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Numbers from GPT Astra - Shopify has 3000 engineers as of 2026 - Google Chrome when released in 2008 conservatively had ~ 60 engineers. - GTA 5 in its credit
by sashank_1509 16d ago
Numbers from GPT Astra
- Shopify has 3000 engineers as of 2026
- Google Chrome when released in 2008 conservatively had ~ 60 engineers.
- GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online!
In a sane society, Shopify’s opinion on anything engineering related would be thrown into rubbish because they seem to have managed to complicate a simple app into requiring thousands of engineers and now maybe millions in cloud spending to Frontier labs. This is unfortunately not an isolated case, Spotify for one has the same issue, idk what “engineering” Spotify is doing, it’s the worst app I’ve used in my life.
- Vegenoid 16d agoSpotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned. I am very unsurprised by this outcome. People wonder why good software becomes bad, and it’s because the people who were good at engineering are often outmaneuvered by corporate-politics savvy people in a growing company. One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you. A couple years ago, an engineer I know who has always been a very poor performer and lacks initiative, but is friendly and non-confrontational, was hired by GitHub. It would not have been hard for GitHub to find a much better engineer, but this person would be an easy person to keep under a manager on a team who wouldn’t leave or make waves. That can be more important to some managers than skills.
- vantassell 16d ago>Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned. Spotify or Shopify?
- aetch 16d agoProbably both
- nish__ 15d agoShopify has gotten quite a bit better tho.
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- Vegenoid 15d agoSpotify, the comment I replied to drew a comparison from Shopify to Spotify. I think I’ll start a company called Shpoptify.
- user_of_the_wek 15d agoSlopify
- bogeholm 15d agoI’ll subscribe to your Sphoophtify service immediately
- psychoslave 15d agoCan’t wait for Sphpoophteefy+ premium subscription to be released!
- yehoshuapw 15d agoShoplifty
- HPsquared 15d agoYou could start a consultancy called Optify to help them optimize their engineering.
- knocte 16d ago[flagged]
- stingraycharles 16d agoI don’t think that AI would have made this confusion (it’s much less likely to overlook things like these), and I’m also not of the opinion that these comments confuse the two companies, it’s rather than Spotify is used by the grandparent as another example like Shopify.
- anon48293 16d agoThey don’t confuse them, he says both have the same issue. Perhaps you are the AI slop?
- seaal 16d agoSeriously, it’s funny how confident people can be about something despite their awful reading comprehension.
- knocte 15d agoAight, I recognize I only skimmed through the comments, I was completely convinced it was a typo because it has to be a big coincidence that in a post about Shopify suddenly they talk about Spotify and it's not by mistake.
- 16d ago
- m10ax 16d agoThe mythical man-month ;)
- leoedin 15d ago> One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you. This is why I’m sceptical of “AI will kill corporate jobs”. A big company has no profit sharing for successful departments. Everyone is trying to get budget to hire because it makes them feel important.
- z3t4 15d agoAny book recommendations, that is not satire, about navigating the political landscape? Spotify had a good app when it came out, p2p and UDP custom networking...
- hirako2000 15d agoSuch book could be distilled in simple essence: - stay out of it for your sanity - sell your soul, organically adapt by looking at those who make it to the top fast
- Cthulhu_ 15d agoWhen it comes to number of engineers, always keep in mind that it costs more engineers to maintain (and understand) software than the initial development push.
- bonesss 14d agoI’d add on to that lifecycle demands: a development project with no users has a tight cheap feedback loop with high quality bug reports with relatively obvious bug sources, once issues start working through layers of QA and customers the per-issue costs raise by several factors (50x to 200x are numbers I’ve seen from research, YMMV). I would feel very confident slapping something onto Chrome ‘back then’ with only internal users. Today, with millions of users and CEO-level attention to screwups, I’d use a lot more time per issue. It’s a fundamentally different risk/reward/confidence situation.
