6 ms·

> I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go _How_ does Meta have 85,000 employees? That's

> I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go _How_ does Meta have 85,000 employees? That's an _incredible_ size of an organisation.

synicalx 4y ago
That seems like a crazy number. I work at a company with not a heap more than that and we have just as many if not more software products + HEAPS of wildly different hardware + RnD for all kinds of things + retail and ecomm.
vegai_ 4y ago
Yeah, I was just thinking few days ago how absurdly large Twitter's workforce seemed to be.
- habinero 4y ago
  People fixate on what looks like a simple frontend and don't see all the tech behind it, plus the even larger support structure behind it: sales, analytics, moderation, etc etc.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  Obligatory link: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
  - blagie 4y ago
    I disagree with this link. Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff. You know the problem with that statement? No one will give me 10 motivated people, 5 years, and room to focus. First, any ten people you find will care about having fun, making money, preparing for their next career step. Beyond a pizza box team, finding people motivated by a common good is impossible. Second, if you give me room to focus, you won't know that I'm not playing video games all day. You don't want that. You'll want to monitor what I'm doing. My ability to keep collecting my paycheck will be based on keeping you happy (perhaps with false reports of progress, if you don't set things up right). And so on. Once you factor in the human constraints, I have no idea how to beat Google. If I did, I'd have a second unicorn on my belt. I'll mention: I've had that magical scenario -- money and room to focus -- exactly once in my career. I did built a unicorn in a few months. Once those dynamics kicked in, there was near-zero further progress, but the organization eventually sold for around $1B (and that was after losing a lot of further value). That was based on me having a few months with a 100% carve-out to focus completely, as well as to spend money as I saw fit. As organizations get bigger, these problems get harder. Right now, in a typical day, in my current job, I can code for at most 3 hours. Just as often, this is zero hours. I couldn't build the same unicorn with that level of split focus in any amount of time. I'm amazed at the difference in how much I get done. The technical problems to beating Google aren't impossible to solve, but the hard problems aren't technical.
    - ctvo 4y ago
      > Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff. This is 60 million USD paying those 10 handsomely to keep them happy. Having built your unicorn that sold for a billion+ you’d think funding would be straight forward for you. You don’t know a single VC? Self-funding isn’t an option?
      - blagie 4y ago
        1) Raising funding is easy for me. 2) Self-funding is hard for me, because I didn't take into account human, political, and organizational issues. I proposed and built an awesome technology, but that doesn't mean I was compensated for it. A few fallacies: - Keeping people happy isn't the same as keeping people aligned and productive. - Keeping funders happy means I can't give technical work 100% focus. - Keeping funders happy also constrains technical work; for example, showing progress is often in friction with not taking on technical debt. ... and many more.
        ctvo 4y ago
        I see. If only you could be left alone to unleash your brilliance with your friends, you could make a trillion dollar company. Unfortunately it looks like no one believes you / believes in you enough to help you with this.
        blagie 4y ago
        While your comment is sarcastic, it is correct. It's also not specific to me -- there are trainloads of people who could build trillion-dollar companies if magically freed from human issues, such as trust. When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too. Unfortunately, there isn't any magic. We all compete on equal ground, having to solve both technical and human issues.
occamrazor 4y ago
Ad sales and content moderation don’t scale as well as engineering, I suppose.
- Havoc 4y ago
  Pretty sure content moderation is excluded due to outsourcing
atemerev 4y ago
The moderators and reviewers alone probably make the bulk of it.
- tiagod 4y ago
  A lot of content reviewing, if not all, is outsourced to consultancy companies as far as I know. I used to work next to a building full of content reviewers in such an arrangement.
  - tigeroil 4y ago
    Indeed - having spoken to these reviewers as well they seem to have fairly minimal day-to-day involvement with the company themselves.
    - tiagod 4y ago
      Just noticed this comment was flagged for some (probably automated) reason, vouched for it but it's a bit late.
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Hilariously enough, most of the front-line moderators are outsourced, so it's even worse than you think.
- tyingq 4y ago
