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I still have a pretty hard time understanding what are thousands of people doing at single-product-companies. I have yet to find any normal[0] product (big ones

I still have a pretty hard time understanding what are thousands of people doing at single-product-companies. I have yet to find any normal[0] product (big ones too) that was built by a team with a bigger headcount than 10 coders. Okay, there are non-tech employees also, and all kind of supporting things... but 9000 people for a music streaming service? Even 900 sounds a lot... to me it sounds they did not lay off too many people, but they laid off the ones that they shouldn't have. [0] - sure, not talking about full operating system level projects. But for example some of the biggest live streaming websites were put together by a group smaller than a football team.

ben_jones 2y ago
Global 24/7 operations in a litigious industry is going to take a lot of people. Then they have over 615 million users. That’s a lot of overhead in customer support, billing, etc. Then they’re expanding into incredibly diverse markets like India. How do you expand in India? Do you hire 5 Norwegians? No you open offices in India, lots of offices, because there’s over a billion people there. Ultimately the need to expand into complex markets like India, China, and South America is going to take a lot of people growth. With people growth there are inefficiencies. And it’s an explanation that answers a lot of these questions with Google headcount for example.