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Way less than half the engineers are needed to keep the lights on. Keeping the lights on isn't enough. You want to grow. You have competitors that will do more
by onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Way less than half the engineers are needed to keep the lights on.
Keeping the lights on isn't enough. You want to grow. You have competitors that will do more than keep the lights on to take your market share.
- bosie 4y agowhat's the engineering to employee ratio at companies like snap?
- Der_Einzige 4y agoWe saw this to be categorically not the case with Twitter. No competition despite nothing but network effects preventing competitors from emerging, lots of engineers, lots of time, and no added features. The engineers did BS useless work or worse, did nothing the past several years.
- short_sells_poo 4y agoI'd argue many (most?) of these companies do not innovate or grow. What innovation has come out of Snap/TikTok/Twitter/{insert name here}? They make one product, get ballooned up with endless cash (or used to) and then do nothing for years because they don't really need to do anything as long as money keeps flowing. I'd argue many (most?) of these companies have so many employees not because they need all that manpower, but because the majority of management is engaged in empire building. As a department head/PM, more headcount = more power = more prestige = even more headcount = ... I'd therefore argue that less than half the engineers are needed even if these companies wanted to grow. They only have so many employees because they had more cash than what they could put into actual innovation. You can see this everywhere. Very smart PHDs get hired all over the place for very impressive salaries and the vast majority of them do absolutely useless busywork at best.