  I suspect those are not employees and not counted in this at all.
pavlov 4y ago
When I joined FB in August 2018, the company had about 30k employees. It felt large but individual teams didn’t seem to have a lot of excess fat. The hiring growth in recent years has certainly been massive. Content moderators are mostly external contractors (AFAIK this is still true), so presumably not included in this number.
blagie 4y ago
My experience -- having been near the top of organizations with standard politics -- is that one of the goals of every executive is to maximize headcount. For example, if I am managing 100 people, I am far better off than if I am managing 10 people, doing the exact same thing. I will be able to step into better, higher-paying roles if I have experience managing large headcount. My salary will be higher, and I'll have more status in my current organization too. Most problems are better-solved by small teams, but that's usually not how incentives align. Above some level in the corporate ladder, executives understand these games and play them completely cynically. It's easy to become a manager without this. You don't get to be in the C-suite at 10,000 person firm without playing these games near-optimally. Note that this is not the only part of the corporate ladder game. Other parts may keep this (somewhat) in check, so you usually don't have completely pointless 5,000 person divisions your local supermarket branch. They do less well for keeping this in check at monopoly-profit firms like Meta. In monopoly-driven firms, it's really easy to start politically-popular pointless units (I suspect, in this case, a skunkswork, forward-thinking division engaged in something with no real corporate value, so long as it aligns well with a buzzwordy-topic like AI/DEI/VR/etc.).
- Dave3of5 4y ago
  Yeah this tracks with what I've seen too. As a note people with 100+ direct reports are not really managing them. Often it'll be indirect as in there are 100+ people in a hierarchy below you. You might only mange 10 people but they manage 10 people and so on. In terms of reporting your "team" is all 100 people even though you may have never interacted with half of them other than an introduction.
  - blagie 4y ago
    "Managing" wasn't meant to imply "direct reports." I don't think I've ever met anyone with 100 direct reports (although I can see completely routine roles where that might happen -- Uber/Turk/etc. can exist with zero human management).
    - Dave3of5 4y ago
curiousllama 4y ago
They do a lot! Most employees aren’t technical. Lots of HR, Accountants, sales, recruiters, etc. Maybe 1/2 of people are in tech-ish roles, across 5 major orgs, that’s maybe 8k per major org. Maybe half of those are coding (not management, PMs, etc). Half of those are non-support/infra. Maybe half of those are doing development work just to deal with tech debt. Take FB itself, that’s maybe 10 major products - so something like “News Feed” might have 100 eng headcount (10-20 teams) doing anything at all new on that product. That feels like a reasonable number to me, but idk.
fumblebee 4y ago
If you think 85,000 if a lot (it is), Amazon employs a whopping 1.6m. > In 2021, the American multinational e-commerce company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, employed 1,608,000 full- and part-time employees.[1] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...
- scarface74 4y ago
  Really? Amazon also has fulfillment centers, drivers, customer service representative and plenty of other “non blue badge” employees as does Apple (retail and customer support). The comparison is nowhere near being valid.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah Walmart employs more people than some major militaries but nobody blinks an eye because you can see what those people are doing.
  - fumblebee 4y ago
    It's clearly not an apples for apples comparison. Op said "for an organisation", not for a company without fulfilment centers, drivers, etc.
    - JCharante 4y ago
      What they really meant was for an online-only app
- steve1977 4y ago
  Amazon handles physical products, that’s a completely different game
whitepaint 4y ago
They literally serve billions of people.
- bombcar 4y ago
  So does McDonalds and they only have 200k.
  - mrweasel 4y ago
    McDonalds is a franchise business. Very little of the staff works directly for McDonalds.... or are they included in the 200.000?
  - ggregoire 4y ago
    McDonalds doesn't serve billions of customers. Not even close. https://www.zippia.com/answers/how-many-customers-does-mcdonalds-have-per-day https://www.zippia.com/answers/how-many-customers-does-mcdon...
steve1977 4y ago
And what are they doing all day long?
poulpy123 4y ago
It's huge but meta is one of the 50 biggest companies in the world so having so many people isn't very surprising.
sytelus 4y ago
Meta tripled its headcount in past 4 years. The functionality and features haven’t been tripled in past 4 years by any accounts. So, there is obvious internal empire building that was in full swing. Zuck had magically contained these tendencies and insisted on keeping team small but I think he gave up about 4 years ago.

