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It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertisin
by pembrook 4y ago
It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform).
Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers.
Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess:
- 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketing and distribution
- A microprocessor and component design business
- 3 entire operating systems and developer tools and app store sales infrastructure for each
- 50+ software products and services, including competitors for Microsoft office suite, Netflix, Spotify, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Adobe Premier, Zoom, and more
- a film & tv production business
- a massive physical retail store footprint
- a global e-commerce store
- I’m sure I’m forgetting something else
- ksec 4y agoMaps, Siri, iCloud, ApplePay, Apple Card, Apple Pay Later, Apple Cash. AppleNews. Apple Fitness Apple Arcade.
- marban 4y agoAdobe, on the other hand, with its ~26k headcount is juggling an astonishing range of products and services it seems.
- oblio 4y agoAdobe's the most forgotten and ignored tech company that actually makes staple software products and services, I think. No matter how much people hate their price gouging :-)
- DrewADesign 4y agoSome call it price gouging and some call it a subscription to professional software that's constantly under significant development. Other professional tools in adjacent industries cost a LOT MORE. Nuke Studio, for example, costs 4k/quarter. Sure Adobe should focus more on old usability issues in lieu of new features and many of their programs have such broad userbases that they couldn't possibly focus equally on everything their users want them to focus on, but when it comes down to it, people are mad because it's something they want, but not enough to pay for. Looking at their uservoice forums for 5 minutes dispenses with the notion that they're just giving these apps the bare minimum amount of work and using them as cash cows. There are cheaper or FOSS alternatives that suit most non-professional's needs but if you want Adobe's professional tools and have those tools keep up with our ever changing technical landscape, that costs money. I professionally use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier Pro, After Effects, Audition, Acrobat, Lightroom Classic and XD, so the CC subscription is an absolute bargain.
- marban 4y agoWill get better when Scott Belsky takes over.
- Meph504 4y agoWell Adobe has also done a lot of acquisition and (many of them they then failed to maintain those products, until a slow death. what they did to Macromedia still hurts.) let us not forget they purchased photoshop and most of what is there PDF software today came from the acquisitions of several companies.
- tayo42 4y agoThat's funny I never thought about that. Is their pay low?
- oblio 4y agoNot super low. They're just not cool nor super big.
- FractalHQ 4y agoAdobe software is user hostile, bug infested spyware perched atop mountains of tech debt.
- mechanical_bear 4y agoStill chugging along on CS6….
- whywhywhydude 4y agoThey probably have thousands of contractors who are conveniently left out of the headcount.
- markoman 4y agoIt also has to be considered that Adobe has a large number of developer contractors that aren't included in the employee headcount, yes?
- piva00 4y agoEven including the retail employees, Apple's footprint is barely double the size of Facebook. I agree that it's really bizarre how wasteful FB's operations seem to be compared to Apple's. What an unimaginative company...
- sfe22 4y agoBut it creates jobs?
- willio58 4y agoAnd now it’s laying off thousands..
- KptMarchewa 4y agoIsn't a lot of retail apple stuff essentially outsourced? Apple sells a lot of stuff in Poland, but there are zero Apple jobs here. It's all "authorized reseller" and "authorized service".
- Moto7451 4y agoI’m assuming you’re in Poland. In the US and in some countries neighboring Poland there are owned and operated Apple stores with Apple staff. When I visit my work’s Warsaw office I always seem to need an Apple Store for something and end up settling for an iStore or similar third party. Authorized Retailers are fine but they usually lack all the small spare parts Apple will carry. On these trips I always seem to break a specific part that I know an Apple Store carries and have to wait until I am in another country. These stores were started in the early 00s due to Apple’s lack of control over how their products were merchandised in US big box stores. Prior to Apple Stores, I purchased all my Apple products and equipment from a catalog or the early E-commerce catalog websites A lot of the experiential sales in Apples world stemmed from the retail experience they created.
- duped 4y agoIf they didn't work for meta they'd be working on something that might be competing with meta
- sam1r 4y agoYou’re forgetting that they also own WhatsApp, the primary mode of communication for several countries.
