Comment by bitbuilder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitbuilder | Hacker News Reader

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>This question comes up on every post about a big tech company.

And in turn, there are always replies that justify these head counts in ways that I still have a hard time buying into.

All I have to go off is on my own experience, but I worked at a large retailer/wholesaler that had:

  - 1500 retail store locations.
  - Probably a half dozen warehouses. 
  - A couple high volume ecommerce sites (not at LinkedIn scale, but scale was a concern).

To support those operations, they employed people for:

  - Staffing the retail stores and warehouses.
  - Call centers for customer support.
  - Sales for the wholesale division.
  - Advertising/marketing for the retail division, all run internally.
  - Logistics/shipping.
  - Real estate.
  - Merchandising.
  - Inventory management.
  - Product design.
  - Sourcing product manufacture.
  - All of the boilerplate corporate crap (HR, recruiting, accounting, etc.)

Almost all of the above had software to support it that was written and maintained in-house, including a custom built ecommerce stack.

All of the above took roughly the same headcount LinkedIn now has. The technology team writing and running all that custom software was maybe 200-300 people.

So even after I hear all the reasons LinkedIn has to be so huge (sales, support, scale, etc), I'm still left scratching my head.

>The technology team writing and running all that custom software was maybe 200-300 people. > So even after I hear all the reasons LinkedIn has to be so huge (sales, support, scale, etc), I'm still left scratching my head.

Bear in mind that organizations, by default, scale superlinearly. If you add a team of 5 engineers, you need to add a manager. If you do that 5 times, you need to add a manager-of-managers. So to double the amount of labor to be done, you need to more than double headcount.

Beyond that, most of the big tech companies have a fleet of engineers building a product and a team 10x that for analyzing the customer experience. They're building streaming processing tools to move the data warehouse batch processing jobs into, so that an a/b experiment start and have statistically valid results within hours. Your retail operation likely can't build and deploy a planogram experiment that quickly, so there's no need to make the analysis pipeline faster.

Or they're analyzing page load times to shrink them down -- over and over again I've seen experiments proving that customers love fast UI, and hate waiting. The smaller the perf opportunity, the more effort it takes to find and fix. Where you dial in at depends on part in how big your customer base is; a 10ms perf fix is more valuable when you have 10million customers a day versus 100k.

And LinkedIn does this on like 3 platforms: web, iOS and Android. Then there's the web properties they bought like Slideshare and Lynda.com.

This is one of those things you can't tell anyone¹. You just learn it by trying differently and failing.

¹ http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...

This can be summarized as, "I can tell you what it is, but I cannot understand it for you".

In such cases I've invariably found that the failure is on part of the person who is telling the thing - they are simply failing to communicate effectively.

They are not emphasizing the important points, they are not working backwards from the result that they want to achieve and merely listing steps to get to the result, they don't empathize with the audience so they cannot customize their narrative in a way that resonates with the audience.

This is exactly why in your 16 or more years of education with dozens of teachers, you can only name a handful that actually were good teachers.

> All of the above took roughly the same headcount LinkedIn now has. The technology team writing and running all that custom software was maybe 200-300 people.

> So even after I hear all the reasons LinkedIn has to be so huge (sales, support, scale, etc), I'm still left scratching my head.

The reason for your head-scratching is unclear. Your previous company had about the same headcount as LinkedIn.

LinkedIn, being an international company even before Microsoft’s acquisition, probably has a similar level of necessary personnel, including internal and external software development teams.

I don’t see the reason for your confusion from what you’ve written. Perhaps explicitly stating a point of difference between your previous company and LinkedIn would clarify?

My apologies, you are correct. I took some things for granted in terms of why I made the comparison, and on further reflection it probably isn't a fair comparison.

For example, I took it for granted that when I said there were 1500 retail locations that readers would realize that meant probably close to 10,000 out of the 13,000 were just dedicated to running those retail locations (that's going by back of the envelope math, as well as hazy memories of actual numbers).

Add to that probably another 1000 for the warehouses and associated logistics, and you're looking at a pool of maybe 2000 actual knowledge workers split among all of the functions listed above (sales, marketing, support, legal, real estate, merchandising, development, IT, etc, etc).

I also made perhaps an invalid assumption that the software being written to manage and optimize the: 1) design of a product 2) sending it off to China for manufacture 3) shipping it back to the states 4) storing it in a warehouse 5) letting it be found, ordered and paid for online by anyone in the world 6) and finally shipped to the end consumer.... is all somehow more complicated than the development being done by LinkedIn, and being done by only a couple hundred dev and infrastructure people.

In my mind, that felt like evidence LinkedIn might be bloated. But as others have pointed out, I'm sure there are dev challenges I'm taking for granted. And of course you need a healthy headcount to deal with the legal, support and sales operations of a company with the international footprint of LinkedIn.

Across how many countries & continents was that company operating?

How many currencies, and differing legal requirements did they have to deal with?

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