There are significant global engineering companies that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways that have roughly that number of people, including their R&D departments.
While I can't answer the question "what does the company need them all for", consider that the company's products are used by ~3.6B people every month, meaning they have about one full-time employee for every ~45,000 users.
Compare this with Google (one employee for every ~29,000 users) or Twitter (one employee for every ~52,000 users). The ballpark is similar, and shows the trend of it being harder to have fewer employees per thousand users (Twitter is much smaller than Meta, and Google twice the size in employee count while reached ~20% more monthly users).
The company generated ~$117B in revenue in 2021, which is ~$1.46M per employee. Profits per employee (net income divided by employee count) was ~$480K/employee.
There will, naturally be a cost of revenue, cost of customer support (even if not all of it in-house).
Also worth considering that Meta is composed like several companies: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger, Reality Labs and several smaller/larger bets operating pretty independently.
I'd flip your question around: what if Meta had fewer employees, what would it mean? It would mean:
1. Increasing their profitability even further
2. Likely less support for current customers, and less of an ability to invest in forward-looking initiatives
I'm sure shareholders of Meta would be happy with #1. For #2, short-term shareholders would be happy to see all of this go. Long-term shareholders would likely realize there would be a cost to cutting down on customer support and R&D and I would not expect them to support this, given the very high profits Meta already has.
All in all, I find it remarkable that the company can operate with such revenue and profit numbers, and I suspect they are already deliberately hiring employees more conservatively, to keep up this profitability rate.
As a side comment, I have my thoughts on how non-applicable the linked article is for software engineers at Meta, as discussed in this comment [1] on this thread.
Spend more time talking to average people.
They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.
Agreed. If someone’s mental model of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp doesn’t extend beyond “scroll through bad posts from distant relatives” then they don’t really understand how those products are used by the general public.
A lot of people in the tech world never really got engaged with social media, stopped visiting (or deleted their accounts), and have anchored their mental models to their personal experience a decade ago. Meanwhile, the world has changed massively and Meta has a lot of users for a reason.
So it’s really not important to most people. It’s numbers are heavily influenced by people who use it because someone or some organization happens to use it.
But that's a really bad way to determine the important of Facebook, for two reasons.
1. You've assumed that the only purpose of Facebook is posting, so a user making an average of one post per week isn't finding it valuable. Bad assumption.
2. You're counting a bizarre measure of market penetration, a standard that only air and food and water would meet. Many, many people don't use cars, and people who do often only use them five days a week. If you think that means cars aren't important to many people, try taking one away!
And that’s the difference between us. If my car disappeared into the ether, I would immediately launch a series of ether-disappearing experiments, systematically trying larger and larger items and video recording the results. I would post these to HN, admittedly in the hopes of going viral while also doing my best to move science forward.
But you? Noooo, just pop over to your insurance company and get a new minivan, leaving the rest of us in the dark about your amazing ether disposal system.
1/4th of all people is a staggeringly large number.
Also, Meta is more than Facebook and they don’t need to post to be using the platform. They have about 3.7 billion monthly active users.
I really don’t understand this knee-jerk drive to try to downplay the scale of a company that has half of the planet as their active user base.
Facebook Marketplace is a whole world of its own. It's become like the Etsy/Ebay/Craigslist in Central America. Payments are confirmed by sending screenshots of bank transfers, and deliveries handed by private post or an informal network of couriers that visit towns and neighborhoods on specific days of the week.
It is not just people talking to each other, several business rely almost completely in WhatsApp around here.
IG is also still the top social media as well globally.
Banks that use WhatsApp for customer support, or restaurant chains that take orders via WhastsApp bots, pay WhatsApp partners for API access.
The payment goes to the WhatsApp partner. What I'm not sure is, if it is distributed between Meta and the WhatsApp Api provider.
I reckon its a bit like email. Great as a top of the funnel customer acquisition tool. Not that great from a money making perspective.
Drugs are important to drug addicts. That's not a reason to praise the dealers for their business acumen.
Facebook and Instagram are exploitative as fuck.
They’ve gotta be two of the least toxic social media sites compared to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — any why: because the format is cancer to news.
Social media itself is great — Snapchat, IG, BeReal, Radite, Discord as long as they are successfully able keep them from becoming political megaphones. TikTok has come the closest to being a general purpose broadcast social network that hasn’t been corrupted but long term I’m sure it’ll get poisoned too.
No wonder that we get stories of students now revolting against challenging courses: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/opinion/letters/nyu-tough...
"A key factor is Professor Jones’s observation that about a decade earlier he noticed a loss of focus in students."
The exact timeframe when children who marinated in social media grew up. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind (from two different NYU professors), the authors track a sudden change in student behavior, like intolerance, impatience, fragility - all around 2013.
