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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 ~75,0

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.
- throw1234651234 4y ago
  This is an issue in smaller companies as well. A team's architect can generally cover technical architecture, business analysis, running scrum, writing stories better than the POs, etc. The fact though, is that one good "business person" to take over all that DOES help. Not so much when you get 3 roles (scrum master, BA, PO) all of which do about an hour of work a day and still blame everything on the devs.
- ngc248 4y ago
  Nowadays I am seeing enormous growth in product management orgs, product mgrs growing like crazy. In my company, we see that product orgs have ballooned a lot and product managers are also not helping that much. A lot of them don't have any product vision and just act like glorified project managers. I am not saying all are bad, I have seen some good ones, but seems like a lot of them are just there to take advantage of the growth.
  - spfzero 4y ago
    Many of the product managers I've worked with have a very simple job: Take the product management direction from some other, higher-up manager, and present it to the engineers. They don't actually manage anything, can't answer any serious questions, etc. They just save time for their manager by fronting for them, and insulating them from questions they'd prefer not to have to answer.
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  Sounds like a pretty rotten product org. Glad I haven't entertained recruiters for it. A good PM can really energize a team and bring vision and clarity to things. A mediocre or bad one just gets in the way.
  - loceng 4y ago
    Not a surprising conclusion based on how Facebook was founded and by whom.

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.

throw1234651234 4y ago
This is an issue in smaller companies as well. A team's architect can generally cover technical architecture, business analysis, running scrum, writing stories better than the POs, etc. The fact though, is that one good "business person" to take over all that DOES help. Not so much when you get 3 roles (scrum master, BA, PO) all of which do about an hour of work a day and still blame everything on the devs.
ngc248 4y ago
Nowadays I am seeing enormous growth in product management orgs, product mgrs growing like crazy. In my company, we see that product orgs have ballooned a lot and product managers are also not helping that much. A lot of them don't have any product vision and just act like glorified project managers. I am not saying all are bad, I have seen some good ones, but seems like a lot of them are just there to take advantage of the growth.
- spfzero 4y ago
  Many of the product managers I've worked with have a very simple job: Take the product management direction from some other, higher-up manager, and present it to the engineers. They don't actually manage anything, can't answer any serious questions, etc. They just save time for their manager by fronting for them, and insulating them from questions they'd prefer not to have to answer.
phillipcarter 4y ago
Sounds like a pretty rotten product org. Glad I haven't entertained recruiters for it. A good PM can really energize a team and bring vision and clarity to things. A mediocre or bad one just gets in the way.
- loceng 4y ago
  Not a surprising conclusion based on how Facebook was founded and by whom.