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?
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
Thank you for all your hard work! I look forward to buying the next Sync on release day.
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
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?
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.
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…
It will be like where I was working. On that project there were ~12 people. You could’ve cut in in half easily:
- AFAIK the project manager did nothing but create meetings (tbh they had no clue what they were doing)
- The QA was incompetent and instead I wrote all their tests and taught the junior dev so he could too
- 2 User Researchers set up various sessions – but the business told them all their findings were wrong (turns out the researchers were right)
- Architect went to some meetings and never spoke to the devs about anything (turns out they were responsible for multiple projects at once, which obviously makes things hard)
- The Lead Developer seemed to be on holiday every other day, dealing with some personal issue, or in meetings
- One Dev was fresh out of a scheme (for non comp sci students, so was slow but that’s understandable)
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
I’d wager a lot of them are looking for new jobs. Those who aren’t are probably making dumpster s’mores.
Let’s see. Reddit right now has:
- NFT
- real time chat
- image and video hosting (imgur used to handle these). needs manpower to make sure they’re not hosting something illegal like cp
- various one-off functionalities (r/place, polls, etc)
- react-based frontend (and the mobile counterpart)
- mobile apps for Android and iOS (seemingly a separate codebase)
- ads/marketing departments that case around big companies to place ads on Reddit
- various virtual goods (gold awards, profile pics customization)
- probably a community team that monitor what’s reddit users currently up to, like banning subreddits that breaking TOS or insulting spez.
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.
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.
