When they said Reddit has 2000 employees I was shocked. what could they possibly do onto a website that is basically run by users (and sysadmins) and that is basically feature-wise mature? I really can’t figure out 2000 people working every day on Reddit… on what? just for a quick comparison, the whole IAmA was run by a single person (Victoria), so… what are they doing?
Reddit’s a huge site with ilots of distributed infrastructure, CDN, storage, synchronization, networking, back end services, custom code, etc. That’s probably a few hundred folks right there.
Then there are nontechnical administrative areas like advertising, media, marketing & branding, legal, HR, payroll, financial AR and AP, clerical support. Probably another several hundred or so there as well.
2000 is probably a generous estimate, but I could see it easily being 1500 or more.
I believe another part of it is that companies that get venture capital money are also encouraged to hire more employees, because VC’s care about growth.
If you are a company relying on the support of venture capital and you aren’t hiring people to grow the fastest, then the VC might decide to just fund your competitor instead.
I think this is indeed the main factor. Reddit needed to grow. Money was cheap. So what’s the first thing you do? You hire more people. Only then you figure out what they need to do, and all of those people will have their own ideas on what to do, regardless of whether it helps the bottom line. And so you get new shiny features such as chat, livestreams, NFTs and other stuff nobody cares about, which all take a lot of manpower to build and maintain. Now the problem is that communication gets harder the more people you add. These people now need a lot of meetings to stay in sync, or to figure out what to do next, or perhaps just to appear busy, which results in work not being done or progressing really slowly. So what do you do? Hire more people, as long as the money lasts of course. This cycle continues for a few years, and suddenly you have 2000 employees.
I could understand 250-500. 2,000 is just outrageous to me.
I worked at Tinder, we had something like 100 engineers for 20 million or whatever daily active users., and I think it was rather well managed with everyone doing a part. Reddit is 20x user wise and far more complex feature wise, so maybe it makes sense.
It seems absurd, but there’s a lot of things going on that you don’t think about. Bots, Ads, Moderation tooling, User management, Chat feature, NFTs, revenue features, push notifications, user targeting, ranking algorithms, etc all consist of whole teams.
I mean, I work for a manufacturer in a niche industry with sales offices around the world. We not only have all of those non-tech administrative depts, but also a R&D department, product support, and sales managers. That’s a small fraction before you get to mfg production, mfg engineers, production management, purchasing, warehouse, shipping, & building mgmt (for multiple sites). It’s maybe around 1500 people.
It’s not really a comparison to a tech company, but considering we complain about the “80/20” rule all the time (80 percent of the work is done by 20% of the people), it’s probably still bloated as-is. And we produce something besides bytes. And there’s no unpaid staff doing most of the work.
No, I rhink you make a great point. There probably IS a lot of bloat because reddit has been VC funded and probably DO waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to monetize things like NFT and short firm video