What are 2000 employees doing at Reddit?
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?
I did all of the development for Sync myself. It blows my mind the mobile team is around ~200 people and ~70 on Android.
And your app is still 100x better than theirs even with all their resources. To think the CEO gets pissed off that users prefer yours over theirs even though they have no reason to make an app that bad.
But he doesn't have to add things like NFT and Avatar support... Which is promptly forgotten when the next big thing comes along.
Sync will be an automatic buy for me once you release it, based on how good it is/was on reddit.
The bonus for me is knowing that spez can't actually stop you from getting paid, despite his asshat antics.
Honestly I would say that that's probably the one thing that small teams have that large teams cannot have is autonomy.
I was working on a web app for a small team inside of a large corporation. It was me and two other people and every single time we wanted to make a change we had to get approval from legal we had to get right off sign off from a VP and this was for something entirely internal that only 35 people would ever use.
I imagine when you are dealing with an app that is intended to be used by millions you're going to have the exact same issues but then 200 people all attempting to do minor improvements getting over voted and outvoted and good shit destroyed and for relegated to the dustbin because legal can imagine that there might be some inconceivable problem with it 5 years in the future, or somebody in marketing might say that it interrupts their work flow even though it would be a massive improvement to the app.
This corporate overhead is one of the biggest issues that corporations face when dealing with a mobile active environment. They can't quickly push improvements and changes it's got to go through the process because otherwise nobody will document anything and they'll reach the point where they can't even read their own app.
This guy corporates
Happy to see you here, ljdawson. Long live Sync!
Im sorry what. 200 people for one app? I work for a multinational and our entire dev team for mobile is 35 people. And thats because we absorbed a few companies that have their own apps.
200 people for one shitty app.
Thank you for all your hard work! I look forward to buying the next Sync on release day.
Are they all writing code or just figuring out ways to inject ads and paid content into every orifice?
Anyway your app defined my reddit experience and I'm looking forward to your next one.
I love your app man. I'll be buying your Lemmy app on day 1, even though I mainly use kbin to access the fediverse.
Wondering. Given a team of 50 people. Do you think your app would have been better or worse ?
Probably worse. It's the old software engineering Moto, nine women can't have a baby in one month
I’m an iOS user so I only know of Sync by reputation, but my understanding is that it’s up there with Apollo as the definitive way to experience Reddit on its platform. The fact that Reddit’s 2000 employees couldn’t remotely approximate the superior experiences of Sync and Apollo, both developed by one guy, is frankly bewildering. I’ve worked in big tech too as an engineer so on one level I get it, but we’re not taking about rocket science here. The sheer manpower and budgets involved should have meant that the official clients would be light years ahead… and yet 😁
Apollo is how you use Reddit on iOS, sync is how you use it on Android. It's the best of the best
I used sync pro for years. Only when forced I'd use their mobile website, and I'd I used desktop I had res installed. I couldn't stand their interfaces.
It's wild, and sync was an awesome piece of software that I've been using over a decade, and I never had a problem with it, that's not often I can say about something. The reddit app has always been pure garbage.
Have you ever worked in a corporate environment?
It's basically friction losses with occasional sparks of actual productivity.
BTW: I've been using sync for years. I hope you can find a way to salvage some of your work.
I have and there's a reason I work on solo projects now...
If I may ask so frankly: do/did you live completely off Sync or is that just a side project to you?
It was my main job for the last few years
Say I'd been learning js, jsnode, python, CSS, HTML for years without aim other than messing around.
And I wanted to make sync.
Where should I be directing my learning?
Good to see you here!
They're dumb lol
@ljdawson @Matte and spez was accusing Apollo of being inefficient...
Wow that really puts things into perspective, like wtf are they actually doing with that many employees?
Reddit to me IS Sync. It's the only way I could use the site. Without Sync reddit is dead to me.
70 android developers on an objectively worse app. Wtf? I'm so confused
Anyways thanks for Sync, masterclass in app design
I've seen similar things. At my last company I helped start a team of 5 people to implement an identity solution, We got it done in about 3 months. Due to shitty management they pushed out the competent devs and back filled with cheaper replacements, either fresh from university or contractors. Fast forward a few years and the over team is now a group of teams with about +/- 40 people and it takes 4 months just to get a plan together which is then obsolete when they want to start due to more shitty management.
Thank god I am no longer there.
Some people want to only recruit people that are less skilled by them so that they can remain in their position of power.
If you have a company with a few like that and several layers of recruitment I guess you can have a bunch of incompetent people spending their time in pointless meetings and not getting much done
And yet Apollo was made by one guy and it’s far better than anything Reddit made
I mean, the complexity of an iOS app is nothing against running one of the world's largest websites...
That argument doesn't hold under scrutiny. Reddit employs about 80 people on their iOS development team. And the app blows fucking chunks, compared to Apollo, which was made by one guy.
Yeah 80 engineers and millions of dollars in budget? Pathetic. I’m an iOS developer by trade and if you’d asked me to draw up a project proposal for the official Reddit app, I probably would have told you I needed 3-5 engineers. But 80, that’s just unreal.
Maybe reddit does that thing that Apple does where they have multiple siloed teams work on the same or similar things and just use the one that comes up with the best solution. So they have 80 independent devs each working on their own app and the current app is the least shitty out of all of them. Either that or they have like 50 shitty apps, 20 decent apps, 9 brilliant apps, and the one that they went with which was done by spez's nephew who took a coding bootcamp one summer and is really good at mobile dev.
And not even one of those 2,000 employees could put in any effort whatsoever?
It's made bad on purpose because you aren't the customer, you're the product
Yeah but isn't it a better product when people are forming positive associations with the brand being advertised because it's being displayed on an app that works well?
Not all of those employees would be engineers, and out of those engineers, many would be backend engineers improving the speed and ranking algorithms. Apollo would also be taking advantage of that work.
Of the iOS engineers, many would probably have been working on priorities that generate money for the company, but we all hated. Apollo had a great model where he just had to make the users happy enough to give him subscription fees.
I hate the decisions the Reddit leads have been making, but I guarantee that the employees have been putting in plenty of effort. It’s the company’s priorities that are misaligned with what the users want.
The obvious implication in my comment was "into user experience."
They treated us like cattle, but forgot that you gotta feed your livestock.
I agree that the user experience is severely lacking. I just wanted to make sure to highlight that it was leadership and not individual contributors that have issues.
They certainly forgot that it was the users that made the site into what it is. And we’ll be the ones who take it away.
If it's anything like my workplace, about 25% of them are doing 75% of the work while the rest do powerpoints and stand around bullshitting all day.
It is called the 80-20 rule for a reason…
More like 90% / 10%
Lol, the workers vs the beaters a tale as old as time. Never enough workers.
They could be. Or they could be sales, or brand ad coordination, or hr, or legal handling the various issues related to products, lawsuits, regulations, actual law enforcement inquiries, etc.
Like any corporation there’s a ton of backend staff doing stuff people don’t see because it makes the parts they do see operate.
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 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
They are building Ads products, Avatars, NFT stores, Chat, Talk, RPAN. All the "growth" features that no one uses.
Then when no one uses them, they switch projects to shut them down (Talk, RPAN).
No offense to the people on it, but I could not stand the fucking RPAN era. It was like no matter what I did or what setting I changed every fourth fucking post was a livestream of some jackass on a guitar.
You forgot the new TikTok like video feature, ntz, ntz, ntz
Let's see. Reddit right now has:
and perhaps many more I'm not aware about. With those whole sets of "features", 2000 seems to be quite reasonable IMO. The marketing stuff is especially all about numbers.
Yeah, add in the "support" functions as well (you mentioned Marketing but HR, Finance, Legal, etc) and #s can add up quickly.
I really feel like that instead of just focusing on running a lean and efficient site, perfecting the fundamentals, and outsourcing the other stuff to their users (third party apps, content creation, the bulk of moderation). They've truly become bloated trying to expand.
I guess this was ultimatively due to them taking on venture capital and thus having the pressure for rapid growth and profitability. They really want to transform themself into a social media site, gathering as much user data as possible and keeping them on their site as long as possible. All with the goal to be able to sell more adds. Which also means pushing out unmarketable content.
Sure it should be a train wreck. Incompetent management is a hallmark of human society. Brilliant devs built something. Idiots manage them. Devs leave, and the idiots patch together a group of like minded individuals on an equal footing to navigate the future blindly. Steve is clearly the benchmark I submit as proof of my now irrefutable theory. It takes 2k Steves to screw in this lightbulb.
I’d wager a lot of them are looking for new jobs. Those who aren’t are probably making dumpster s’mores.
It will be like where I was working. On that project there were ~12 people. You could've cut in in half easily:
I ended up working overtime into burn out to get the project through the door (and hit issues due the architect should've informed us of). It would've honestly been easier as just me, one other developer, and a BA
Diminishing returns. The more employees you add, the harder they are to manage efficiently and in-sync. You need to add more managers to manage more employees, which adds more layers and fragments the business more.
However, the numbers still don't add up to me. The app shouldn't be worse than 3rd party apps. The platform shouldn't have all these downtime issues. The website shouldn't be an accessibility failure.
Of those 2000 people, at least 1000 are not in technical roles at all, but stuff like partner management, HR, marketing, etc.
What exactly the rest is doing, I'm also baffled. I guess, they primarily reinvent wheels. Reddit is relatively easy to scale and has been in its core not changed for years.
