and HR are shared with FB?
- criddell 5y agoHow do you feel about them having only 13 employees in 2012 when none of the things you listed were shared with FB?
- im3w1l 5y agoInstagram is a huge, huge product. Hiring 500 people to chase diminishing returns does sound reasonable.
- triceratops 5y agoThey were also a lot smaller in 2012. And with 13 employees, you can get away with outsourcing a lot of those things.
- criddell 5y agoOr maybe they built a product that could apply filters and share photos and that only took 13 people to make.
- triceratops 5y agoObviously. But even in a company with just 13 people building filters, the employees need to get paid, get health insurance, desks, chairs and computers. Engineers need servers, databases, monitoring, pagers. That's the part that they outsourced then, and now FB manages for them.