Ask HN: How JetBrains with just 500 employees can do this all? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How JetBrains with just 500 employees can do this all?

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I got impressed after read that this company has just 500 employees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains

How they handle all these complex products? Do they have an army of contractors?

JetBrains Products: AppCode, CLion, DataGrip, Hub, IntelliJ IDEA, Kotlin, MPS, PhpStorm, PyCharm, Gogland, ReSharper, Ultimate, Rider, RubyMine, TeamCity, Toolbox App, Upsource, WebStorm and YouTrack.

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Very experienced and skilled devs. Plus they build everything on the Java platform and always have, so they get a big productivity boost over many companies that use less effective tools.

Also, not VC backed. A 'real' company, that actually makes money because people buy their products. Our expectations of how many developers are needed for things is inflated by the prevalence of unprofitable venture backed firms that over hire.

They also make .NET products. Like Resharper.

And python! Pycharm is really slick but I don't think I'll ever give up Sublime Text.

They built Kotlin because writing pure java was being too inefficient for them and had too many null pointer exceptions. They build language parsers, why not build a language :P

They are also based in Russia so their costs are a bit lower probably.

Also as peoplewindow mentioned they grow based on need, so we know they didn't hire 200 developers just because.

Prague actually. I've heard informatics is pretty strong there so unsurprising that such a strong PL company is also in Prague.

https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/

JetBrains was and largely still is a Russian company. The Kotlin developers are all based in St Petersburg for example.

Yeah, but there's more to Java than the language.

Compare to one of their primary competitors, Visual Studio. VS is still struggling with the transition to 64 bits because they can't take the plugins with them. It essentially can't be made cross platform with the result that they gave up and started a rewrite (VS Code). Despite Microsoft having vastly more resources than JetBrains, IntelliJ seems to have more features.

I credit a lot of that to the underlying platform being higher level and more productive.

VS Code isn't a rewrite of Visual Studio, it is just a text editor with support for plugins.

Visual Studio isn't 64-bit for performance reasons. They have decided instead to take components that are most constrained by the 32bit limitation and move them out of processes, leaving the core application 32bit [1].

1: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...

I love JetBrains, but that number isn't that impressive. If you were to assume only half of that 500 were actual developers, that's still 13 developers per each product you listed. All of their products tend to use the same core technology as well.

Consider that Todd Howard's team that built Skyrim consisted of roughly 100 people.

Epic Games employed 250 people as of 2016. Most of those are not developers. Yet, their Unreal Engine 4 changelogs are mind blowing:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Support/Builds/inde...

How many people do you think it takes to make a single product? From what you listed, they average 26 employees per product. The products aren't released at the same time. Most of their products are the same, with minor differences depending on the language they're supporting. IMO they have too many employees...

Just to maintain, evolve, support and do release testing of only one product: Intellij IDEA, checking the thousand of details and flows, between frameworks and platforms it runs, to me, it seems a good amount of work. And a company have more departments than Software Development: Finance, Administration, RH, Marketing, etc.

But a lot (the majority even, maybe?) of JetBrains' products are just IDEA plus some extra language-specific tooling. So presumably they have a relatively large number of people hacking on the core of the whole product line, IDEA, and then just a small number of people to add whatever language-specific polish each IDEA-based product requires.

the changes for each new release of IntelliJ IDEA gets smaller each year

there's a reason they moved to a subscription model

All of their complex products are actually plugins on top of a single base called the intellij Platform(which is open source). Any changes they make to it automatically percolate to all their products. This allows them to keep small teams for every product that focus only on the specific language plugin.

Look at how much more Microsoft did before reaching 500 employees. They wrote not only compilers and languages, but also games and productivity apps for poorly documented platforms and even OSes.

Jetbrains is doing well for themselves, but it's far from unprecedented.

Most of the Products are basically IntelliJ IDEA with only features pointed at a specific language, so you have a smaller install really

Still a company like Soundcloud had 420 employees before layoffs. Spotify: more than 1600

The linked Wiki page now says 700 (looks like it was updated fairly shortly after this was posted).

I'm curious how this breaks down between developers, customer support, marketing, and admin. My guess is that developers might be a fairly small fraction of he 700...

That's about the amount of employees I'd expect, actually. You might be surprised at how many products or engineering initiatives can be accomplished by an efficient 300-500 person team.

Update: they ended 2016 with 650 employees: https://www.jetbrains.com/annualreport/2016/

"Just"

Hi they all based on intellij ide platform

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