So we can discuss how "important" it is to them, but we are just now beginning to get data about how these apps absolutely destroy our ability to focus, think, and connect with other humans.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only important when life is good. They are icing on the cake. But once things go south, they can be quickly discarded.
Do either of those pages get the power back sooner?
How about regulating and resourcing the power systems so that storms don't frequently take them out. I've lived in the same house for over thirty years and I can count the number of outages on the fingers of one hand. Two of them were planned and all were of less than 24 hours duration.
I'll grant you that I live in an area that doesn't have a lot of storms but even so the electricity company cuts a wide corridor either side of power lines to make sure that trees cannot fall on the lines.
At Meta’s scale, that’s about 1 employee for every 45,000 monthly active users across their platforms. Many of those MAUs are using multiple Meta products.
I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees. They’re serving a significant portion of the entire world’s population with their products. Of course they’re going to need a lot of employees.
But then, Valve was one of the most profitable company per employee count.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Corporation
[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/valve-reveals-steams-monthly-a...
The question that people have is, "what do the employees actually do?" It's because most people have no idea how labor intensive tech is, nor do they understand the math behind the revenue that 45k active users generate. That said, when you look at 80,000 people "to operate a website" it sounds ridiculous (even thought it probably is not).
Poor/thrifty users take the same amount of work as users who click on ads and buy stuff.
It has been like this for years now.
It also took months and months for them to fix a “phantom message” where it’d show I had a single Messenger message from the main Facebook app, despite there being nothing there (even in the ‘not friends with you’ section, I checked!).
I don't know if these things become fundamentally hard to fix at their scale, like it's possible that a "hide" button becomes too hard to properly implement if your feed suggestion algorithm has to handle millions of users at the same time. It's possible, but sounds hard to believe, because a lot of the quality has degraded in only a couple of years, and they haven't become orders of magnitude larger in that time.
Of course, it would be very reasonable to claim that they simply don't care. But their websites do keep changing, so it's also not like they have decided to halt development of this part of the UX and simply focused on doing advertising right.
Personally, I still suspect that regardless of their motives, there's a high degree of corporate inefficiency.
Regardless thanks to whomever at Facebook who got it fixed.
So when I see someone who is going through trauma like this sharing a picture and asking for emotional support I don’t want to block them. I tap “hide” which then promptly does… absolutely nothing.
There is definitely a legitimate use case for the “hide” button where the two things you mentioned won’t really help.
In all likelihood we're also not talking Facebook but Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever else they have been buying up. Depending on how the acquisitions were handled, there's likely a lot of structural redundancies there too.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not suggesting all of the layoffs were developers. But a company like Meta has a vast number of support staff and this number scales with the number of developers. A good chunk of the layoffs might just be service staff being replaced with external service companies. And even if they layed off thousands of developers, that would likely mean also laying off thousands of other workers no longer needed to support the developers.
Example or sources for this claim? I spent close to a decade working there and this doesn’t sound familiar at all.
I'm not falling on my sword to defend Facebook here, BTW. The company does a lot wrong. I just suspect it's not much worse than anyone else.
Also since Meta is multi app you could have one solution for FB and one solution for IG etc.
If you have something extremely critical you need done and enough resources, especially at a high risk of failure, you often have multiple groups tackling the same problem to increase your odds of overall success.
Edit.
I just saw the photo for their Nebraska data center, so I guess each of their locations are about the same size and shape.
I'm actually surprised there would be that many. This report [1] from the US chamber of commerce says 157 after initial construction and I've seen numbers lower than that. (Some may be a function of presumably outsourced workers like security guards and janitorial services.)
Datacenters bring money to an area while they're being built but there are very few local jobs once they're operational. (Obviously engineers do work connected to datacenters from other locations.)
[1] https://www.uschamber.com/sites/default/files/ctec_datacente...
I really wish local politicians would get this. Here in Norway, several small communities got wooed by businesses wanting free land and cheap electricity for data centers, in return for promises of hundreds if not thousands of jobs from all those supposedly using the data center.
One even ended up having to buy back land they gave for free[1] for ~$700k.
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/nordland/ballangen-ga-bort-tomt-for-a-fa-...
The frontend apps are all the same, whether they have 3 users or 3 billion.
You also end up leaving massive efficiencies on the floor by not hiring more specialists as you scale. This is a good read which explains it in detail https://danluu.com/in-house/
I would also suggest reading their published papers on in house systems to understand the challenges that come with operating at a large scale.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30940595
I’m sure FB could operate with a range of employees 40k-100k(?), but that number scaling with users is far from surprising.
Product and UI has its own complexities, but it seems clear each product is unique and would require different logic.
I’m still thinking it’s just enough to repair failures in a timely manner (and assuming there is spare capacity so you are not blocked if something breaks). Which means only a few hands on deck and the rest being triaged remotely.
Or not maybe we are still in the 90s when you need someone sitting at a desk in a server room to handle password resets :P