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Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

There are so many features in the Snapchat app. If you really dig in, there are teams dedicated to each portion of the app. I'm not sure if that means a bunch of separate PMs as well, but it is a big complex app once you account for all the features... DMs, group messages, Discover, Memories, Stories, the map, filters/lenses, integrations like Bitmoji, ...

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Still doesn't justify anywhere close to 1000 engineers.

I think a lot of the engineers are working on new filters.

Then a bunch are working on 'location based promoted filters", these are basically just graphic designers, or maybe web designers, but they are getting lumped in.

I think about R&D. Rolling out experiments takes teams with different focuses.

Oh come on, 1800 employees!?

Sales people, biz dev, PR, recruiting, legal, content creation, headcount from acquisitions like Bitmoji, support team, data team to make sense of the massive amount of data coming in, marketing team, etc etc etc.

You need these things to run a global operation at scale.

If you're not interested in running a global operation at scale, then you can be happy running a little self-serve application - but to create the phenomenon that is SnapChat requires a lot of coordinated effort. To think otherwise is just simply naive.

Now I don't think we have enough information to judge if 1800 is the wrong number for SnapChat or not. They very well may be overstaffed.

Instagram got pretty far with their initial 13 employees.

They got far but less than you think. They had 30mm users mostly in the US (versus nearly 1 billion today all over the world), no monetization operations in place, no biz dev deals, no data deals, not truly international, iPhone only, a far far more limited feature set, very little content moderation or community support in place, very little anti-spam measures, far less security, etc

Valve has 1/6th of that, develops games, and provides the entire worlds distribution of PC games. 1800+ is ridiculous, and clearly the wrong number, since they are laying off people.

@overcast

> develops games

Not in a long time. They're practically in maintenance mode with their games, DOTA 2 being the exception. Most of the creative talent there (people who worked on Half-Life, Portal, etc) has retired.

Sure, but they must have 200-300 people actively developing hats.

It's actually very little work to maintain Steam once the core functionality is there.

Valve is actually a good example of a company that's now incapable of doing anything really ambitious that has real demand. You know, like Half Life 3...

It seems the only work left is to continually make the store page even busier and harder to use.

There's the business-facing products too; dashboards, analytics, insights, content curation, etc. tools for advertisers.

Not to mention internal engineering too, from dev-ops and platform to potentially even custom HR tools.

Again, not saying they're not overstaffed. But a lot of people seem to forget about the internal teams supporting other engineers/employees.

Let's not forget designers, illustrators, accounting, onsite-building security, benefits people, account managers, mid level managers, execs, advisors...

I once worked at a very successful company that had hundreds of millions of dollars in worldwide business.

The employee count was like 260.

That's fine, but what's your actual point? That it's broadly possible to make money in the world with less headcount than 1800?

I'm sure there are hedge funds out there with only 100 employees and $30 billion under management.

That has nothing to do with anything.

Hedge funds?

We were a software company, the only thing we shipped was software. We shipped a hell of a lot more code than Snapchat. We had many products, some fairly complex. We even developed a bunch of internal tools as well.

I obviously wouldn't be comparing the head count of a financial management company with a software company.

The majority of employees at advertising-based companies are employed in selling advertising and supporting the people who sell advertising. Outside of Google and Facebook scale it is still a very high touch process.

But still, compare this with ARM, who develop both CPUs, GPUs, and tons of other silicon IP that runs most of our digital world. They currently have around 4000 employees in total.

Is that a fair comparison? I'm actually asking, I don't know anything about CPU development. It just seems like it's a different kind of work entirely.

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