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That means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for? There are significant global engineering companies that do real

That means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for? There are significant global engineering companies that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways that have roughly that number of people, including their R&D departments.

hnbad 4y ago
Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams) and has a high rate of turnover. They also spend a lot of resources on stuff tangential to their core business like open source libraries. Project managers have also very aggressively been pushing attendees at conferences I've been to to apply to work at FB. In all likelihood we're also not talking Facebook but Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever else they have been buying up. Depending on how the acquisitions were handled, there's likely a lot of structural redundancies there too. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not suggesting all of the layoffs were developers. But a company like Meta has a vast number of support staff and this number scales with the number of developers. A good chunk of the layoffs might just be service staff being replaced with external service companies. And even if they layed off thousands of developers, that would likely mean also laying off thousands of other workers no longer needed to support the developers.
- tazjin 4y ago
  "allows for redundancy in development" is an incredible euphemism for "is unable to coordinate cross-team work"
  - Frost1x 4y ago
    Eh, redundancy doesn't have to imply a lack of coordination, it can be strategic. I haven't worked at FB/Meta so you may have deeper insight here. If you have something extremely critical you need done and enough resources, especially at a high risk of failure, you often have multiple groups tackling the same problem to increase your odds of overall success.
- cranekam 4y ago
  > Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams) Example or sources for this claim? I spent close to a decade working there and this doesn’t sound familiar at all.
  - ketchupdebugger 4y ago
    Its more like, if x team doesn't deliver a functionality that y team needs, y team would need to come up with an alternative/short term solution in order to answer y customers/users. Sometimes alternatives doesn't go away even after a permanent fix comes along. Also since Meta is multi app you could have one solution for FB and one solution for IG etc.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    That's pretty much what multiple people working at FB at the time told me over the past years. It was also the conclusion of a third-party analysis of the FB mobile app which literally included multiple libraries for doing the same thing for different parts of the app which were developed by different teams. This was also true for the Facebook web app at least during the early React years.
    - cranekam 4y ago
      I doubt this is an unusual situation. I'm not falling on my sword to defend Facebook here, BTW. The company does a lot wrong. I just suspect it's not much worse than anyone else.
threeseed 4y ago
> that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways Spend more time talking to average people. They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  > They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them. Agreed. If someone’s mental model of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp doesn’t extend beyond “scroll through bad posts from distant relatives” then they don’t really understand how those products are used by the general public. A lot of people in the tech world never really got engaged with social media, stopped visiting (or deleted their accounts), and have anchored their mental models to their personal experience a decade ago. Meanwhile, the world has changed massively and Meta has a lot of users for a reason.
  - Retric 4y ago
    At least 3/4th of people don’t uses Facebook and their average user makes 1 posts per week. So it’s really not important to most people. It’s numbers are heavily influenced by people who use it because someone or some organization happens to use it.
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and don't use it ever. But that's a really bad way to determine the important of Facebook, for two reasons. 1. You've assumed that the only purpose of Facebook is posting, so a user making an average of one post per week isn't finding it valuable. Bad assumption. 2. You're counting a bizarre measure of market penetration, a standard that only air and food and water would meet. Many, many people don't use cars, and people who do often only use them five days a week. If you think that means cars aren't important to many people, try taking one away!
      - pc86 4y ago
wincy 4y ago
No idea, it’d be nice if a few of those 80,000 could get the “hide” button to work properly when I hit it on my iPhone Facebook app. I hate when people post gross closeup pictures of spiders (my friends are weird) then the “hide” button grays it out for a second then instantly re-serves the post in the same spot in my feed. It has been like this for years now. It also took months and months for them to fix a “phantom message” where it’d show I had a single Messenger message from the main Facebook app, despite there being nothing there (even in the ‘not friends with you’ section, I checked!).
- flerchin 4y ago
  I wonder if that "phantom message" was intentional. It surely got you, and me, to check the Facebook messenger app several times.
- e-clinton 4y ago
  The unfollow feature works great. And so does the unfriend.
  - lupire 4y ago
    As does the Super Unfriend feature, which comes in two flavors, indefinite and permanent.
  - wincy 4y ago
    Honestly a lot of the pictures are people in a spina bifida parents support group sharing pictures of their child’s spinal surgery. I don’t want to straight up block these people or even unfollow them as they might have questions I can answer sometime in the future, like I’m good at helping dads get used to the idea of cathetering their daughters without feeling like they’re a total weirdo. So when I see someone who is going through trauma like this sharing a picture and asking for emotional support I don’t want to block them. I tap “hide” which then promptly does… absolutely nothing. There is definitely a legitimate use case for the “hide” button where the two things you mentioned won’t really help.
- 998244353 4y ago
throwaway0asd 4y ago
I live really close to their largest data center and only about 500 people work there. It’s 4x larger now than when they initially broke ground and even then it was insanely huge. Edit. I just saw the photo for their Nebraska data center, so I guess each of their locations are about the same size and shape.
- grepfru_it 4y ago
  You don't need people in a datacenter. You only need a skeleton crew for hands when things physically break, everything else should be done remotely
