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Big mistake in the article to claim that a single engineer could build Amazon, Facebook, or Google. Amazon is the most egregious. > . A software developer coul

Big mistake in the article to claim that a single engineer could build Amazon, Facebook, or Google. Amazon is the most egregious. > . A software developer could write a simple e-commerce website in a few days; Amazon employs 1,335,000 people [source]. Those 1.4 million people are not coding the e-commerce app but making e-commerce happen as package handlers, drivers, finance teams, etc. on top of that Amazon has many non e-commerce related projects: building hardware (Kindles, Alexa, etc) , AWS and support, and on and on.

jasode 5y ago
>Big mistake in the article to claim that a single engineer could build Amazon, Facebook, or Google. You misread it. The author is not equating them; he's contrasting them. Simplicity-of-proof-of-concept vs complexity of real-world-AmaFaceGoog.
- ivan_gammel 5y ago
  The author puts as a reason some internal objectives of the corporation not visible to an observer behind the simple idea of their website. But contrast focused on them is wrong, it is comparison between apples and asteroids. The complexity of a corporation is created from external factors: E.g. Google or Facebook are not a search engine or social network (both even in current scale would require significantly less people to implement and maintain). They are advertisement businesses compliant with local regulations, serving different audiences and optimizing variety of financial KPIs set by investors. Just naming and understanding all those factors is beyond intellectual abilities of a single person and this is why big organizations are really difficult: it is not due to complexity of relationships between people or misalignment (they are just derivatives), but due to complexity of the problems such organizations are dealing with.
planb 5y ago
That's what I thought, too. Amazon is a bad example, maybe for Twitter, you could make the case. But not for the reasons the article mentions: Sure, there's some overhead due to communication and misaligned incentives, but most of the work goes into the hidden complexity that even the simplest tasks contain when rolled out to millions of people. And I'm not only talking about technical complexity - I'd be interested how many people Twitter employs just for checking reported tweets.
- hunter-gatherer 5y ago
  > ...that even the simplest tasks contain when rolled out to millions of people. Wasn't this precisely the focus of the article?
  - planb 5y ago
    Maybe I misread it, but I understood that the article said that the simplest tasks get complex when dozens of people are involved in solving it. I'm not saying that's wrong, of course working with a large team creates overhead. But giving the headcount of amazon and google as evidence for this is a bit misleading.
  - handoflixue 5y ago
    > Wasn't this precisely the focus of the article? "A software developer could write a proof-of-concept search engine in a few days; Alphabet employs 130,000 people " This suggests that those 130,000 people are all software developers, and that they all work on the search engine. I think clarifying that ambiguity is a pretty appropriate response. The reason Alphabet employees 130K people isn't because "running a search engine at scale" requires it, it's because they're in 30 other lines of business.
- freewilly1040 5y ago
  I wouldn't really listen to the case on either FB or Twitter unless the person arguing the point is familiar with using the products as an advertiser. That is the core product, after all.
nopassrecover 5y ago
I’m not going to say it’s the same, but I have a bit of a story here. My first gig was at a small software retailer, straight out of high school and balancing study at uni. Picture a GameStop competitor but selling home/commercial software and licensing as well as games. The owner’s approach was to employ a series of teenagers who saw this as an opportunity to get that elusive “foot in the door” first job experience despite being paid less than half minimum wage for the hours we were actually paid for (hard not to envy today’s junior Devs walking into jobs out of uni today, yet alone the eye watering salaries, but then again there’s something to be said with romanticised rear vision for working your way up the ladder during that golden age of the early modern web). Two of us, while balancing sales and service to customers, and keeping the store running (receiving and unpacking stock, boxing up and posting customer orders, phone calls, stocktake, cleaning, directing the occasional casual staff), without any formal education, with tools that don’t match today (no especially useful libraries or tools, eg pre-jQuery, Ajax just catching on and feeling like magic, plain PHP, .NET 2.0 without an ORM etc.), built and maintained a website that in my view rivalled Amazon’s UX at the time (we developed some novel ways to group and present licensing and editions that surpassed Amazon in this space). On top of this we developed and maintained a bespoke WinForms POS/inventory/accounting system that handled all sales and ordering etc., supporting tools to handle pricing/forecasting, automation scripts to keep customers updated etc., and a series of integrations with suppliers to pull near-live stock availability and pricing for perhaps 40k SKUs from around 80 suppliers (none of whom had APIs so we were screen scraping custom portals, parsing the odd PDF price list, or best case pulling CSV email attachments). The net effect was with minimal operational effort we could effectively compete with far larger businesses and provide a better experience. This included the ability, with near zero-touch, to surface a comprehensive catalogue of stock while maintaining minimal inventory, automatically take customer orders, place corresponding supplier orders based on the best price at that point in time (rationalising and aligning across price lists, with consideration of preferential contract terms or shipping timelines), publish near-live pricing and ETA changes, administer a customer loyalty program, and provide automatic updates to customers. We just got stuff done because we didn’t know any better. I know this is several scales lower in complexity than Amazon, eg fraud detection, volume of catalog and sales, reseller accounts etc. but again we were not 1000s of Stanford and MIT educated engineers. Incidentally this has shaped my view of the undervalued power of having bespoke software supporting your core business operations, despite also driving home the risks and perils of reinventing the wheel.
netcan 5y ago
I agree with you on amazon, but I think the author does have a point. Take FB as an example. FB have 60k employees, 12X the 2012 IPO number. It also costs 12X to run facebook today. They don't do that much more today than in 2012. They mostly just do things a more complicated way. IMO, the reason for that is actually revenue. Beyond a point, there's no market discipline reason for mitigating costs. FB is profitable enough with its >30% margins. Investors don't want them to cut the salary bill. They want FB to hire people, invest, do more stuff & grow. If FB revenues had plateaued around $10bn, I'm pretty sure FB would still exist. FB would have 90% fewer employees and users would not experience much difference. Once you have all these extra people, and basically the same set of tasks at hand... sluggish ways of doing things and inefficiency are basically guaranteed. If 500 devs are now working on an area that 50 people previously ran, it's going to look like ineffectiveness at the ground level. A lot of the software industry is like that. Half the industry, like most internal dev orgs are not very capable or motivated, and things look sluggish at ground level. The other half is flooded with cash and great devs, but teams are bigger than actually necessary.
- Dumblydorr 5y ago
  My question: what is new about what FB is doing currently? Are they attempting to maintain their current influence and social network? Stem the tide of anti social media talk? Encourage controversial misinformation? What do they need the employees for? Is it to improve their image for investors?
  - netcan 5y ago
    >> what is new about what FB is doing currently? You'd find the same sort of answers at FB that you'd find at citibank. They have regulatory challenges, content moderation challenges. Corporate structure challenges left over from acquisitions or whatnot. I'm sure there are a ton of items on the todo/doing/done lists. There are "new and exciting" projects, oculus VR, whatever is happening with the marketplace, etc. Same thing at citibank. From the perspective of a manager there, I imagine it looks like they're doing a ton of stuff all the time.
- kleinsch 5y ago
lbriner 5y ago
This is probably due to engineer's bias. We like to look at something like Amazon and think "I could build that". It's just a shopping site? A business person would know all of the things you are talking about that make that e-commerce site as successful as it is. I have stumbled across many existing companies that do things that I have thought about developing but they employ 2 people, have no marketing and no-one knows about them. That said, I also agree that there is a weird exponential growth of team size with a product that isn't always much bigger. Our SaaS company turns over about 3M/year with a dev team of 6. I was looking at another similar company the other day (granted slightly bigger/more complicated but only 2 main products) and they had about 200 devs in their about page!
fouric 5y ago
> Big mistake in the article to claim that a single engineer could build Amazon, Facebook, or Google. The article does not claim that. You misread it. Right there, in the quote you included: > A software developer could write a simple e-commerce website in a few days; Amazon employs 1,335,000 people It says "simple" right in the middle. Then it immediately says afterward that Amazon employs 1.3M people, which clearly indicates that the author does not consider Amazon to be "simple" (and this holds regardless of whether the 1.3M people are factually related to e-commerce), and that he does not expect his readers to, either.
- twobitshifter 5y ago
  The author is trying to use Amazon’s workforce size to support his argument that “given their organization's internal objectives, they are forced to build huge workforces to accomplish what seems like "simple" tasks.” “internal objectives” is not why Amazon needs 1.4 million people to complete the “simple” task described. And if you redefine internal objectives to include everything else that Amazon does to make money then it’s really saying nothing at all.
jldugger 5y ago
Well, 13 people worked on Instagram when FB acquired it for a billion. So... productivity varies.

