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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

It’s crazy to me how Facebook has so many employees when their entire business is basically managing 3 software products (Facebook, instagram and the advertising platform).

Meanwhile I think Apple has about the same number of employees if you subtract the retail Apple store workers.

Yet, Apple’s business is comprised of managing, and this is only a rough guess:

- 30+ hardware products and their supply chain, marketing and distribution

- A microprocessor and component design business

- 3 entire operating systems and developer tools and app store sales infrastructure for each

- 50+ software products and services, including competitors for Microsoft office suite, Netflix, Spotify, Google Chrome, Dropbox, Adobe Premier, Zoom, and more

- a film & tv production business

- a massive physical retail store footprint

- a global e-commerce store

- I’m sure I’m forgetting something else

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Even including the retail employees, Apple's footprint is barely double the size of Facebook.

I agree that it's really bizarre how wasteful FB's operations seem to be compared to Apple's.

What an unimaginative company...

But it creates jobs?

And now it’s laying off thousands..

Isn't a lot of retail apple stuff essentially outsourced? Apple sells a lot of stuff in Poland, but there are zero Apple jobs here. It's all "authorized reseller" and "authorized service".

I’m assuming you’re in Poland. In the US and in some countries neighboring Poland there are owned and operated Apple stores with Apple staff. When I visit my work’s Warsaw office I always seem to need an Apple Store for something and end up settling for an iStore or similar third party. Authorized Retailers are fine but they usually lack all the small spare parts Apple will carry. On these trips I always seem to break a specific part that I know an Apple Store carries and have to wait until I am in another country.

These stores were started in the early 00s due to Apple’s lack of control over how their products were merchandised in US big box stores. Prior to Apple Stores, I purchased all my Apple products and equipment from a catalog or the early E-commerce catalog websites A lot of the experiential sales in Apples world stemmed from the retail experience they created.

If they didn't work for meta they'd be working on something that might be competing with meta

No one is going to challenge Facebook head on. Google tried and flamed out. Zuckerberg is afraid of new forms of social media that will expedite the death of Facebook. This is why he bought Instagram. Was it really a competitor? Nope. But it was the new thing the kids were flocking to.

It is more crazy if you remember when they bought whatssapp it was less than 20 employees supporting a billion user.

And the app doesn't look like it changed that much since it started being supported by 10,000 employees (guessing).

Too many cooks

> And the app doesn't look like it changed that much...

You didn't intend it, but that is a complement of the highest order. Thanks!

Those who've worked on large systems over many years will understand what I mean.

I can see what you're getting at here but in this case, a lack of changes is NOT desired or virtuous.

WA is being left in the dust by messaging platforms that actually care about shipping a quality product.

Says you. Lots of people like software that keeps working reliably over the years. I know I do. The only valuable updates to WhatsApp are when new emojis are added ;). For the rest it already works very well, why break it or redesign it?

Indeed, says me. I've never used whatsapp and I probably never will.

Other messaging apps introduce new features, like inline bots and the ability to not share your phone number to everyone you talk to.

The articles I can find with numbers show Whatsapp at about 2B users, ahead of WeChat and everything else. When I flew Southwest the other day the only apps the "free wifi messaging" bothered supporting were iMessage and Whatsapp.

I thought about this yesterday.

There is actually something very cute and personal about WhatsApp.

I would go to Telegram to get movies or some restricted (conspiracy?) news feeds.

Spam, payment notes, etc. come via regular Messages/SMS.

But when something comes via WhatsApp... Dunno, it just feels more personal from me. As if, it's someone I personally know or care about / involved with.

I think some of this magic is preserved just because it does not add any other features that dilate the original use case and how it makes one feel.

Telegram to get movies? Can you explain this?

In addition to 1-to-1 chats and group chats, telegram has channels, which are kind of similar to twitter timelines, 1-to-many communications.

There are a large number of channels that take advantage of the 2 gig filesize limit by uploading pirated media. It's actually more convenient than torrents for most things, but it's still a hassle compared to a good usenet setup.

You can find entire seasons of animes just by doing a global search for the name of the anime. Sometimes there's even a chat attached for discussing the anime!

It's quaint :-)

no, it isn't. WA is the industry standard. More features doesn't mean better

Oh hell no. I'm glad that Whatsapp is being mostly left alone, or at least that's what I see as a user. They ship some improvements and extraneous stuff (Whatsapp Status) from time to time, but the core of the app stays as it is.

