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Comment by aldanor | Hacker News Reader

It always baffles me how there are 3k people working at, say, Dropbox. What are they all doing? There's a product, it simply syncs files, it synced files pretty much the same way 10 years ago, give or take some polishing and optimisation.

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I work in enterprise product support to companies that pay us very large amounts of money every year for the product. A support call at a small business for a particular issue might take 15 minutes. For the same issue at a F50 that could take all day, maybe more.

In the small company I may something like "flip this windows setting and reboot the server". They do, we test it, and the call is done.

In enterprise the different levels of complexity spiral out of control very quickly. Is it the standard windows setting issue, or is it the enterprise endpoint protection causing the problem? Ok, lets follow the windows setting issue. Do we have access control the windows settings on this machine? No, we'll need admin access. Actually its controlled by a GPO. Now we need to raise a ticket with the active directory team and may need a custom change. Custom changes need a compliance and security officer to review. Because this change also requires a reboot a impact report needs filed before implementation and reboot. Do we have to test this in the customers Dev/UAT/QA system before implementation? And if this is a new issue will I have to write up the issue for the documentation team?

And after that I'll have spent 10 hours of on the call time with the customer, mostly waiting on them. And next year when sales comes to them with an even higher price tag for the same product they pay the bill because they know when they call we'll stay with them until the problem is solved.

And sometimes you have to stay on a war room call with the customer team the entire time until the issue is resolved, while trying to accomplish all of the above, and navigate that company's unique internal politics (which you need to understand to navigate). But yeah, someone who is good at doing this makes it looks like you can replace them with a cookie cutter support person because they are good and making sure there is no visible friction with the customer, therefor to the bean counters, this persons hard work is invisible. But when this person is gone, and there is suddenly tons of friction next year's sales is f'd. Good luck tech companies laying all these 'dead wood' people that took care of all these things (stuff that also doesn't just fit into the corporate knowledge base). I said before, if you can replace people that do this sort of thing with just anyone, you don't have a real company, you have a franchise that can just plug people into roles. But large customers don't want the McDonalds treatment, they want (and their complexity demands it if your solution is to work for them) the personal service treatment.

Again, I wish HN had an auto responder for "what can Xk people at company Y be doing?".

Not that companies never have bloat, but it's obvious from your comment you don't know what DropBox actually does these days. Have you seen the admin pane for enterprise users? There is a huge amount there alone that goes into permissions and role management, auditing, compliance requirements, etc.

One simple example - how many engineers do you think it took to get all the compliance frameworks (e.g. SOC II, HIPAA, etc.) implemented and maintained? My guess is that that is one of a hundred requirements you didn't even consider.

And that is exactly how the scope increases.

The problem is not that companies or products increase their scope. Most companies do need to increase their scope in order to grow. The problem is increasing scope in an untargeted way that leads to more cost but without a commensurate increase in revenue.

I don't think any sane person would argue that DropBox going into the enterprise was a bad business decision.

Have you taken a look at what Dropbox actually does today? Just open their website and hover "Products" and you will see that the company does much more than "just" file syncing today (and they're profitable doing so).

dropbox needs sales teams to sell their product to the enterprise. That’s easily 100-200 people. Then you need support for when those enterprise customers complain, easily another 50+. Infrastructure is done in house with massive storage arrays needing 24x7x365 oncall rotation. Again easily another 30+ people. What about their android and iOS apps. Web apps. Etc

It adds up. Sure they probably have fat to trim, but twitter gives us a great case study how often the massive headcount is focused on revenue generation activities the user isn’t privy to.

>twitter gives us a great case study how often the massive headcount is focused on revenue generation activities the user isn’t privy to

Does it? Twitter the product has been fine (barring clumsy design changes driven by Musk) after the massive downsizing, and they still make billions. I was under the impression a lot of the lost revenue was because of Musk's caustic image that made brands pull their campaigns from the platform.

Less Musk's caustic image and more the lack of moderation due to the layoffs meant a rise in content that advertisers did not want to advertise next to.

There was an older podcast from Darknet Diaries[0] that was about a very popular chat app called “Kik”. Kik was targeted at teens and younger, with an estimated install base of 1 out of every 3 American teenagers.

Long story short they were bought by some holding company that completely neglected the platform and stopped any kind of moderation, DMCA notice or anything else. The result? It became a huge magnet for trading child porn.

While listening to this podcast I thought of how Elon gutted twitter to the bone and probably fired entire teams designed to deal with this kind of content…

[0] https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/93/

Let's see how next year's sales cycle plays out for Twitter. They are banking on providing a McDonald's value menu model, when those big corporate ad buyers are expecting (and need in order to realize value from the relationship and keep their own jobs by ensuring no embarrassment to the company) a personalized service experience.

You'd think you could do the same with three lines of rsync

It's mostly other roles outside of engineering.

Managers that manage managers that manage the manager that manages the guy managing to do all the work.

Maybe. Usually its a ton of sales people.

Probably a bit of support staff as well

You forgot HR!

One word: enterprise.

This just tells us you don't have enough experience at that scale.

Also the product hasn't essentially changed in a decade. And yet they were so late to get on ARM for Mac (M1), most people (including myself) I know dropped it.

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