jasode 5y ago

>Big mistake in the article to claim that a single engineer could build Amazon, Facebook, or Google. You misread it. The author is not equating them; he's contrasting them. Simplicity-of-proof-of-concept vs complexity of real-world-AmaFaceGoog.

ivan_gammel 5y ago
The author puts as a reason some internal objectives of the corporation not visible to an observer behind the simple idea of their website. But contrast focused on them is wrong, it is comparison between apples and asteroids. The complexity of a corporation is created from external factors: E.g. Google or Facebook are not a search engine or social network (both even in current scale would require significantly less people to implement and maintain). They are advertisement businesses compliant with local regulations, serving different audiences and optimizing variety of financial KPIs set by investors. Just naming and understanding all those factors is beyond intellectual abilities of a single person and this is why big organizations are really difficult: it is not due to complexity of relationships between people or misalignment (they are just derivatives), but due to complexity of the problems such organizations are dealing with.

planb 5y ago

That's what I thought, too. Amazon is a bad example, maybe for Twitter, you could make the case. But not for the reasons the article mentions: Sure, there's some overhead due to communication and misaligned incentives, but most of the work goes into the hidden complexity that even the simplest tasks contain when rolled out to millions of people. And I'm not only talking about technical complexity - I'd be interested how many people Twitter employs just for checking reported tweets.

hunter-gatherer 5y ago
> ...that even the simplest tasks contain when rolled out to millions of people. Wasn't this precisely the focus of the article?
- planb 5y ago
  Maybe I misread it, but I understood that the article said that the simplest tasks get complex when dozens of people are involved in solving it. I'm not saying that's wrong, of course working with a large team creates overhead. But giving the headcount of amazon and google as evidence for this is a bit misleading.
- handoflixue 5y ago
  > Wasn't this precisely the focus of the article? "A software developer could write a proof-of-concept search engine in a few days; Alphabet employs 130,000 people " This suggests that those 130,000 people are all software developers, and that they all work on the search engine. I think clarifying that ambiguity is a pretty appropriate response. The reason Alphabet employees 130K people isn't because "running a search engine at scale" requires it, it's because they're in 30 other lines of business.
freewilly1040 5y ago
I wouldn't really listen to the case on either FB or Twitter unless the person arguing the point is familiar with using the products as an advertiser. That is the core product, after all.

nopassrecover 5y ago

I’m not going to say it’s the same, but I have a bit of a story here. My first gig was at a small software retailer, straight out of high school and balancing study at uni. Picture a GameStop competitor but selling home/commercial software and licensing as well as games. The owner’s approach was to employ a series of teenagers who saw this as an opportunity to get that elusive “foot in the door” first job experience despite being paid less than half minimum wage for the hours we were actually paid for (hard not to envy today’s junior Devs walking into jobs out of uni today, yet alone the eye watering salaries, but then again there’s something to be said with romanticised rear vision for working your way up the ladder during that golden age of the early modern web). Two of us, while balancing sales and service to customers, and keeping the store running (receiving and unpacking stock, boxing up and posting customer orders, phone calls, stocktake, cleaning, directing the occasional casual staff), without any formal education, with tools that don’t match today (no especially useful libraries or tools, eg pre-jQuery, Ajax just catching on and feeling like magic, plain PHP, .NET 2.0 without an ORM etc.), built and maintained a website that in my view rivalled Amazon’s UX at the time (we developed some novel ways to group and present licensing and editions that surpassed Amazon in this space). On top of this we developed and maintained a bespoke WinForms POS/inventory/accounting system that handled all sales and ordering etc., supporting tools to handle pricing/forecasting, automation scripts to keep customers updated etc., and a series of integrations with suppliers to pull near-live stock availability and pricing for perhaps 40k SKUs from around 80 suppliers (none of whom had APIs so we were screen scraping custom portals, parsing the odd PDF price list, or best case pulling CSV email attachments). The net effect was with minimal operational effort we could effectively compete with far larger businesses and provide a better experience. This included the ability, with near zero-touch, to surface a comprehensive catalogue of stock while maintaining minimal inventory, automatically take customer orders, place corresponding supplier orders based on the best price at that point in time (rationalising and aligning across price lists, with consideration of preferential contract terms or shipping timelines), publish near-live pricing and ETA changes, administer a customer loyalty program, and provide automatic updates to customers. We just got stuff done because we didn’t know any better. I know this is several scales lower in complexity than Amazon, eg fraud detection, volume of catalog and sales, reseller accounts etc. but again we were not 1000s of Stanford and MIT educated engineers. Incidentally this has shaped my view of the undervalued power of having bespoke software supporting your core business operations, despite also driving home the risks and perils of reinventing the wheel.

