Reddit kind of anticipates this critique in its investor docs, and argues that it didn’t really start operating as a serious business until 2018 when it finally started “meaningful monetization efforts” — that is, trying to make money for real.
But that’s still six years ago. What has Reddit been doing since then?
One big, obvious answer: It has been hiring a lot of engineers and spending a lot of money on their salaries…
…What am I missing? I asked Reddit comms for comment but they declined, citing the company’s quiet period before the IPO.
They’re spending over 400mio a year on RnD. I was downvoted for stating this somewhere else, but tech workers are drastically overpaid and tech companies are structurally incapable of allocating resources properly.
I’m 100% sure, that reddit has a bunch of technologies, frameworks, components, that were developed inhouse for no other reason than a bunch of engineers trying to reinvent the wheel for the 100th time.
Why do you think tech workers are overpaid? I think other workers are underpaid.
They think that cause they aren’t a tech worker. Also, as a non American tech worker were also underpaid.
I’m a senior software developer. I know how the industry works. And I also know the incredible arrogance of IT people thinking they’re only millimeters away from being literally gods.
Username checks out.
Sure but thats the same in every technical industry. Doesn’t have anything to do with pay.
No, it’s not. Other industries have standards. Nobody would try to re-invent bolts for no reason. Software engineers do. All the time.
And it is related to pay. Or better, willingness to pay. VC funded firms are willing to spend a lot of money on hiring “top talent”, but they let them run relatively free. So instead of using a not 100% fitting solution off the shelf, they build a custom solution, that costs obscene work hours and fits a tiny bit better for 3 weeks. That means, a lot of the work of these very capable engineers gets wasted in the sense that it doesn’t create business value. So the business value they do create gets more expensive to produce.
lol that bolt comment is factually wrong
You seem to have a hatred for the tech industry and a very warped view of it vs the work force.
Again, I’m part of it.
That does nothing to change what I’ve said
From a software engineering view: Lots of rebuilding the wheel, now with Internet Explorer dependencies. Large tech firms are more and more bureaucratic rather than innovative. Startups slurp up VC funding for the next 200 or so unicorn investments. NVIDIA is THE ENTIRE S&P 500 at this rate with SERIOUS “Peak of Inflated Expectations” valuation. Elon Musk.
All the while the majority of the job is fixing the mistakes of the past, of yourself and of some code monkey in 2003. There’s this theory that code replicates the structure of the design team. When that team spans an entire corporate hierarchy with SCRUM standups every 2.5 milliseconds, you wonder if you could do the equivalent of the ending of Office Space to the codebase.
I’m sorry, I’m just… anyway, a sage piece of advice. For the love of all that is holy, write requirements BEFORE doing validation for Aerospace applications, and DO NOT OUTSOURCE THE REQUIREMENTS WRITING. That is all.
During the initial and development stages, the top tech workers were headhunted and paid a lot to set up good infrastructure. Now that the infrastructure is already there, when there’s not much new development being done, they ended up being considered overpaid with respect to the works being done. These companies will end up getting rid of this ‘overpaid’ workers and replace them with migrant workers that they can get for a lot less.
Do you really think an engineer at Reddit or anywhere in the Valley generates as much value to society as a doctor?
I’m not even close to FAANG, and I earn twice as much as a nurse and slightly more than a doctor of my age. That’s great for me, but I’m not worth that much. And tech workers in the USA earn even more relative to regular workers.
People aren’t paid for contributing to society, they’re paid to generate wealth for rich assholes. Doctors don’t earn billionaires as many yachts.
And you just showed your incapability to distinguish between descriptive and normative.
The purpose of a system is what it does.
“Purpose” is the wrong category here.
I meant what I said.
Ah yes, a theorem that is so incredibly self-referential, that you could literally justify anything with it.
That’s “it is what it is” for snobs.
And 193 mio for the CEO, that’s a lot of dickpill ads they need to sell…
And, interestingly, they lost $91 million last year. If the CEO had instead earned $100 million last year, the company have made a multi-million dollar profit (if only just). If it had been $10 million (still way overpaid for any single person, I’d argue), they’d be nearing the hundreds-of-millions-per-year profit scale.
I’ll never understand companies paying their CEOs hundreds of millions while they’re losing money hand over fist…
Not quite. He’s paid mostly in stock, not cash.
Still an absurd amount of cash for a single person in a single year. You can effectively own most people for $4,000,000 (40 years at $100k a year.)
This guy is making half a million every single day. Imagine buying someone else’s life’s work every week.
Or, optionally, he could buy a nice house every single day.
Ultimately, cash is a measure of what society owes you.
One person simply can not produce the amount of effort that should be required to earn that amount of debt from society.
He’s literally trying to build up and stock his doomsday bunker.
If you are a tech company everything you do is R&D and therefore subject to tax breaks.
That’s enough money to fund a rogue nuclear weapons program. So, I hereby start the rumor that reddit is developing weapons of mass destruction.
It’s always been a weapon of mass distraction, though, and Redditors are poor spellers.
You’re not alone; I got two downvotes within a few minutes of posting this – a very Reddit-like phenomenon.
Hey, until those are money that go from VC leeches to actual workers, I call it a win.
I think what they stated was that they spent $400 on R&D in 2023 - you know, the year where, after 20 years of twiddling their thumbs and doing shit-all, depending on volunteers to run the site, and RES and 3rd party apps to make it usable, and imgur to provide hosting, etc etc - the year when they finally had to actually do some real coding.
I’m wondering how much of 2023’s R&D was spurred by restricting the API code, and then allowing certain applications access; having to finally take seriously their decade-old promise to develop mod tools with no planning or preparation; their total surprise at having to provide access to disabled people; and having to update their app. Those are all areas where they were extremely happy to let languish, and which they suddenly had to provide expedited support for after the protests.
400 million? For slightly dusting off an app and somewhat improving some aspects of their site?
Think about, what that means. If we assume a very generous 400k per engineer, that would result in 1000 people working full-time for a year. Just in RnD. And for what exactly?
The key question is: What kind of R&D? I’m afraid their key research is “how to squeeze more money out of our users”.
There is a video somewhere explaining why tech companies need such wasteful bunch of tech workers to give out this image of rapid growth.
Tech worker here: Am underpaid, you are full of shit on that part.
Edit: Looking at your subsequent posts, it seems you are just completely full of shit or quite possibly trolling. Just to be safe: Welcome to my block list! :D
Yeah, why would you engage with someone who suggests that 200k per year might not be a fair wage?
spicy take for lemmy, where working in IT seems to be a prerequisite for having an account and engineers disease is endemic