- cjrp 4y agoI know it's grown since the acquisition, but how many people were involved in developing and running the service pre-Facebook?
- hdjjhhvvhga 4y agoAround 35.
- oblio 4y agoDo you think a large entreprise that actually needs to follow legislation in 100+ countries can work the same way a startup can, though?
- pembrook 4y agoApple runs a competitor for that too with iMessage so I’d call it a wash. Ditto on the AR/VR metaverse thing if macrumors is to be believed.
- hfbff 4y agoAre you in the USA? iMessage is only really relevant in the USA. Meanwhile, Whatsapp is huge in Latin America, Europe, Africa, parts of Asia
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- robertlagrant 4y agoFacebook, Instagram, Meta (which is Oculus hardware and all the metaverse...stuff), Whatsapp, ads, Portal (which includes hardware). It still seems bloated, but they do a wide variety of things, including running their own enormo-scale platform, in addition to doing things on AWS.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dnissley 4y agoPoor Workplace, always forgotten. https://www.workplace.com/ https://www.workplace.com/
- peteradio 4y agoApple came from the 80s when people actually built real difficult shit instead of cashing in on corruption.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stevage 4y agoI worked on FB briefly. It turns out that platform does vastly more than I had imagined, and maybe you too.
- jollyllama 4y agoIt's especially crazy given how terrible Facebook's UX is outside of the native apps. Ex. You can't rate marketplace sellers at all and it's been that way for a year or more.
- hellojesus 4y agoI figured this was done purposely to drive users to native apps, where more device data could be collected than could be through a standard browser.
- jollyllama 4y agoYou're probably right. Now management can reap the reward of sic'ing thousands of engineers on data collection rather than fixing the deficiencies in their product. Too bad for the engineers, though.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bamboozled 4y agoThere was a time when it seemed like Facebook was the world, and like it was unstoppable. They hired a lot of people believing this.
- ak_111 4y agoIt is more crazy if you remember when they bought whatssapp it was less than 20 employees supporting a billion user. And the app doesn't look like it changed that much since it started being supported by 10,000 employees (guessing).
- aaomidi 4y agoToo many cooks
- wa_throwaway 4y ago> And the app doesn't look like it changed that much... You didn't intend it, but that is a complement of the highest order. Thanks! Those who've worked on large systems over many years will understand what I mean.
- skyyler 4y agoI can see what you're getting at here but in this case, a lack of changes is NOT desired or virtuous. WA is being left in the dust by messaging platforms that actually care about shipping a quality product.
- llampx 4y agoOh hell no. I'm glad that Whatsapp is being mostly left alone, or at least that's what I see as a user. They ship some improvements and extraneous stuff (Whatsapp Status) from time to time, but the core of the app stays as it is. Most people don't look forward to every time their app is redesigned starting from the icon up. It mostly doesn't get better, it gets worse to satisfy a Product Manager's CV checkbox.
- c-cube 4y agoSays you. Lots of people like software that keeps working reliably over the years. I know I do. The only valuable updates to WhatsApp are when new emojis are added ;). For the rest it already works very well, why break it or redesign it?
- madduci 4y agoMany businesses have the "not invented here" syndrome, i believe they have many employees doing yak shaving or writing tools/libraries to support the business. Examples are osquery, folly and contributions to Apache Thrift as well, just to mention a few.
- countvonbalzac 4y agoThey did slightly more than contributions to Apache Thrift :)
- f1shy 4y agoAnd whatsapp
- papito 4y agoWhatsApp and Instagram, both acquired by Facebook, were actually a gold standard in lean development. 1o to 30 people for a massively popular product. If these companies were creating sprawling and unnecessary micro-service-based infrastructures, they would have easily needed headcounts 10 times as large. So it's really a case in point that Facebook is ultra-wasteful.
- adave 4y agoIf you look from the outside yes, however there is low we don't know about FB and hidden works not producing a product etc just yet.They are very long term focused and very different from Tim Apple's idea of a company as an operational engine.