You have all of HR and Legal, you have all the execs and quite a lot of VPs associated with that size of organization. Under that you are going to have an adve

You have all of HR and Legal, you have all the execs and quite a lot of VPs associated with that size of organization. Under that you are going to have an advertising-related departments both in sales and engineering. Much of the custom engineering focus is going to be directed at ads and how to make money which users will never see. Remember that users are the product, not the customer. Then there's going to be the forum site itself, and the problem of moderating the moderators via the admins and generating visibility into how mods and users are abusing the system are going to be larger than expected at their scale. Then there's the problem of trying to keep up with automated bots and straight forwards abuse of the system and that arms race against other people's code. Then reddit has to interface with government agencies and is now responsible for policing itself when it comes to foreign troll farms. There is likely groups of engineers and managers assigned to dealing with the government. And there's just the complexities of being such a large global business, and needing to deal with worldwide regulations and being such a large regulatory target, which will complicate everything. You can try to wave all that away and say that they should just embrace radical free speech and fire 75% of the people, but that would result in the site being taken over by Troll farms, Nazis, and CSAM -- with advertisers fleeing and the US government itching to regulate them. (Although I'm sure they could fire the useless half of middle management that I'm certain that they've accumulated, but that wouldn't make that enormous of a dent in the headcount) In general this is an xkcd/793 problem: https://xkcd.com/793/ https://xkcd.com/793/ Only replace physicists with software engineers. It seems simple because you wave all the concerns you don't care about and you're entirely focused on just building a forum website for users. Without advertisers, bots, bad actors, worldwide regulations, meta-moderation, etc the problem dramatically simplifies itself, but that isn't actually what reddit does.