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Comment by pyrelight | Hacker News Reader

Honest question from someone who has never worked at a Bay Area startup:

What do all these developers at these tech companies do all day? As a freelance developer who has to meet ridiculous timelines all the time, I don't really get how a company can have hundreds of developers and yet the product seems to languish and/or get worse or slower or both.

I suppose there's a lot more overhead with internal QA, code review, meetings, etc, but with the amount of developers these companies have as full-time staff, what are they doing all day? Is it mostly internal systems, tooling, etc?

I just find it hard to believe that there can be hundreds of developers at a company like Twitch and yet the product is largely the same as it was 5 years ago. I would think features could be cranked out so much faster than they appear to be.

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This sort of question comes up a lot when people are talking about big social media sites and there are two answers, both related to scale. First is that things really do just go more slowly when you are larger. There are more stakeholders and greater consequences to change. You don't change anything without measuring it first through flagging and limited a/b releases, and often those a/b tests actually fail to show a reason to release the change since the stats show that even though you think it's an improvement, it actually has a negative impact on key metrics.

But the second one is that while the site might seem simple and straightforward, the way it has to be engineered to handle the massive scale of a Reddit (with over a billion active monthly users) makes it very, very complicated internally. I'm not familiar with Reddit specifically but having seen the architecture at other places of similar size, I can tell you there's a ton going on behind the scenes to make it possible to reliably serve that many users and that makes major changes very complicated, involving multiple teams, and lots of planning.

These companies don’t operate like bay area startups, nearly the opposite. Where a startup is low on process and very nimble, these orgs are slow and bloated. They have too much money. They’re more like a bad corporate gig with even less focus on quality because they heard Zuck say breaking things is ok.

Peel back the layers of any site that has millions of active users and you'll find all sorts of things you never imagined would be a problem, but become so at scale because, well, people (and, well, scale).

Reality is surprisingly complicated.

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