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?
There’s over 3 million subreddits and over 60 million daily active users. The thing with Reddit is that its so huge that the numbers are so large that we cant properly conceptualize it anymore. Even simple work at that scale requires shit tons of people to be involved when its activities that require a human brain. With the sheer size of Reddit, Im almost surprised they only have 2,000 employees.
I gotta call bullshit. I’ve no doubt that they have a robust team on the IT side that branches into BAU, Devops, Ops, CSC, and Neteng…but to really put it into perspective that staff could run the show with 500 people. That’s also factoring in a good rotation for on-call and backshifts. The other 1500 are broken up into marketing, strategy, administration, and a bunch of other bullshit like “convergence”. I’m sure they have vendor management, government relations, and a few other trappings…but the vast majority of what they have is stupendously useless.
They have developers working on shit nobody wants, nor will they ever use. The way companies work in this day and age is the epitome of resource waste and bullshit job titles. I’m pushing back on that notion. There’s something, sure, but 2k people’s worth is a tremendous waste. You’re not off base being surprised it isn’t more too, as many companies simply waste more time and salary on stupid worthless shit that doesn’t benefit the company or its mission, and it’s often at the behest of the board and/or investors who do risk management and growth strategy (that seldom pans out).
I dont disagree. Big companies tend to suffer from more and more departmental bloat over time. You end up with project managers managing projects of other project managers who holding meetings to plan the meetings they’re planning.