Ask HN: What are they doing there? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are they doing there?

2 pointsgbear6053 comments

According to LinkedIn, Shazam has around 400 employees! [1] Why does an app like that need that many employees? What do they do all day?

Or some other tech companies: MongoDB had 820 employees as of July 31st [2]. StitchFix had 5,800 employees as of July 31st [3]. Facebook had 17,048 employees as of December, 2016 [4]. Oracle has 136,000 employees [5]!

And many other tech companies are like that. For many of them (although of course not all), their product could be built by a small team in a matter of months. Even counting for things like scaling to larger user counts, having 10 or 100 times the number of employees hardly makes sense to me.

Meanwhile, SpaceX, which is making rockets to send people to Mars, has only around 5,500 employees [6]. It's hard to see that rocket engineering is simpler than a clothing app.

So what are all of those employees working on all day?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15900109 [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1441816/000104746917006014/a2233365zs-1.htm [3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1576942/000119312517313629/d400510ds1.htm [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook-employees/ [5] https://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/ORCL--Number_of_Employees [6] https://www.linkedin.com/company/spacex/

Big companies play in many markets (read: countries). Just to deal with financing, taxes, regulations, legal, and everything you can imagine that is related to "doing business", not even considering resources to deal with Marketing/Sales/Support, and definitely not to "building products" (engineering), it can take hundreds of employees. To make things more interesting, the bigger the portfolio of a company, even higher is the number of employees.

Regarding the cost of "doing business", consider this: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.TAX.DURS?year_high_d...

And here's a story about it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joeharpaz/2013/12/17/brazil-ran...

TL;DR on both links above: in Brazil, a company may spend as well as 2,600 hours a year to comply with taxes.

Now imagine a company with hundreds, if not thousands of contracts, customers, multiple invoices, and so on. Even if they outsourced this, it'd still require a lot of employees, distributed worldwide in every market/country that company wants to do business in to deal with local regulations.

Oracle has over 136,000 employees, but also has offices in almost every country - definitely in every continent. Based on the latest Fact Sheet [1], here's an idea:

More than 138,000 employees, including: - - 40,000 developers and engineers - - 16,000 support and services specialists, who speak 29 languages - - 19,000 implementation consultants

[1] http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-sheet-079219....

disclaimer: I work for Oracle.

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