  - cvwright 4y ago
    So what then is the argument about them needing more employees to serve more users? The frontend apps are all the same, whether they have 3 users or 3 billion.
    - mapme 4y ago
      The front end apps are not all the same. If you built an app that handles 3 users well do you think it would easily handle 3 billion with no tweaks at any layer (app, framework, OS, network, hardware, edge traffic routing, internal dc network fabric, caching layer, storage for binary/ graph/ KV/ relational, cluster scheduler, security )? Another example, ML backed products (eg. Search, any RecSys) requires tuning features based on product specific needs. You also end up leaving massive efficiencies on the floor by not hiring more specialists as you scale. This is a good read which explains it in detail https://danluu.com/in-house/ https://danluu.com/in-house/ I would also suggest reading their published papers on in house systems to understand the challenges that come with operating at a large scale. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30940595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30940595 I’m sure FB could operate with a range of employees 40k-100k(?), but that number scaling with users is far from surprising.
      - milosmns 4y ago
sealeck 4y ago
https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> That means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for? At Meta’s scale, that’s about 1 employee for every 45,000 monthly active users across their platforms. Many of those MAUs are using multiple Meta products. I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees. They’re serving a significant portion of the entire world’s population with their products. Of course they’re going to need a lot of employees.
- twoodfin 4y ago
  To understand if that’s effective scaling, you have to know how much the average employee is costing Facebook and how much revenue the average MAU is generating.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Cost-effective is a different matter from labor-effective. Poor/thrifty users take the same amount of work as users who click on ads and buy stuff.
- indymike 4y ago
  > I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees The question that people have is, "what do the employees actually do?" It's because most people have no idea how labor intensive tech is, nor do they understand the math behind the revenue that 45k active users generate. That said, when you look at 80,000 people "to operate a website" it sounds ridiculous (even thought it probably is not).
- Kuinox 4y ago
  In 2016-2017, Valve had 360 employees[1], for 67 millions montly player[2], which make 186k active user per employees. But then, Valve was one of the most profitable company per employee count. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-reveals-steams-monthly-active-user-count-game-sales-region/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-reveals-steams-monthly-a...
gregdoesit 4y ago
When I did a deepdive on Facebook ~5 months ago ("Inside the Facebook Engineering Culture"), I confirmed with people inside the company the company having ~75,000 global employees, ~32,000 working in tech. While I can't answer the question "what does the company need them all for", consider that the company's products are used by ~3.6B people every month, meaning they have about one full-time employee for every ~45,000 users. Compare this with Google (one employee for every ~29,000 users) or Twitter (one employee for every ~52,000 users). The ballpark is similar, and shows the trend of it being harder to have fewer employees per thousand users (Twitter is much smaller than Meta, and Google twice the size in employee count while reached ~20% more monthly users). The company generated ~$117B in revenue in 2021, which is ~$1.46M per employee. Profits per employee (net income divided by employee count) was ~$480K/employee. There will, naturally be a cost of revenue, cost of customer support (even if not all of it in-house). Also worth considering that Meta is composed like several companies: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger, Reality Labs and several smaller/larger bets operating pretty independently. I'd flip your question around: what if Meta had fewer employees, what would it mean? It would mean: 1. Increasing their profitability even further 2. Likely less support for current customers, and less of an ability to invest in forward-looking initiatives I'm sure shareholders of Meta would be happy with #1. For #2, short-term shareholders would be happy to see all of this go. Long-term shareholders would likely realize there would be a cost to cutting down on customer support and R&D and I would not expect them to support this, given the very high profits Meta already has. All in all, I find it remarkable that the company can operate with such revenue and profit numbers, and I suspect they are already deliberately hiring employees more conservatively, to keep up this profitability rate. As a side comment, I have my thoughts on how non-applicable the linked article is for software engineers at Meta, as discussed in this comment [1] on this thread. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33150495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33150495
- anon23anon 4y ago
  I don't think so - I'm an insider and honestly to me the biggest amount of fluff is the all project manager/program manager/product owner/process owner types roles. Realistically you could put them all under the broad title of business analyst. From what I've seen a given engineering team will grown in size under a given director and the corresponding director on the product/business side will want to grow their side of the house equally and so they do and we end up w/ roughly a 1 to 1 ratio of developers to business analysts of some sort which is about what is cited here.
jrs235 4y ago
When money was "free or cheap" (low interests) and plentiful I believe many of these large tech firms added head count as a competitive strategy: "If they're behind our desk then they're not behind a competitor's!" Now that interest rates are going up and talk of tighter times are in the mix, "waste" reduction is the new and upcoming wind that these and all firms are adjusting their sails to. Additionally, keeping rumors of mass layoffs can slow and paralyze smaller firms that are looking to hire because many may be holding off longer to actually hire current candidates in hopes of, and counting on, many many more potential applicants in the near future. Plus with the influx of developers they may be hoping for a buyers (employers) market with regards to compensation in the next few months.
mindtricks 4y ago
Facebook is an ad company, and if that market is declining, those cuts may come from non-technical groups meant to serve those accounts and markets. There are likely other programs necessary with high marketing needs that I could imagine need culling and thus fewer people.

