What are 2000 employees doing at Reddit?

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
- This all sounds right. Currently at some large company, it sucks so much compared to working at smaller projects and startups
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...
Happy to see you here, ljdawson. Long live Sync!
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.
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
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.
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.
- 70 android developers on an objectively worse app. Wtf? I’m so confused
  
  I've been a developer for more than two decades. There is absolutely a negative correlation between the size of the development team and the quality of the application, with the optimum development team size being one.
Can't wait for Sync for Lemmy. I will buy it on Day 1. Thank you for working on this!
- I've never used any apps (I avoid mobile apps at all cost) and Lemmy seems to work perfectly well on the web, both on desktop and on mobile. Can you point out what makes you want to use an app, and even pay for it, for Lemmy (or Reddit and similar websites)?
That's an absurd big team for one mobile app, I could imagine they just failed to scale.

"SAFe is the best, we are so productive!"
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
@ljdawson @Matte and spez was accusing Apollo of being inefficient...
They're dumb lol

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.

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.

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.
- And not even one of those 2,000 employees could put in any effort whatsoever?

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.

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.
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.

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.
- According to what I've heard, reddit has a fuck ton of micromanagers at several levels. So it's just a giant cycle of micromanaging and most likely switching direction constantly which impedes any actual progress.
Impossible, reddit in no way shape or fashion has somebody that deals with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to

I’d wager a lot of them are looking for new jobs. Those who aren’t are probably making dumpster s’mores.

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).

You forgot the new TikTok like video feature, ntz, ntz, ntz
- I'm out of the loop, what is this?
- and the spotify year end wrap ups
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.

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.

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.

The tech industry has been under the spell of cargo cult cheap investment money for the better part of two decades. The most cynical but simple and probable reason they have 2000 employees is because almost every other tech company has about 10x-20x the number of employees they actually need to be sustainable and profitable companies.

TLDR: they're throwing shit at the wall until something sticks

So they're just doing what everyone else is doing. It would look very suspicious to investors if leadership said "You know what, we actually can run this thing with a team of 100 people and make a few tens of millions in profit a year!". That's not what investors want to hear. They want to hear "If we have a 100 person company making a few tens of millions in profit a year, imagine how much revenue we could make if we were ten times bigger. We can easily scale operations!".

Investors want the kind of financial growth that would make cancerous tumour cells envious. And most tech leaders have figured out with cheap money that the best strategy for obtaining this growth is by having smart people throw shit at the wall until something sticks. The more smart people you have throwing shit at the wall, the better your chances at stumbling on a product or service that levels up your company.

If a tech leader were just content with running a sustainable and profitable business at the end of its growth curve, they wouldn't need as many employees. They just need the ones who can keep the core business going because there's nobody working on new venture pet projects.

But investors aren't interested in that because that's like putting their money into a savings account at a bank except with a lot more risk of losing it all. Right now, Reddit's investors are starting to realize that their risky investment with a chance at winning it big is looking a lot more like a dud that will pay out more meagre returns or worse, may not pay out at all. They desperately need an IPO to win it big. It's their last hope.

The investors won't throw any more money at Reddit and are at the stage where they're pressuring the leadership to start cracking the whip. The leadership has now removed any illusion of wanting to make Reddit users happy because we aren't their customers or investors. They need their customers and their investors happy. They don't need Reddit users to be happy. They just need to keep them hooked.

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 think this is indeed the main factor. Reddit needed to grow. Money was cheap. So what's the first thing you do? You hire more people. Only then you figure out what they need to do, and all of those people will have their own ideas on what to do, regardless of whether it helps the bottom line. And so you get new shiny features such as chat, livestreams, NFTs and other stuff nobody cares about, which all take a lot of manpower to build and maintain. Now the problem is that communication gets harder the more people you add. These people now need a lot of meetings to stay in sync, or to figure out what to do next, or perhaps just to appear busy, which results in work not being done or progressing really slowly. So what do you do? Hire more people, as long as the money lasts of course. This cycle continues for a few years, and suddenly you have 2000 employees.
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

Don't underestimate the amount of heads needed in ads and marketing

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.

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?

Lmao they put all their developers on actively making the site worse. They intentionally made the whole desktop experience so shitty so you use their shitty app.

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

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

Well, one thing is for sure: They aren't working on the reddit video player.

My guess is dev teams implementing doomed pet projects of the c-suite individuals.

Don't underestimate the amount of people needed to work in a website, a website, what the regular user see is just an interface to a system, and beyond that there can be an intricate company behind with technical complexity, finance, hr, sales, customer care and many other departments.

I work in tech and people that had no knowledge at all of my industry assume it takes 1 or 2 people to run a website and get amazed 1000+ people may be necessary to run the entire company.

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.

It's just Gregs all the way down
Whoa, whoa, whoa you can’t have a guy just make coffee. First we need to have a meeting to discuss this, then form a sub committee to put together a survey, then follow up meetings to approve the survey and email verbiage, then more committee meetings to compile the results and another meeting with top brass to review the results and approve the coffee selection. Then we will need another meeting to form a new committee to write the bid for the coffee contract. A meeting to approve the bid. A committee to review bids and pick a winner, a meeting to review the review of the bids and formally approve the contract. Then purchasing will need to meet to determine which account to bill. We will also need to meet and firm committees to establish procedures for procurement, storage, and production of the coffee as well as formal job duties and probably a liability waver if the coffee is to hot. So we will need to meet with legal as well.
- Probably best to get a coffee insurance, since I just spat mine across the screen

Hmmm, and the third party developers are the reason they're not profitable?

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.

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.

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).