- mentalgear 15d agoI have the impression that for hiring this is fundamentally the most important aspect: Finding a prospect that is just skilled enough for the position without being a risk to the person who is hiring them.
- 0xpgm 15d agoSometimes I wonder what the tech ecosystem would look like without the ZIRP era. I look back over 15 years and with the exception of increased smart phone usage, everything else still looks mostly familiar. Maybe a bit more slick, but also slower and buggier despite having much better hardware. There hasn't been a qualitative leap in software (as was in the 90s). Just larger SaaS companies. Without ZIRP would it have been any different?
- PunchyHamster 15d agoThat and venture investment has become bane of good. When a company can run for years, hell, decade+ on the red thanks to investments, that means every competitor now have to compete with company that sells their goods or services below production value. It just kills competition and innovation, which only becomes possible if other company also attracts investors
- adjejmxbdjdn 15d agoThings have become measurably worse as open standards have been dropped. An example is messaging apps. Today, if I want to remain in touch with my friends and family I have to juggle between Facebook messenger (thank the heavens for this app which means I rarely need to open Facebook itself), Whatsapp, Signal, etc. In the early 2000s, even though I was on more services, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AIM, a single app such as trillian or Adium was enough to communicate on all of them. While today we have to go to a whole slew of walled gardens to read posts from folks, such as substack, medium, twitter, etc. earlier, the heavy use of RSS meant that a single RSS news client covered everything. From a socio-political standpoint, “canceling” also wasn’t a thing, since you could trivially self host a blog and discovery would be no different. Even better, discovery was through human recommendations rather than algorithms designed to keep you hooked on the platform.
- 0xpgm 15d ago> Even better, discovery was through human recommendations rather than algorithms designed to keep you hooked on the platform. Yeah, that's one thing that is definitely noticeable. Online social services basically became data-driven psychology research companies, with the goal being to improve engagement. Every page refresh became an A/B test designed to keep you hooked.
- darkvertex 15d ago15 years of extremely well paid engineers and yet we still cannot delete a track from Recently Listened. ಠ _ ಠ
- alt227 15d agoRecently listened is an automatic list like a log, not user curated. I would never expect to be able to delete things from that list.
- matsemann 15d agoI don't need an audit log for my audio. What I do need however is to remove something so it doesn't influence the algorithm. I may not remember every time I play music for a kid to turn on the right mode.
- nish__ 15d agoYou're never going to win against a black box algorithm. Just let Spotify do it's thing or go back to hosting your own music if you don't like it.
- alt227 15d agoThat would also then require them to invalidate caches and rerun scripts to rebuild those lists and recommendations, which costs extra compute.
- winrid 13d agoInvalidate the recommendation cache You mean like, when a new song is added to the list???
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- NewtDev 6d ago[dead]
- pavelstoev 16d agoWhat are we talking about here - Spotify or Shopify ? If Shopify - and you are concerned about their engineering teams, please consider that Shopify's revenue grew from roughly $205 million in 2015 to $11.56 billion in 2025, reflecting an explosive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 45% across the past decade. Market validates ! I have nothing to add about Spotify - I use it to listen to music and it works well for me !
- abustamam 15d agoShopify works well for me but it used to push nonsense like podcasts or audio books that I had no interest in, with no way for me to hide them. I just want to listen to music. Upon looking just now, seems like they have been relegated to their own tabs now, which is great.
- cwackerfuss 15d agoI can’t tell if we’re trolling at this point with the mixing up of Shopify and Spotify
- tonyedgecombe 15d agoPoor reading comprehension is more likely than trolling.
- abustamam 15d agoOr I just made a typo. I dont think anyone actually has the understanding that Shopify is a music streaming service and Spotify is a shopping plug-in. I was addressing the latter half of gp's comment which was saying that Spotify has had no problems and I wrote (or perhaps got autocorrected, as I had to correct my phone several times writing this comment). I cant speak for the rest of the commenters.
- nish__ 15d agoIt's accidental. This mixup is essentially a meme at Shopify this point.