hnbad 4y ago

Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams) and has a high rate of turnover. They also spend a lot of resources on stuff tangential to their core business like open source libraries. Project managers have also very aggressively been pushing attendees at conferences I've been to to apply to work at FB. In all likelihood we're also not talking Facebook but Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever else they have been buying up. Depending on how the acquisitions were handled, there's likely a lot of structural redundancies there too. EDIT: To be clear, I'm not suggesting all of the layoffs were developers. But a company like Meta has a vast number of support staff and this number scales with the number of developers. A good chunk of the layoffs might just be service staff being replaced with external service companies. And even if they layed off thousands of developers, that would likely mean also laying off thousands of other workers no longer needed to support the developers.

tazjin 4y ago
"allows for redundancy in development" is an incredible euphemism for "is unable to coordinate cross-team work"
- Frost1x 4y ago
  Eh, redundancy doesn't have to imply a lack of coordination, it can be strategic. I haven't worked at FB/Meta so you may have deeper insight here. If you have something extremely critical you need done and enough resources, especially at a high risk of failure, you often have multiple groups tackling the same problem to increase your odds of overall success.
cranekam 4y ago
> Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams) Example or sources for this claim? I spent close to a decade working there and this doesn’t sound familiar at all.
- ketchupdebugger 4y ago
  Its more like, if x team doesn't deliver a functionality that y team needs, y team would need to come up with an alternative/short term solution in order to answer y customers/users. Sometimes alternatives doesn't go away even after a permanent fix comes along. Also since Meta is multi app you could have one solution for FB and one solution for IG etc.
- hnbad 4y ago
  That's pretty much what multiple people working at FB at the time told me over the past years. It was also the conclusion of a third-party analysis of the FB mobile app which literally included multiple libraries for doing the same thing for different parts of the app which were developed by different teams. This was also true for the Facebook web app at least during the early React years.
  - cranekam 4y ago
    I doubt this is an unusual situation. I'm not falling on my sword to defend Facebook here, BTW. The company does a lot wrong. I just suspect it's not much worse than anyone else.