Most people don't look forward to every time their app is redesigned starting from the icon up. It mostly doesn't get better, it gets worse to satisfy a Product Manager's CV checkbox.

We've entered distopia

Unless memory is failing me, WhatsApp had ~55 employees (engineers ?) when they were acquired, also I doubt that Facebook is now pumping tens of thousands of engineers on a product that kept itself up with more or less 50 people. Moreover, I'm not sure what sort of change were they even supposed to bring to the app when their goal, as WhatsApp stated, was to take over SMS as global messaging system.

Adobe, on the other hand, with its ~26k headcount is juggling an astonishing range of products and services it seems.

Adobe's the most forgotten and ignored tech company that actually makes staple software products and services, I think.

No matter how much people hate their price gouging :-)

Will get better when Scott Belsky takes over.

Well Adobe has also done a lot of acquisition and (many of them they then failed to maintain those products, until a slow death. what they did to Macromedia still hurts.) let us not forget they purchased photoshop and most of what is there PDF software today came from the acquisitions of several companies.

That's funny I never thought about that. Is their pay low?

Not super low. They're just not cool nor super big.

Adobe software is user hostile, bug infested spyware perched atop mountains of tech debt.

Still chugging along on CS6….

Some call it price gouging and some call it a subscription to professional software that's constantly under significant development. Other professional tools in adjacent industries cost a LOT MORE. Nuke Studio, for example, costs 4k/quarter.

Sure Adobe should focus more on old usability issues in lieu of new features and many of their programs have such broad userbases that they couldn't possibly focus equally on everything their users want them to focus on, but when it comes down to it, people are mad because it's something they want, but not enough to pay for. Looking at their uservoice forums for 5 minutes dispenses with the notion that they're just giving these apps the bare minimum amount of work and using them as cash cows.

There are cheaper or FOSS alternatives that suit most non-professional's needs but if you want Adobe's professional tools and have those tools keep up with our ever changing technical landscape, that costs money. I professionally use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier Pro, After Effects, Audition, Acrobat, Lightroom Classic and XD, so the CC subscription is an absolute bargain.

They probably have thousands of contractors who are conveniently left out of the headcount.

It also has to be considered that Adobe has a large number of developer contractors that aren't included in the employee headcount, yes?

Facebook, Instagram, Meta (which is Oculus hardware and all the metaverse...stuff), Whatsapp, ads, Portal (which includes hardware). It still seems bloated, but they do a wide variety of things, including running their own enormo-scale platform, in addition to doing things on AWS.

Poor Workplace, always forgotten. https://www.workplace.com/

Hah, does anyone use this?Seems like such an odd product for business…

It's actually pretty good.

Better than chat for fostering async-style communication. Better than email at discoverability.

It's especially crazy given how terrible Facebook's UX is outside of the native apps. Ex. You can't rate marketplace sellers at all and it's been that way for a year or more.

I figured this was done purposely to drive users to native apps, where more device data could be collected than could be through a standard browser.

You're probably right. Now management can reap the reward of sic'ing thousands of engineers on data collection rather than fixing the deficiencies in their product. Too bad for the engineers, though.

You’re forgetting that they also own WhatsApp, the primary mode of communication for several countries.

I know it's grown since the acquisition, but how many people were involved in developing and running the service pre-Facebook?

Around 35.

Do you think a large entreprise that actually needs to follow legislation in 100+ countries can work the same way a startup can, though?

No, I think it requires more. How many more is the question though.

Do you think it grew as significantly as it's employees did? Whatsapp was already huge beyond measure when they bought it.

Apple runs a competitor for that too with iMessage so I’d call it a wash.

Ditto on the AR/VR metaverse thing if macrumors is to be believed.

Are you in the USA?

iMessage is only really relevant in the USA. Meanwhile, Whatsapp is huge in Latin America, Europe, Africa, parts of Asia

I’d rephrase as “In the US, only iMessage is relevant”

Which is surprising considering how bad it is.

In what way is iMessage bad? It works amazingly well from my perspective.

And you're using an android phone I presume?

WhatsApp runs the exact same whether it's an iPhone or an android phone. That's not trivial.

iMessage when I have to use my MacBook because my phone is charging is amazingly awful, completely inflexible.