- rtpg 16d ago> GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online! Just so it is said: my understanding is it's really easy to not end up on the credits list for games despite having worked on it. I don't know if contractors end up on there for example, at least beyond some team leads or the like. I don't know R*'s policies though, I've heard stories of people not being in credits because they, for example, changed jobs near the end of the development. I get your overall point though
- literallywho 15d agoI remember hearing in an old podcast (Dad & Sons), one of the guys there worked at Rockstar in QA in 2012 and he's still listed in the credits for Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), so the policies are unclear to say the least.
- faet 15d agohttps://www.rockstargames.com/gta-v/thankyou https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-v/thankyou They have updated their policies a bit. You may not be in the game credits but you'll show up here. FWIW the social club team which handled a lot of the online components was small around the time GTA5 released. They built the APIs to handle user generated content, telemetry, accounts, etc. But, there were other team members that made it so the game would call said APIs.
- austin-cheney 16d agoIn the corporate software world, especially anything to do with the web both front and back, most people really don’t know what they are doing. The goal is hiring/firing and agile. Compare that to companies that release actual software products. The goal is product release at high enough quality. There are real performance and security targets to achieve. Your typical corporate developer, on the other hand, does not have release targets. The actual goal is compatibility with the industry least common denominator expectations and retaining employment. This is why so many people are needed to do the work and why the result is so slow and bloated.
- abustamam 15d agoWhat's an "actual software product" and why don't you think web products count as them? I'm a full stack web developer. I've worked for startups and F500 companies. There is always a push for release targets. The less technical the leadership, the stricter the release targets (its hard to sell a critical refactoring to management when they cant sell a shiny new feature or kpi to their own boss). We've kept our teams pretty lean too. We still aim for high quality, and performance and security. I do agree that many people dont really know what theyre doing and are kinda just winging it, especially with AI at the helm, and many companies are likely overstaffed, but I dont think theres a correlation between headcount and slow/bloated software. Any team of any size can make slow and bloated software.
- sgammon 15d agoIf you are selling the code as the product, it could be said to be an “actual” software product, rather than a mechanism for selling other products, or software as a substrate for some other business. Those other businesses aren’t any less valid, of course. They just aren’t software businesses. They are businesses that (quite sensibly) use software.
- UK-Al05 15d agoShopify is literally selling software.
- zuzululu 16d agoits actually not that weird if you consider that those shopify engineers are probably not even exceeding 150,000 usd on average salary wise canadian dollar is very cheap so you'd likely see 40~50% more headcounts for the same burn rates you get in USA i definitely dont think those shopify engineers are going to be retained long term however
- beached_whale 16d agoI wonder how many of those are there to consult with customers and help them build their stores.
- sidcool 16d agoComments like these make me wonder if people don't understand the difference between engineering and business.
- InterviewFrog 16d agoThat’s what they said about Elon firing 80% of Twitter’s staff. But X is doing pretty well.
- Twisell 15d agoTwitter was never a profitable business. You actually renforce his point. (Maybe that was intended I might have missed some irony here)
- saagarjha 15d agoI'm not sure why people keep repeating this when Twitter was profitable at the point that Elon bought it.
- mitxela 15d agoFor some definition of pretty well which doesn't include human user numbers, revenue, profit, or ratio of humans to bots
- hn993302 15d agoPretty well from an engineering perspective. But they've lost so many advertisers because it's intentionally not very moderated.
- mitxela 15d agoThe site is currently running, yes. Don't forget it went down quite often immediately following the mass firing though. They seem to have fixed that. There was certainly a ton of bloat to trim, but the haphazard "just pick 80% of the people and fire them" was incredibly stupid. Should have chosen whoever was producing the bloat, at least.
- golly_ned 16d agoThis is wrongheaded in so many ways. To start -- how many of those 3,000 engineers do you think work on the mobile app? And even among those who work on the app -- do you think they're all working on user quality-of-life and just can't get it right? And it's a $175BB company -- do you think it's worth that much based on the quality of its mobile app?