threeseed 4y ago

> that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways Spend more time talking to average people. They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them. Agreed. If someone’s mental model of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp doesn’t extend beyond “scroll through bad posts from distant relatives” then they don’t really understand how those products are used by the general public. A lot of people in the tech world never really got engaged with social media, stopped visiting (or deleted their accounts), and have anchored their mental models to their personal experience a decade ago. Meanwhile, the world has changed massively and Meta has a lot of users for a reason.
- Retric 4y ago
  At least 3/4th of people don’t uses Facebook and their average user makes 1 posts per week. So it’s really not important to most people. It’s numbers are heavily influenced by people who use it because someone or some organization happens to use it.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and don't use it ever. But that's a really bad way to determine the important of Facebook, for two reasons. 1. You've assumed that the only purpose of Facebook is posting, so a user making an average of one post per week isn't finding it valuable. Bad assumption. 2. You're counting a bizarre measure of market penetration, a standard that only air and food and water would meet. Many, many people don't use cars, and people who do often only use them five days a week. If you think that means cars aren't important to many people, try taking one away!
    - pc86 4y ago

wincy 4y ago

No idea, it’d be nice if a few of those 80,000 could get the “hide” button to work properly when I hit it on my iPhone Facebook app. I hate when people post gross closeup pictures of spiders (my friends are weird) then the “hide” button grays it out for a second then instantly re-serves the post in the same spot in my feed. It has been like this for years now. It also took months and months for them to fix a “phantom message” where it’d show I had a single Messenger message from the main Facebook app, despite there being nothing there (even in the ‘not friends with you’ section, I checked!).

flerchin 4y ago
I wonder if that "phantom message" was intentional. It surely got you, and me, to check the Facebook messenger app several times.
e-clinton 4y ago
The unfollow feature works great. And so does the unfriend.
- lupire 4y ago
  As does the Super Unfriend feature, which comes in two flavors, indefinite and permanent.
- wincy 4y ago
  Honestly a lot of the pictures are people in a spina bifida parents support group sharing pictures of their child’s spinal surgery. I don’t want to straight up block these people or even unfollow them as they might have questions I can answer sometime in the future, like I’m good at helping dads get used to the idea of cathetering their daughters without feeling like they’re a total weirdo. So when I see someone who is going through trauma like this sharing a picture and asking for emotional support I don’t want to block them. I tap “hide” which then promptly does… absolutely nothing. There is definitely a legitimate use case for the “hide” button where the two things you mentioned won’t really help.
998244353 4y ago

throwaway0asd 4y ago

I live really close to their largest data center and only about 500 people work there. It’s 4x larger now than when they initially broke ground and even then it was insanely huge. Edit. I just saw the photo for their Nebraska data center, so I guess each of their locations are about the same size and shape.

grepfru_it 4y ago
You don't need people in a datacenter. You only need a skeleton crew for hands when things physically break, everything else should be done remotely
- cvwright 4y ago
  So what then is the argument about them needing more employees to serve more users? The frontend apps are all the same, whether they have 3 users or 3 billion.
  - mapme 4y ago
    The front end apps are not all the same. If you built an app that handles 3 users well do you think it would easily handle 3 billion with no tweaks at any layer (app, framework, OS, network, hardware, edge traffic routing, internal dc network fabric, caching layer, storage for binary/ graph/ KV/ relational, cluster scheduler, security )? Another example, ML backed products (eg. Search, any RecSys) requires tuning features based on product specific needs. You also end up leaving massive efficiencies on the floor by not hiring more specialists as you scale. This is a good read which explains it in detail https://danluu.com/in-house/ https://danluu.com/in-house/ I would also suggest reading their published papers on in house systems to understand the challenges that come with operating at a large scale. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30940595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30940595 I’m sure FB could operate with a range of employees 40k-100k(?), but that number scaling with users is far from surprising.
    - milosmns 4y ago

sealeck 4y ago

https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> That means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for? At Meta’s scale, that’s about 1 employee for every 45,000 monthly active users across their platforms. Many of those MAUs are using multiple Meta products. I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees. They’re serving a significant portion of the entire world’s population with their products. Of course they’re going to need a lot of employees.

