What are 2000 employees doing at Reddit?
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?
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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.
Yeah, I work at a big international tech company myself and sometimes get surprised by the amount of people we have working on our app.
My guess would be that it has to do with
- More features (I think the Apollo developer mentioned how some features aren't available through the API?)
- More insights (I would guess that the official Reddit app contains way more code to track and quantity the user)
- On-call. I assume the 3PA won't get paged in the middle of the night if there's a critical bug in their code.
- Experiments. Wouldn't surprise me if the official Reddit app is using experiments (I.e. A/B testing) to try new features or changes in UI
- New features. The Apollo developer is the one who has to adapt. API changes, new features are (maybe?) added while I assume in house app developers work together with the rest of the company to bring those features.
Etc.
None of these points explain why they'd need 80x more developers of course. It's also just because reddit is a big company and the bigger you get, the more time you spend in meetings, writing documents, etc. and then you hire more developers to increase the velocity and then you end up with a slow machine.
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.