4 ms·

Internally they operate like a government or military and less like a normal company.

by teaearlgraycold 6mo ago

booleandilemma 6mo ago
As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?
- teaearlgraycold 6mo ago
  I've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.
- jldugger 6mo ago
  No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle. And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly. The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
  - Nemo_bis 6mo ago
    You don't need 80k employees to self-host. The Wikimedia Foundation does it with a team of few dozens SREs.
    - jldugger 6mo ago
      And just think how much more profitiable they'd be if they scaled up (◞ิ౪◟ิ)
      - qwe----3 6mo ago
        You joke but they fund raise like they love money - lying to their users about needing donations...
        Nemo_bis 6mo ago
        It depends on what your priors are for what's "needed". If you think 80k employees are needed to do what the Wikimedia Foundation does, their fundraising is way too humble. :-)
  - cft 6mo ago
    There is only one problem with Meta: Facebook itself is like a TV show that has ran its course. He's riding off what he purchased: Instagram and WhatsApp, but being a product thief he cannot create anything new.
    - sixothree 6mo ago
      I still feel like he stole the word "meta" from the world. It was ours. Not his.
  - nneonneo 6mo ago
    > virtual reality products with no legs This is the most incredibly apt description of Horizon Worlds possible. How is it that I've missed this joke until now? Thank you!
marcosdumay 6mo ago
There are very few government organizations here in Brazil with more than 8k people under the same management.
- Jensson 6mo ago
  All of those government organizations are under the same management: the government. Subsidiaries are still under the management of the parent firm.
  - Tarq0n 6mo ago
    That's not how it works in many countries. You can have regional governments that raise their own taxes and aren't beholden to the central government organizationally, just legally.
    - wil421 6mo ago
      This is how it works in the US. Federal/State/County/City.
      - Tarq0n 6mo ago
        State governments are very much not under "management" of the federal government.
mlsu 6mo ago
They also take profits a lot like government. :thinking:

Internally they operate like a government or military and less like a normal company.

booleandilemma 6mo ago

As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?

teaearlgraycold 6mo ago
I've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.
jldugger 6mo ago
No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle. And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly. The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
- Nemo_bis 6mo ago
  You don't need 80k employees to self-host. The Wikimedia Foundation does it with a team of few dozens SREs.
  - jldugger 6mo ago
    And just think how much more profitiable they'd be if they scaled up (◞ิ౪◟ิ)
    - qwe----3 6mo ago
      You joke but they fund raise like they love money - lying to their users about needing donations...
      - Nemo_bis 6mo ago
        It depends on what your priors are for what's "needed". If you think 80k employees are needed to do what the Wikimedia Foundation does, their fundraising is way too humble. :-)
- cft 6mo ago
  There is only one problem with Meta: Facebook itself is like a TV show that has ran its course. He's riding off what he purchased: Instagram and WhatsApp, but being a product thief he cannot create anything new.
  - sixothree 6mo ago
    I still feel like he stole the word "meta" from the world. It was ours. Not his.
- nneonneo 6mo ago
  > virtual reality products with no legs This is the most incredibly apt description of Horizon Worlds possible. How is it that I've missed this joke until now? Thank you!

marcosdumay 6mo ago

There are very few government organizations here in Brazil with more than 8k people under the same management.

Jensson 6mo ago
All of those government organizations are under the same management: the government. Subsidiaries are still under the management of the parent firm.
- Tarq0n 6mo ago
  That's not how it works in many countries. You can have regional governments that raise their own taxes and aren't beholden to the central government organizationally, just legally.
  - wil421 6mo ago
    This is how it works in the US. Federal/State/County/City.
    - Tarq0n 6mo ago
      State governments are very much not under "management" of the federal government.

mlsu 6mo ago

They also take profits a lot like government. :thinking: