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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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.
Thank you for all your hard work! I look forward to buying the next Sync on release day.
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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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
And not even one of those 2,000 employees could put in any effort whatsoever?
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
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).
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.
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.
I’d wager a lot of them are looking for new jobs. Those who aren’t are probably making dumpster s’mores.
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 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 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.