Have you not used another messaging app?

I am in US, from an Asian community; & people in my circle who own an iPhone still prefer Whatsapp for like 100+ msgs a day. Never saw them using iMessage even for other iPhone users.

Popularity doesn’t have any affect on how many people you need to build it.

Presumably a lot of these are content moderation staff, often much cheaper than engineers. Facebook claimed to have made good progress in the last year automating moderation, but could also just be backing off on moderation to reduce costs at increased risk of regulation.

Often that kind of staff will be employed via agencies, so it's difficult to really compare between companies as we don't have the numbers. For instance, Apple presumably need a lot of staff to moderate apple pay, but if they have outsourced the rolls we won't know how many there are or see if they get cut.

We're specifically talking WhatsApp, there's no moderation in private messaging.

Oh, so that's why we have millions of blog articles about how to scale software and software organizations?

Because software used by 10k people needs as many features and infrastructure care and investment as one used by 3 billion people?

No need for egregious hyperbole, there are well more than 10k iPhones in the USA

That's not how it works, WhatsApp had 50 engineers when it had 900M users[0]. Beside iMessage is not only used by 10k, some estimates put it at more than 1 billion users[1].

[0]https://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-us...

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2022/09/10/why-apple...

iMessage has a lot of users if you count people with iphones who very occasionally try to send a text but end up using iMessage. I count as one but it still is completely irrelevant to me. WhatsApp is where everything interesting is.

Same here. I’m always shocked when I meet someone that doesn’t use WhatsApp

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use WeChat

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use Signal

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use Facebook Messenger

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use LINE

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use Telegram

I'm always shocked when I meet someone that doesn't use QQ

etc.

It is true that WhatsApp seems to be the largest, but it's still used by fewer than 25% of humans, so you might be shocked often.

25% of humans is astonishing considering only about 2/3rds of humans have internet access.

I'm always surprised when I meet someone who does. None of my friends (+their family) or my family have ever used it. Nobody I hang out with will even say they have whatsapp. Maybe it's because we're "desktop people", which doesn't explain the lack of participation by someone like my wife. She uses her phone almost exclusively. shrug

US vs ROTW

there's still infrastructure in place to support you. there's a cost per user and cost per message, and you contributing to the former even if not to the latter.

> Try to send a text but end up using iMessage

iMessage is the default SMS and messaging app on iPhones. It’s what most people use for texting as well as messaging on iPhone.

In the US. Outside even iPhone users use WhatsApp or similar.

>> Apple runs a competitor for that too with iMessage so I’d call it a wash.

I agree, and I’m sure it’s adoption rate is increasing globally.

I’m just saying… WhatsApps global impact on an everyday basis is quite overlooked.

There are countries where people solely depend on WhatsApp to communicate externally. Todays’ green sms on an iPhone is equivalent to a WhatsApp text.

If that fallback, that Facebook controls and owns, didn’t exist or your country banned it—imagine not receiving messages from your kids because “WhatsApp is down”?

Anyways tldr; WhatsApp is cheaper than sms. The default communication for many. More affordable. More used daily as a necessity.

pre-facebook wasn't that run by 50 people?

I worked on FB briefly. It turns out that platform does vastly more than I had imagined, and maybe you too.

There was a time when it seemed like Facebook was the world, and like it was unstoppable. They hired a lot of people believing this.

Apple came from the 80s when people actually built real difficult shit instead of cashing in on corruption.

If you look from the outside yes, however there is low we don't know about FB and hidden works not producing a product etc just yet.They are very long term focused and very different from Tim Apple's idea of a company as an operational engine.

Maps,

Siri,

iCloud,

ApplePay, Apple Card, Apple Pay Later, Apple Cash.

AppleNews.

Apple Fitness

Apple Arcade.

Many businesses have the "not invented here" syndrome, i believe they have many employees doing yak shaving or writing tools/libraries to support the business.

Examples are osquery, folly and contributions to Apache Thrift as well, just to mention a few.

They did slightly more than contributions to Apache Thrift :)

And whatsapp

WhatsApp and Instagram, both acquired by Facebook, were actually a gold standard in lean development. 1o to 30 people for a massively popular product.

If these companies were creating sprawling and unnecessary micro-service-based infrastructures, they would have easily needed headcounts 10 times as large.

So it's really a case in point that Facebook is ultra-wasteful.

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