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Another aspect of the Facebook engineering team is how large the ratio of active user to developer is. Currently it stands at 1.1 million users per developer.

by davi 17y ago

Another aspect of the Facebook engineering team is how large the ratio of active user to developer is. Currently it stands at 1.1 million users per developer. This ratio changes my model of how the world can work. I'm not sure how, yet. I have to give it time to sink in.

brown9-2 17y ago
Is this really accurate? Of Facebook's 900+ employees (according to Wikipedia, I'm sure it's higher), only ~300 are engineers?
- mitko 17y ago
  I guess so. I interview for them in the Spring (when they only had 170 million users) and they had ~200 engineers out of ~800 employees.
- graywh 17y ago
  And what are the other 600? I fail to see how they (as a whole) bring much value to the company relative to the engineers. Could you image a startup of 1 lawyer, 1 manager, and 1 engineer?
  - fuzzmeister 17y ago
    I'd imagine a large portion of them are in sales - they do have to make money, after all.
  - jfarmer 17y ago
    Engineers don't (necessarily) have to scale with the number of users, but things like customer support (Facebook calls it "user operations") do.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    You're just biased in favor of yourself because you know what you produce, and it is tangible. However having a product does not make a company. If you get sued the lawyer could make the difference between the company existing or not. If you have your head down all the time writing code, you may be oblivious to the need to cut certain corners in order to get to market before the money runs out. The manager might save your ass in that case. Also, let me add marketer since a lot of engineers notoriously hate marketing. If you don't have marketing you may have a great product, but have no clue how to get the word out or position it so people will actually sign up. In that case all your code is worth exactly nothing.
- ivankirigin 17y ago
  Yes, it is true. [i work at facebook] It's actually better than that. Individuals can build things that everyone uses. If you don't divide # users / # developers, but look at median users affected foreach developer, the numbers will be far higher. Note that this also means you can break shit for hundreds of millions of people :)
- emmett 17y ago
  Justin.tv has about 15 engineers (counting designers who work on product as "engineers") and we have 30 million unique users, so our ratio is almost 2 million to 1. This is definitely possible.

by davi 17y ago

brown9-2 17y ago

Is this really accurate? Of Facebook's 900+ employees (according to Wikipedia, I'm sure it's higher), only ~300 are engineers?

mitko 17y ago
I guess so. I interview for them in the Spring (when they only had 170 million users) and they had ~200 engineers out of ~800 employees.
graywh 17y ago
And what are the other 600? I fail to see how they (as a whole) bring much value to the company relative to the engineers. Could you image a startup of 1 lawyer, 1 manager, and 1 engineer?
- fuzzmeister 17y ago
  I'd imagine a large portion of them are in sales - they do have to make money, after all.
- jfarmer 17y ago
  Engineers don't (necessarily) have to scale with the number of users, but things like customer support (Facebook calls it "user operations") do.
- dasil003 17y ago
  You're just biased in favor of yourself because you know what you produce, and it is tangible. However having a product does not make a company. If you get sued the lawyer could make the difference between the company existing or not. If you have your head down all the time writing code, you may be oblivious to the need to cut certain corners in order to get to market before the money runs out. The manager might save your ass in that case. Also, let me add marketer since a lot of engineers notoriously hate marketing. If you don't have marketing you may have a great product, but have no clue how to get the word out or position it so people will actually sign up. In that case all your code is worth exactly nothing.
ivankirigin 17y ago
Yes, it is true. [i work at facebook] It's actually better than that. Individuals can build things that everyone uses. If you don't divide # users / # developers, but look at median users affected foreach developer, the numbers will be far higher. Note that this also means you can break shit for hundreds of millions of people :)
emmett 17y ago
Justin.tv has about 15 engineers (counting designers who work on product as "engineers") and we have 30 million unique users, so our ratio is almost 2 million to 1. This is definitely possible.