- moomoo11 15d agoi will bet 175 billion dollars people like that guy are bikeshedding types
- mitxela 15d agoThey'll be mostly involved with the parts that make money. I worked in a similar situation as one of about 5 people keeping the core infrastructure of the product working, meanwhile about 500 people optimized the ads
- deaux 15d agoHow is life at Google nowadays? Oh you said 500, not 5000, my bad.
- djtango 15d agoVideo games are much easier than what Shopify do which will be a long tail of business cases and local permutations for all the countries they operate in. Commercial software is usually a simple core and a long tail of business exceptions
- psychoslave 15d agoThat’s different difficulties. Like comparing a climb and along run. Sure both require some physical abilities, but in the first case any error and the collapse mean dead end bringing progress to zero, while the second one you can rest on the side any time and still have the miles behind you accomplished.
- _flux 15d agoIt's externally mandated difficulties vs internally created ones. I think the latter should always be easier, because you can change the requirements.
- djtango 15d agoIt's complex vs complicated. A compiler may be very difficult to build but it is largely complicated. Human issues are often complex and may not even have a real solution. Consider human issues like Brexit and the Good Friday Agreement - at face value they are a contradiction and yet a solution must be found. Coding is absolute - trying to build software that can handle all these edge cases, let alone adapt to environmental changes like the law changing around you, when the decision makers have no insight (or interest) in the details is what makes software difficult.
- ojbyrne 15d agoOne word: Ottawa. There's a lot of engineers, most of them underemployed.
- Jean-Papoulos 15d agoWe have no idea how many of these engineers work on the mobile app. This comment is somehow both AI slop and human slop.
- dominus103 15d agoPeople who has not run software at scale have no idea what it takes to run it at scale. Google chrome is 60 engineers at launch but google same company has more than 100k engineers. Building first version was always easy and only gotten easy, scaling software was always hard and it is still hard. PS - Spotify i can't defend the product sucks.
- fallingbananna 15d agoI wonder how many of the 100k+ enginners at Google work on that "simple" text box that shows you relevant websites to the input text.
- bigiain 15d agoI'm guessing that maybe 4 of them maintain that in their "20% time", while the 99,996 other engineers are: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." -Jeff Hammerbacher
- psychoslave 15d agoIt’s not that much about scalling software, as scalling software on highly concentered nodes. Distribution downstream can be its own hell, admittedly, but otherwise having fully independent copy of software copies that run in local terminal is a no-brainer if all that matter is running software at scale.
- T4iga 15d agoI am quite curious about what people hat so much about Spotify. I made some excursions the last few years to competitors like Tidal and Apple Music but I just found myself coming back because the Spotify mobile app experience (and desktop) was just plain better. I wonder what gripes people have.
- Hendrikto 15d agoThe website, desktop app, and mobile apps all have different feature sets, for one. There are things that you can only do in one of them, but it is a different one of them for each thing. There is no one feature set. It feels so cobbled together, with each platform doing their own thing. Also, the website is slow and buggy, and the Electron “desktop” app is even worse. Both gobble up way too many resources and soft-crash constantly. The app does not lock up, but simply stops working. Often it even shows an error like “Spotify cannot play this song right now.”.
- rhdunn 15d agoYou're comparing a company (Shopify) to an application (Google Chrome). A better comparison would be the number of engineers at Google (90,000 [1]) vs Shopify, or the number of developers actually working on the mobile application instead of any other area (website, backend database, internal systems and processes, infrastructure management and maintenance, etc.). [1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rpandey1234_its-mind-bending-how-many-engineers-are-activity-7212824645757018112-IUGm https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rpandey1234_its-mind-bending-...
