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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

How many employees would seem reasonable for Reddit to you? Also a sincere question.

Let's see.. Reddit is a very straightforward non-realtime forum that doesn't run its own servers

Maybe two dozen engineers/devops, a dozen support/management people for them, and 50-100 minimum wage-ish admins and their managers/corporate support structure. I can't pretend to know anything about the ad sales part of the business, I guess that's where the other 1800 people live?

That sounds about right - for an English-language-only message board startup that mostly ignores laws outside of a 100-mile radius of the bay area.

Narrowing focus to just engineering: how would you allocate 24 engineers across infra (networking, storage, scaling), backend (API, features), web frontend, design, mobile (iOS & Android), security, ads & monetization, Abuse & internal tooling dev? Or would you allocate 1 or 2 individuals to each (working 60-80 hour weeks) rather than teams (3-5 people, minimum) + line-managers & product folk. Add QA and you realize "2 dozen engineers" isn't a lot, the devil is in the details.

I was being charitable on 3-member teams: noone wants to be on an on-call roster that's only 3-engineers deep. Each of the areas I highlighted likely has multiple teams rather than just one (e.g. infra can be split into parthensized teams - networking, storage, operations/ops), and I intentionally completely ignored R&D functions.

That's true. And each one of those teams is going to need intra-team support teams with a lot of enterprise project managers, product managers, technical project managers, stakeholders, directly responsible individuals. There's going to be schedules to manage, rollouts, release dates, code lockdowns. Build engineers, infrastructure to support the build engineers and the project managers. Engineers are going to be spending so much time in standups, meetings, pre-meeting meetups, all-hands, etc that they'll be lucky to get an unbroken hour a day to code at all. Before you know it you have 500 people doing a job that's entirely doable by a handful of hardworking people.

> Before you know it you have 500 people doing a job that's entirely doable by a handful of hardworking people

Perhaps the market rewards growth more than it does efficiency? I can't name a single company (post WhatsApp) that has users in the 9-plus-digit-range and has less than a thousand employees.

yeah, I think you're right

It seems like investors prefer to have a large (but still profitable) org with a lot of redundancy and clear systems in place than an elite team of superheroes

I'm just annoyed that Spez is running a bloated overweight organization, then using that fact to justify some user-hostile money grubbing

Nobody likes an elite team of superheroes for a _business_. Superheroes burn out, get hit by a bus, have limited affinity for creating good documentation, sometimes a tendency to be fascinated by shiny things, can get annoyed by a real or perceived <whatever> and quit or can be headhunted away. And then there goes your business.

I dislike unnecessary bloat, be it in software or in org design, as much as the next guy, but staking your company's long-term future on superheroes (or superpowers, as it's for some inexplicable reason still fashionable to say) is a recipe for disaster.

You could also create a photo sharing site in a couple of weeks with a dozen devs. But an actual business like Instagram, that can acquire users, thats profitable is a different story.

There are dozens of unprofitable Internet search engines each made by a handful of people, yet Google somehow employs ~200k people to run a profitable search engine.

I can create (probably build from scratch) a wiki in same amount of time but non-profit Wikipedia is 450(?) people.

The core tech isn’t the driver to headcount, the business model is.

For Reddit, that probably means selling ads and acquiring users. Which probably means a whole lot of ad tech and other optimizations/features to increase visitors to your site. Ad sales, ad tech, etc etc. It probably means ad sales to big clients with complex legal, etc.

In the tech, entire feature groups worth having because it serves important business goals around user retention or growth. Some small percentage of extra eyeballs helps Reddit towards these goals that a site like hacker news wouldn’t care about.

That's exactly what Reddit more than 10 years ago. Right now they have NFT, real time chat, image and video hosting (imgur used to handle these), various one-off functionalities (r/place, polls, etc), react-based frontend (and the mobile counterpart), mobile apps for Android and iOS (seemingly a separate codebase), ads departments, various virtual goods (gold awards, profile pics customization), and perhaps many more I'm not aware about.

Well, the best Reddit app available (Apollo) is made by one guy. So maybe start there.

An app available only on one platform couldn't possibly be the best one available, this is highly subjective. "One of the most popular" perhaps

An app that scrapes an API is no measure of the complexity under the hood.

To be honest, I'm not surprised at the 2k number after everyone crazily bloated their companies during the low-rate period. I would be really surprised if they have < 1k.

If anything, the fact that they have only 2k employees shows how much free labor the mods provide.

There was a large argument about free mod labor during the dotcom days in regards to AOL forums. Not much has changed since those days. The solution to the free labor mod situation is a Reddit operated more like Wikipedia, that removes the obnoxious layer of behavior in Reddit that is hyper corporate and has tended to cause most of the problems. The free labor mods will feel a lot less upset about a platform that isn't profiting off their backs as well.

Can't say, but let's estimate ranges. Probably more than Wikipedia, less than Twitter.

Twitter pre-pandemic: 5000

Wikipedia pre-pandemic: 450

So... maybe 1000.

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