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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

HN: How does every company have so many people?

Twitter / Google / Microsoft / Amazon layoffs occur

HN: The feudal lords have decided the serfs are no longer needed. Google shrinking is a travesty and proves they are a dying company! Time for revolution!

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You know that (potentially misattributed) Steinbeck quote about how poor Americans view themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires? Well it seems like a large percentage of HN view themselves as temporarily embarrassed FAANG employees. Those are the cool places that people want to work, so people have a more natural empathy for their employees. Few have dreams of working for Yahoo, so their employees don't merit the same empathy and instead we get jokes made at their expense.

I thought we were mostly startup folks, at least as far as engineers go?

That would be an interesting poll. Personally I’ve never worked for a startup. I’m an engineer at a non-tech Fortune 100 company.

I think this was the case then HN was new, these days it's a very general tech crowd (like slashdot was 20 years ago).

So the startups are temporarily embarrassed FAANGs?

I would imagine this place hates on FAANG more than the average place.

I'm 100% sure that quite a lot of actual FAANG employees are on HN

I have absolutely no desire to join FAANG, and I am confident that I am not part of some tiny minority here.

Like Steinbeck, I was not speaking literally. Even if you hate those 5 specific companies, they represent a kind of pinnacle for tech workers in the way they pay, value, and empower their employees. Maybe you would never work at any of them today. They have a lot of baggage at this point. However I’m confident that many people here would have loved to work at a company like them at some point in those companies’ histories even if that time was back when they were run out of a garage.

FAANG is the opposite of cool. The money is good and there is some prestige in getting through the hiring funnel, but ultimately as an individual you will be unimportant to the company and you will never be highly productive due to all the red tape.

“You could run Twitter with 50 engineers” is practically an HN meme at this point. There was lots of discussion claiming that many Googlers sit around and do nothing. I think there are two consistent sides of this particular debates

FAANG is what you make it. If you wanna coast and make 350k for 20 hours of actual work, it's doable. But if you wanna work on some super fancy team, make it to staff eng, make an impact etc... there's a path for that too.

Neither of them are wrong approaches to working at FAANG

That doesn't invalidate the point that at some point they thought "man, 6400 employees really enough to run Yahoo, we really need another 1600" so clearly they thought they felt had work for at least 6400 employees. So what was it?

A lot of not invented here (some of which has made it outside like Hadoop, npm being heavily inspired by the yahoo package manager, screwdriver which is a self-hosted travis clone).

Things that were once difficult but are now easy (datacenter management).

Things that are not user facing but which Yahoo is actually doing with much lower headcount than their competitors (ad tech).

Things which don't actually have synergies and have headcounts comparable to independent competitors (e.g. CNET is a 500 person company, Yahoo has a news business, Fanduel is a 2000 person fantasy sports company, Yahoo has one of those too)

Google hasn't been what engineers think Google is since at least 2008. Probably a few years earlier.

My mistake. Please forgive my usage of HN cliche #318. (Though you appear to be in violation of cliche 284)

But my question stands. What the hell is Yahoo doing nowadays? Yahoo Finance and search can't take that many folks to run. Maybe it's Yahoo Weather?

It's a shame you're continuing with your snark - if you work in tech, I'm sure you could use your imagination on the myriad of ways that many employees could still be generating value, or you could even do a quick search and satisfy your own curiosity.

More recent: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/121015/how-yah...

Older, but more clearly laid out: https://fourweekmba.com/how-does-yahoo-make-money/

What about Twitter? How in the world did it take that many people to run a single website?

How much do you know about the machinery running that single website? If you can't answer this question then the reduction in your assumption of how simple it is falls flat.

How many large orgs with hundreds of millions of users have you worked for? Derive from that experience how many people it takes to run their systems...

How about taking the question at face value and attempting to answer it instead of questioning the assumptions behind it?

I've been working on a single website for a Fortune 50 company more than 20 years. For the first 12 years years it was just me. I built the entire thing from the ground up. Provisioned servers, installed software (database, web server, application server, etc.), hardened software, optimized software, designed database schema for hundreds of tables, wrote tens of thousands of sql scripts, optimized queries, wrote server side software, wrote apache config file, built front end, etc. After 12 years they hired another developer and the two of us have been the only ones working on it since. Now, our website isn't used by hundreds of millions of users, but it has been used by millions of users and we get about a million unique users each day. Obviously it will take more than 1 or 2 developers to create and maintain a website of Twitter's size, but 10s of thousands of developers? That seems pretty crazy.

We really should be questioning how companies are allowed to grow that large before generating a profit.

If your company's revenue expenditure starts growing to around 1% of the GDP of a small city and you're still LOSING money, at what point and how much employee-risk needs to be taken on for you to prove your business model?

Also crazy that any of these employees ever felt secure. headcount in the thousands to tens of thousands and operating in the red? That's chum in the water.

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