- dmazzoni 15d agoWhen Chrome 1.0 came out in 2008, it only ran on Windows, and it couldn't do basic things like print or export to PDF, didn't have any accessibility, didn't work in RTL languages, and didn't have any graphics acceleration, among other limitations. Don't get me wrong, it was a marvelous piece of engineering - but it was extremely incomplete. By the time it was what we think of as a modern, complete browser, they had many hundreds of engineers working on it. Also, you're comparing the number of engineers working on one product, to the number of engineers working at Shopify across their entire company today, which includes far more than just one app. You're entitled to your opinion that Shopify is a poor app or that it's overengineered, but clearly it's not simple. That's just a fact. If it looks like a simple app to you, that's because you're not seeing most of it. It's like looking at the YouTube mobile app as someone who watches videos and saying that the app frontend looks simple. You're only seeing 5% of the app. The other 95% is for video creators and advertisers, and it is decidedly NOT simple. I think that's the same here.
- conradfr 15d agoAnd it was a fork.
- wiseowise 15d agoRubbish. Most of the stuff you’re listing is handled by OS and frameworks themselves, you don’t need hundreds of SE to handle RTL or a11y. I work in one of those companies, most people just regurgitate existing shit into another form of shit and collect salary (not complaining, as I’m one of them, but let’s be honest).
- csomar 15d agoShopify supports multiple countries both as a buyer/seller. I assume there is all kind of customizations needed to comply with each country weird rules. Are all of these software engineers doing core engineering? Probably not. But they are probably tagged as software engineers within the organization.
- protocolture 15d ago>what “engineering” Spotify is doing, it’s the worst app I’ve used in my life. Engineering is app usability. Theres no other possible thing an engineer might do. Chrome ofc has infrastructure to distribute a binary. Spotify of course having a global content delivery network for terabytes of music. Hey GANG CAN WE WOKK OUT WHAT THESE ENGINEERS MIGHT BE DOING?????? WHY HASNT JIM STORAGE ENGINEER IMPLEMENTED A UI REFRESH YET!!!!
- pjmlp 15d agoAdd to it that they need a compiler team for a Ruby JIT, due to the language choice to run an heavy load server infrastructure.
- flossly 15d agoAnd now we learn they use Swift and Kotlin to replace React with. So they are not replacing it with Ruby. I think they've hit the limits on Ruby (like twitter had on Scala). P.s.: I find Kotlin "an acceptable typed-Ruby" with an industrial strength VM (the JVM) and two compiles to native stories (KMP and GraalVM-native).
- meowface 15d agoTidal is pretty nice to use. Plus the music isn't compressed.
- svennidal 15d agoI love Tidal. That said its UI is remarkably heavy for what it is. You also used to see what quality the songs were in without playing them, but they removed that. They added bpm and key, but that is not as useful to most of us as seeing the quality of the song beforehand. And you also have to make sure you're getting the most out of it manually. Here are three steps for those who have Tidal and wan't to make sure that they're getting the most (ish) for their money: 1. Hardware Source: If you're using the soundcard in your computer, make sure to bump up the sample rate: on macOS you go to "Audio MIDI Setup" and change the sample rate to highest possible for your output. 2. Software Source: In Tidal itself you have to go to "Settings" and under "Audio quality" choose "Max". Under "Playback" turn off "Normalize volume". If you're having a dinner party and playing the music through a bluetooth speaker, you might want to leave it on. But otherwise off; the normalization causes distortion. 3. Output Device: You have two options here and you can go with both or invest more in the other one: * Option 1: Invest in some decent studio monitors. They don't have to be expensive or be able to play super loud, they just have to not lie to you. I would 100% recommend buying higher quality low power monitors for small spaces and/or spaces that lack acoustic treatment. * Option 2: Buy some actually ok headphones. Bluetooth headphones are not good. I got Sony WH-1000XM6 which I mostly use outside. Inside I can plug them with an audio cable and turn them on and then they double their sample rate from 22kHz to 44kHz. But I also got Sennheizer HD600 which cost about the same and I plug them into a cheap headphone amp, and these headphones are really a world appart. Note: You have to actually find the high quality songs on Tidal to enjoy all those changes. Aim for the 24-bit 192kHz or at least 24-bit 96kHz (personally, the DAC on my Mac only offers 96kHz anyway). Remasters are often a good source, but sometimes they're from the loudness era and are horrible comparing to the originals.