twoodfin 4y ago
To understand if that’s effective scaling, you have to know how much the average employee is costing Facebook and how much revenue the average MAU is generating.
- lupire 4y ago
  Cost-effective is a different matter from labor-effective. Poor/thrifty users take the same amount of work as users who click on ads and buy stuff.
indymike 4y ago
> I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees The question that people have is, "what do the employees actually do?" It's because most people have no idea how labor intensive tech is, nor do they understand the math behind the revenue that 45k active users generate. That said, when you look at 80,000 people "to operate a website" it sounds ridiculous (even thought it probably is not).
Kuinox 4y ago
In 2016-2017, Valve had 360 employees[1], for 67 millions montly player[2], which make 186k active user per employees. But then, Valve was one of the most profitable company per employee count. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-reveals-steams-monthly-active-user-count-game-sales-region/ https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-reveals-steams-monthly-a...

gregdoesit 4y ago

When I did a deepdive on Facebook ~5 months ago ("Inside the Facebook Engineering Culture"), I confirmed with people inside the company the company having ~75,000 global employees, ~32,000 working in tech. While I can't answer the question "what does the company need them all for", consider that the company's products are used by ~3.6B people every month, meaning they have about one full-time employee for every ~45,000 users. Compare this with Google (one employee for every ~29,000 users) or Twitter (one employee for every ~52,000 users). The ballpark is similar, and shows the trend of it being harder to have fewer employees per thousand users (Twitter is much smaller than Meta, and Google twice the size in employee count while reached ~20% more monthly users). The company generated ~$117B in revenue in 2021, which is ~$1.46M per employee. Profits per employee (net income divided by employee count) was ~$480K/employee. There will, naturally be a cost of revenue, cost of customer support (even if not all of it in-house). Also worth considering that Meta is composed like several companies: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger, Reality Labs and several smaller/larger bets operating pretty independently. I'd flip your question around: what if Meta had fewer employees, what would it mean? It would mean: 1. Increasing their profitability even further 2. Likely less support for current customers, and less of an ability to invest in forward-looking initiatives I'm sure shareholders of Meta would be happy with #1. For #2, short-term shareholders would be happy to see all of this go. Long-term shareholders would likely realize there would be a cost to cutting down on customer support and R&D and I would not expect them to support this, given the very high profits Meta already has. All in all, I find it remarkable that the company can operate with such revenue and profit numbers, and I suspect they are already deliberately hiring employees more conservatively, to keep up this profitability rate. As a side comment, I have my thoughts on how non-applicable the linked article is for software engineers at Meta, as discussed in this comment [1] on this thread. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33150495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33150495

anon23anon 4y ago
I don't think so - I'm an insider and honestly to me the biggest amount of fluff is the all project manager/program manager/product owner/process owner types roles. Realistically you could put them all under the broad title of business analyst. From what I've seen a given engineering team will grown in size under a given director and the corresponding director on the product/business side will want to grow their side of the house equally and so they do and we end up w/ roughly a 1 to 1 ratio of developers to business analysts of some sort which is about what is cited here.

jrs235 4y ago

When money was "free or cheap" (low interests) and plentiful I believe many of these large tech firms added head count as a competitive strategy: "If they're behind our desk then they're not behind a competitor's!" Now that interest rates are going up and talk of tighter times are in the mix, "waste" reduction is the new and upcoming wind that these and all firms are adjusting their sails to. Additionally, keeping rumors of mass layoffs can slow and paralyze smaller firms that are looking to hire because many may be holding off longer to actually hire current candidates in hopes of, and counting on, many many more potential applicants in the near future. Plus with the influx of developers they may be hoping for a buyers (employers) market with regards to compensation in the next few months.

mindtricks 4y ago

Facebook is an ad company, and if that market is declining, those cuts may come from non-technical groups meant to serve those accounts and markets. There are likely other programs necessary with high marketing needs that I could imagine need culling and thus fewer people.