synicalx 4y ago

That seems like a crazy number. I work at a company with not a heap more than that and we have just as many if not more software products + HEAPS of wildly different hardware + RnD for all kinds of things + retail and ecomm.

vegai_ 4y ago

Yeah, I was just thinking few days ago how absurdly large Twitter's workforce seemed to be.

habinero 4y ago
People fixate on what looks like a simple frontend and don't see all the tech behind it, plus the even larger support structure behind it: sales, analytics, moderation, etc etc.
FartyMcFarter 4y ago
Obligatory link: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
- blagie 4y ago
  I disagree with this link. Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff. You know the problem with that statement? No one will give me 10 motivated people, 5 years, and room to focus. First, any ten people you find will care about having fun, making money, preparing for their next career step. Beyond a pizza box team, finding people motivated by a common good is impossible. Second, if you give me room to focus, you won't know that I'm not playing video games all day. You don't want that. You'll want to monitor what I'm doing. My ability to keep collecting my paycheck will be based on keeping you happy (perhaps with false reports of progress, if you don't set things up right). And so on. Once you factor in the human constraints, I have no idea how to beat Google. If I did, I'd have a second unicorn on my belt. I'll mention: I've had that magical scenario -- money and room to focus -- exactly once in my career. I did built a unicorn in a few months. Once those dynamics kicked in, there was near-zero further progress, but the organization eventually sold for around $1B (and that was after losing a lot of further value). That was based on me having a few months with a 100% carve-out to focus completely, as well as to spend money as I saw fit. As organizations get bigger, these problems get harder. Right now, in a typical day, in my current job, I can code for at most 3 hours. Just as often, this is zero hours. I couldn't build the same unicorn with that level of split focus in any amount of time. I'm amazed at the difference in how much I get done. The technical problems to beating Google aren't impossible to solve, but the hard problems aren't technical.
  - ctvo 4y ago
    > Give me 10 motivated, aligned high-quality people, 5 years, and all of us room to focus, and I'll build you a better Google, almost guaranteed. Including Arabic, a11y, spam filtering, and all the other messy stuff. This is 60 million USD paying those 10 handsomely to keep them happy. Having built your unicorn that sold for a billion+ you’d think funding would be straight forward for you. You don’t know a single VC? Self-funding isn’t an option?
    - blagie 4y ago
      1) Raising funding is easy for me. 2) Self-funding is hard for me, because I didn't take into account human, political, and organizational issues. I proposed and built an awesome technology, but that doesn't mean I was compensated for it. A few fallacies: - Keeping people happy isn't the same as keeping people aligned and productive. - Keeping funders happy means I can't give technical work 100% focus. - Keeping funders happy also constrains technical work; for example, showing progress is often in friction with not taking on technical debt. ... and many more.
      - ctvo 4y ago
        I see. If only you could be left alone to unleash your brilliance with your friends, you could make a trillion dollar company. Unfortunately it looks like no one believes you / believes in you enough to help you with this.
        blagie 4y ago
        While your comment is sarcastic, it is correct. It's also not specific to me -- there are trainloads of people who could build trillion-dollar companies if magically freed from human issues, such as trust. When I was young, I thought technical problems were hard, and made comments just like yours when more experienced people told me technical problems were easy and human problems were hard. I ignored them too. Unfortunately, there isn't any magic. We all compete on equal ground, having to solve both technical and human issues.

occamrazor 4y ago

Ad sales and content moderation don’t scale as well as engineering, I suppose.

Havoc 4y ago
Pretty sure content moderation is excluded due to outsourcing

atemerev 4y ago

The moderators and reviewers alone probably make the bulk of it.

tiagod 4y ago
A lot of content reviewing, if not all, is outsourced to consultancy companies as far as I know. I used to work next to a building full of content reviewers in such an arrangement.
- tigeroil 4y ago
  Indeed - having spoken to these reviewers as well they seem to have fairly minimal day-to-day involvement with the company themselves.
  - tiagod 4y ago
    Just noticed this comment was flagged for some (probably automated) reason, vouched for it but it's a bit late.
disgruntledphd2 4y ago
Hilariously enough, most of the front-line moderators are outsourced, so it's even worse than you think.
tyingq 4y ago
I suspect those are not employees and not counted in this at all.