- jakubmazanec 14d agoDid they finally implemented Last.fm integration and sleep timer?
- PunchyHamster 15d agoWhen business is booming, you can do nothing wrong, as with that revenue even big mistakes stop mattering. All I want from Spotify is API so someone can make better player/plugin to a better player.
- melodyogonna 15d agoWhen you see seemingly simple products have too many engineers, most are almost always there to cater for enterprise customers.
- jimnotgym 15d agoHow many of those 3000 engineers are working on the core engine? That is vs infrastructure, customer support, partner outreach etc? Then you have all the people working on localisation, not just changing the words, but local regulatory issues. Chrome only has one customer to deal with, Google itself. And since Shopify is saas and hosted for thousands of customers, vs Chrome running on the users pc, the infrastructure complexity does not compare
- altmanaltman 15d ago> GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online! This is so... wow. You think only 150 devs made GTA 5? Despite the fact that rockstar has 10 studios and you think only 150 people in 5 years touch the code of the game? You should learn how those credits work. It doesn't mean what you think it does. Furthermore, game dev also includes so many artists and other work. It is so insane to claim gta 5 was made by 150 people that I don't think the rest of your comment can be taken seriously.
- iLoveOncall 15d agoShopify is handling customer payments worldwide, 90% of their work is probably localization issues rather than customer-facing feature development. GTA V developers don't give a fuck whether the game is running on a computer in North Korea or in Sweden. Extremely ignorant comment.
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- wesleywt 15d agoComparing Chrome in 2008 to a company in 2026 is a choice.
- kreativ_py 15d agoShopify has approximately 7,600 employees globally
- justin66 15d agoLazily researched comment. Pretty much anyone who isn't in sales can have "engineer" in their title. I'm sure there were plenty of "support engineers" in the Shopify number you cited, and I'm sure there were zero in the GTA and Chrome numbers you cited.
- gaws 15d ago> Numbers from GPT Astra Come on.
- adjejmxbdjdn 15d agoShopify as a company works on a lot more products than Chrome developers do. More relevantly, a lot of their work involves interfacing with hundreds, if not thousands, of external partners, competitors, etc. systems.
- cashsterling 15d agoA lot of shopify's engineering probably work on the back-end business logic for payment processing, sales tax, etc. Shopify has to comply with financial norms, rule and laws in so many different jurisdictions. I know someone who works for Gusto (HR and payroll SaaS for small businesses)... most of their code-base is also business logic and whatnot for all the jurisdictions they support.
- jstummbillig 15d agoIn a sane society we would be less willing to pass heavy judgement on so many things at passing glance.
- _the_inflator 15d agoI don't share your opinion. With no deeper knowledge to the matter, it is pretty senseless to speculate. "Numbers from GPT Astra" - well, well... Currently roughly 1000 engineers are working on Google Chrome. GTA 6 has around 6000 developers working on GTA 6 since 2019. So sounds a bit off what you allegedly researched. But, hey, AI slop is real.
- brandnewideas 15d agoIronically enough, you using "GPT Astra" to query for such simple information is probably in no small way correlated to the state of software engineering (in these large corporations and otherwise) today.
- klrefg 14d agoAnd how many engineers does Google have? The people working on Chrome are a tiny, numerically insignificant fraction of Google’s employees. A much better comparison would be people working on Google ads and their other commercial products.
- dbbk 14d ago"A simple app" well there's your first mistake, it's not a simple app is it
- Melatonic 14d ago3000 engineers or 3000 people on the engineering side of the org ? Not sure I'd trust Astra in its numbers. Shopify also seems to be very solid and reliable and I imagine that could require a lot of QA and edge cases (and a lot of support engineers)