An addendum to the non-devs here:
As anyone who has worked in a large company knows: You can easily get a team like this that spends more than half of its time in meetings:
1 Project Manager
3 Business Analysts for different languages
1 BA for tickets
1 QA Lead
2 QA Tester(Intern)
1 Mockup Designer
1 Front End layout specialist(CSS)
1 Javascript developer
1 Backend developer / Team Lead
But that doesn't factor in that with teams like that you can end up with 1/3 to even 2/3 of those dev teams being devoted to development and management of internal tools used to facilitate the end product, or that the project manager will be at the bottom of their own tree of people that spend almost all of their day in meetings. More if you make your own analysis tools.
Don't underestimate the amount of heads needed in ads and marketing
I don't know anything about working at reddit, but I've worked at enough software companies to know generally what people do all day
HR - hires employees, deals with insurance and other perks, fires employees, probably communicates with the board or governing body.
Software - there are a few departments here, the most interesting of which is programming new features. Most will never see the light of day, but they're working on them.
QA - tests new features and bug fixes and patches before they go live.
IT department for when developers computers do unexpected things.
Tickets - a team of developers/systems engineers to fix bugs and issues in the production source code. They will typically have 1-10 people on call at all times outside of normal business hours.
Systems Engineering - they decide how and what systems to implement, upgrade, retire etc. They need to coordinate with developers to plan software/hardware upgrades to make sure they don't mess anything up unexpectedly (but it almost always happens during an upgrade)
Accounting - Accounts Payable (when you pay money for something, like AWS); Accounts Receivable (when you receive money, like for artificially inflating posts to the front page for money); Finance - should and how much money should be borrowed/invested to run the business; and a ton more depts honestly, any of which without the business would crumble.
Advertising - Both advertising Reddit in other media, and arranging sponsors to put their ads all over the place.
Executives - they plan the strategy for each dept listed above. Although this being an internet service, the CIO might be slightly more inflated than a typical company.
And there's probably a lot that I'm forgetting. But really, all this is just to illustrate about one of the most trafficked websites every is "How are they running a business with only 2,000 employees"
They have three ads? He gets us, US Army and maybe one more? That’s all I remember seeing. That’s one persons job.
100% agree, here's some more departments that you haven't listed but probably exist:
Legal, internal contracts, contracts with suppliers, contracts with customers (advertisers), compliance with the laws of many countries/markets
Regulatory, compliance with internal and external regulations
Procurement, negotiating with suppliers
sustainability, there's probably someone in the business reporting on gender balance and environmental impact and a host of other UN SDG considerations
PMO, internal project management and portfolio reporting
market X, there may be a team of people for each major market responsible for sales, infrastructure, compliance, etc. in that market, in addition to central
CI/productivity, there will be some team responsible for reducing costs
Product owners, there will be teams of people responsible for arguing about what features/bugs should be implemented/fixed
monetization, there's probably dedicated teams looking at (and a/b testing!) new ways to push people into spending money on the app and/or interacting with ads more often
Upper management is always the issue. Why put all my talented developers to work on improving user experience when I can implement NFT support instead and keep bloating the app?
Well, one thing is for sure: They aren't working on the reddit video player.
Hmmm, and the third party developers are the reason they're not profitable?
That's every bigger software company. As my first job on a startup(ish) company we were 5 devs working on a desktop application and embedded software. This entailed working all the way up from firmware, to Linux distribution and higher level onboard software. After 8 or so years I went for a bigger company on similar market. They had 4 teams of 6 devs each doing a much worse job than we ever did. There was lots of friction and corporate bullshit. The only thing I felt didn't work out on smaller teams was customer support.
A lot of IT companies do that, they probably write a lot of documentation and hold meetings and do studies and quality checks. One person could skip all those steps but might be harder for another developer to continue their work depends though.
I think their team doubled during COVID too.
What they could have done is you know, actually make things people have to use bot accounts to do, like a barebones calendar to replace remindme, or automod, or integrate RES (seriously, I don't understand why they used SPA with React and made everything so slow)
Well, there is the guy that makes the coffee, and then there's the guy who makes his coffee and the guy who makes his ... you get the gist.
Jokes aside, I don't get it either. Sure, they need a certain amount of employees to run the company, but I would've never thought they are more than maybe 500.
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 departmental bloatover time. You end up with project managers managing projects of other project managers, and holding meetings to plan the meetings you're planning.
My take at all that mess would probably be blaming upper management for not trusting anybody, so layers of redundancy piled up to 2000. & on the other hand there are individuals (sometimes one-man stand + community input) creating outstanding apps.
My very much hardware company has problems like this. Sometimes we can't deal with a customer direct we have to go thru another company. When that happens there is an entire layer of people insisting that we are doing everything wrong. Forcing us to produce mountains of paperwork and revisions.
Spotify has more than 8000 employees. I can't fathom what they could possibly contribute to the product.
But spotify works on pretty much any device out there, it has a pretty good UI and works fairly well overall, so we can at least see where some of their effort is going
Unfortunately that wasn't my experience with Spotify about a year ago. Samsung note 9, galaxy watch 3, galaxy buds pro, and their subscription. It was rough to get music to play and keep playing. It wouldn't pause either. I looked online and plenty of other people had these issues.