netcan 5y ago

I agree with you on amazon, but I think the author does have a point. Take FB as an example. FB have 60k employees, 12X the 2012 IPO number. It also costs 12X to run facebook today. They don't do that much more today than in 2012. They mostly just do things a more complicated way. IMO, the reason for that is actually revenue. Beyond a point, there's no market discipline reason for mitigating costs. FB is profitable enough with its >30% margins. Investors don't want them to cut the salary bill. They want FB to hire people, invest, do more stuff & grow. If FB revenues had plateaued around $10bn, I'm pretty sure FB would still exist. FB would have 90% fewer employees and users would not experience much difference. Once you have all these extra people, and basically the same set of tasks at hand... sluggish ways of doing things and inefficiency are basically guaranteed. If 500 devs are now working on an area that 50 people previously ran, it's going to look like ineffectiveness at the ground level. A lot of the software industry is like that. Half the industry, like most internal dev orgs are not very capable or motivated, and things look sluggish at ground level. The other half is flooded with cash and great devs, but teams are bigger than actually necessary.

Dumblydorr 5y ago
My question: what is new about what FB is doing currently? Are they attempting to maintain their current influence and social network? Stem the tide of anti social media talk? Encourage controversial misinformation? What do they need the employees for? Is it to improve their image for investors?
- netcan 5y ago
  >> what is new about what FB is doing currently? You'd find the same sort of answers at FB that you'd find at citibank. They have regulatory challenges, content moderation challenges. Corporate structure challenges left over from acquisitions or whatnot. I'm sure there are a ton of items on the todo/doing/done lists. There are "new and exciting" projects, oculus VR, whatever is happening with the marketplace, etc. Same thing at citibank. From the perspective of a manager there, I imagine it looks like they're doing a ton of stuff all the time.
kleinsch 5y ago

lbriner 5y ago

This is probably due to engineer's bias. We like to look at something like Amazon and think "I could build that". It's just a shopping site? A business person would know all of the things you are talking about that make that e-commerce site as successful as it is. I have stumbled across many existing companies that do things that I have thought about developing but they employ 2 people, have no marketing and no-one knows about them. That said, I also agree that there is a weird exponential growth of team size with a product that isn't always much bigger. Our SaaS company turns over about 3M/year with a dev team of 6. I was looking at another similar company the other day (granted slightly bigger/more complicated but only 2 main products) and they had about 200 devs in their about page!

fouric 5y ago

> Big mistake in the article to claim that a single engineer could build Amazon, Facebook, or Google. The article does not claim that. You misread it. Right there, in the quote you included: > A software developer could write a simple e-commerce website in a few days; Amazon employs 1,335,000 people It says "simple" right in the middle. Then it immediately says afterward that Amazon employs 1.3M people, which clearly indicates that the author does not consider Amazon to be "simple" (and this holds regardless of whether the 1.3M people are factually related to e-commerce), and that he does not expect his readers to, either.

twobitshifter 5y ago
The author is trying to use Amazon’s workforce size to support his argument that “given their organization's internal objectives, they are forced to build huge workforces to accomplish what seems like "simple" tasks.” “internal objectives” is not why Amazon needs 1.4 million people to complete the “simple” task described. And if you redefine internal objectives to include everything else that Amazon does to make money then it’s really saying nothing at all.

jldugger 5y ago

Well, 13 people worked on Instagram when FB acquired it for a billion. So... productivity varies.