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?

    • ConditionOverload@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Corhen@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        But he doesn’t have to add things like NFT and Avatar support… Which is promptly forgotten when the next big thing comes along.

    • MushuChupacabra@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Bizarroland@kbin.social
      4·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.deEnglish
      51·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • aRei@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • -hypnotoad-@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • sotolf@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • rath@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        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)?

    • shapis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Wondering. Given a team of 50 people. Do you think your app would have been better or worse ?

    • sparky@lemmy.federate.cc@lemmy.federate.ccEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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 😁

      • Aeoneir@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Apollo is how you use Reddit on iOS, sync is how you use it on Android. It’s the best of the best

        • Robnez@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          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.

    • ANuStart@kbin.social
      0·
      2 years ago

      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

      • MarvinKMooney@kbin.social
        4·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • potterman28wxcv@lemmy.world
          11·
          2 years ago

          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

      • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
        11·
        2 years ago

        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.

  • AB7ORH7D@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    2 years ago

    And yet Apollo was made by one guy and it’s far better than anything Reddit made

        • sparky@lemmy.federate.cc@lemmy.federate.ccEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          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.

        • icy_mal@kbin.social
          1·
          2 years ago

          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.

        • designated_fridge@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          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

          1. More features (I think the Apollo developer mentioned how some features aren’t available through the API?)
          2. More insights (I would guess that the official Reddit app contains way more code to track and quantity the user)
          3. 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.
          4. 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
          5. 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.

          • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            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?

        • The Dark Lord ☑️@lemmy.caEnglish
          11·
          2 years ago

          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.

          • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            2 years ago

            The obvious implication in my comment was “into user experience.”

            They treated us like cattle, but forgot that you gotta feed your livestock.

  • SolidGrue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Crayon8027@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • andobando@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.

  • Marduk@hammerdown.0fucks.nlEnglish
    10·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Adama@kbin.social
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • reversebananimals@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    2 years ago

    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).

  • redcalcium@c.calciumlabs.comEnglish
    72·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • WhoisJohnGalt@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, add in the “support” functions as well (you mentioned Marketing but HR, Finance, Legal, etc) and #s can add up quickly.

    • golli@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • j4k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • pizza_rolls@kbin.social
        1·
        2 years ago

        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.

  • Vaggumon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

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

  • guy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • akaifox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    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

  • Renacles@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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?

    • andobando@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • Renacles@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        It usually happens when a non-profitable company wants to generate “value” in order to be sold, I’m not sure how they think it’s going to lead to profit though, it’s essentially polishing a turd so investors think it’s valuable.

  • erogenouswarzone@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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”

    • Windexhammer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      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