pavlov 4y ago

When I joined FB in August 2018, the company had about 30k employees. It felt large but individual teams didn’t seem to have a lot of excess fat. The hiring growth in recent years has certainly been massive. Content moderators are mostly external contractors (AFAIK this is still true), so presumably not included in this number.

blagie 4y ago

My experience -- having been near the top of organizations with standard politics -- is that one of the goals of every executive is to maximize headcount. For example, if I am managing 100 people, I am far better off than if I am managing 10 people, doing the exact same thing. I will be able to step into better, higher-paying roles if I have experience managing large headcount. My salary will be higher, and I'll have more status in my current organization too. Most problems are better-solved by small teams, but that's usually not how incentives align. Above some level in the corporate ladder, executives understand these games and play them completely cynically. It's easy to become a manager without this. You don't get to be in the C-suite at 10,000 person firm without playing these games near-optimally. Note that this is not the only part of the corporate ladder game. Other parts may keep this (somewhat) in check, so you usually don't have completely pointless 5,000 person divisions your local supermarket branch. They do less well for keeping this in check at monopoly-profit firms like Meta. In monopoly-driven firms, it's really easy to start politically-popular pointless units (I suspect, in this case, a skunkswork, forward-thinking division engaged in something with no real corporate value, so long as it aligns well with a buzzwordy-topic like AI/DEI/VR/etc.).

Dave3of5 4y ago
Yeah this tracks with what I've seen too. As a note people with 100+ direct reports are not really managing them. Often it'll be indirect as in there are 100+ people in a hierarchy below you. You might only mange 10 people but they manage 10 people and so on. In terms of reporting your "team" is all 100 people even though you may have never interacted with half of them other than an introduction.
- blagie 4y ago
  "Managing" wasn't meant to imply "direct reports." I don't think I've ever met anyone with 100 direct reports (although I can see completely routine roles where that might happen -- Uber/Turk/etc. can exist with zero human management).
  - Dave3of5 4y ago

curiousllama 4y ago

They do a lot! Most employees aren’t technical. Lots of HR, Accountants, sales, recruiters, etc. Maybe 1/2 of people are in tech-ish roles, across 5 major orgs, that’s maybe 8k per major org. Maybe half of those are coding (not management, PMs, etc). Half of those are non-support/infra. Maybe half of those are doing development work just to deal with tech debt. Take FB itself, that’s maybe 10 major products - so something like “News Feed” might have 100 eng headcount (10-20 teams) doing anything at all new on that product. That feels like a reasonable number to me, but idk.

fumblebee 4y ago

If you think 85,000 if a lot (it is), Amazon employs a whopping 1.6m. > In 2021, the American multinational e-commerce company, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, employed 1,608,000 full- and part-time employees.[1] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-employees/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-...

scarface74 4y ago
Really? Amazon also has fulfillment centers, drivers, customer service representative and plenty of other “non blue badge” employees as does Apple (retail and customer support). The comparison is nowhere near being valid.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yeah Walmart employs more people than some major militaries but nobody blinks an eye because you can see what those people are doing.
- fumblebee 4y ago
  It's clearly not an apples for apples comparison. Op said "for an organisation", not for a company without fulfilment centers, drivers, etc.
  - JCharante 4y ago
    What they really meant was for an online-only app
steve1977 4y ago
Amazon handles physical products, that’s a completely different game

whitepaint 4y ago

They literally serve billions of people.

bombcar 4y ago
So does McDonalds and they only have 200k.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  McDonalds is a franchise business. Very little of the staff works directly for McDonalds.... or are they included in the 200.000?
- ggregoire 4y ago
  McDonalds doesn't serve billions of customers. Not even close. https://www.zippia.com/answers/how-many-customers-does-mcdonalds-have-per-day https://www.zippia.com/answers/how-many-customers-does-mcdon...

steve1977 4y ago

And what are they doing all day long?

poulpy123 4y ago

It's huge but meta is one of the 50 biggest companies in the world so having so many people isn't very surprising.

sytelus 4y ago

Meta tripled its headcount in past 4 years. The functionality and features haven’t been tripled in past 4 years by any accounts. So, there is obvious internal empire building that was in full swing. Zuck had magically contained these tendencies and insisted on keeping team small but I think he gave up about 4 years ago.