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Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

> Binance had a global staff of 8,000

A 12.5% reduction. Also, they are way larger than I thought with 8k employees. I don't know what's involved with running an exchange but they must be into lots of things with that many folks.

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NYSE has around 2000 employees. So I think this is more than they need.

OTOH NYSE operates in NY and US jurisdictions right? Binance tries to operate everywhere.

> Binance tries to operate everywhere.

Under which legal jurisdiction does Binance operate? It's not "all of them". I'm not sure that it's "any of them".

Fair cop, haha. It has designs on operating aboveboard I think everywhere on earth right?

And I have designs on flying to the moon by flapping my arms.

In some corporate cultures, headcount is its own reward.

There are dozens of protocols they need to integrate with and keep up to date. Plus, those protocols change constantly. And there are also new ones, and those which disappear... And then, there is their whole infrastructure.

The support must be massive too. And the legal aspect must also keep people busy from having to enforce various regulations to having to answer to various governments...

So let's take a comparison: - facebook: 50k employee. What has changed on Facebook for the last few years? So yes, there is probably some support, the content enforcement of course must keep a lot of people busy, but then?..

- snapchat: 5k employee. Well, for a social media platform which is not changing at all and actually losing in revenue, that's a big number

> facebook: 50k employee. What has changed on Facebook for the last few years?

What do you mean? Facebook changes literally every day. Every single day a piece of UI randomly stops working.

You're assuming (in both the Binance and Facebook cases) that the majority of headcount comes from product development teams. Not true. The majority of that 8k/50k figure comes from areas like sales, compliance, finance, HR and management.

They have around 100M registered users, so approximately 1 employee for every 100k users seems reasonable.

Yes, totally. They probably have tons of support, sales, etc. I'd imagine they have tons of contractors too with that many users. Makes sense now.

That figure seems implausibly high. 1 in 80 humans on Earth are not only participating in crypto but specifically have an account on Binance? It certainly cannot be the number of active users.

If its indeed true, the gap between onchain and offchain users is even more immense.

On chain, there are not more than 100k users across chains daily. Real users across all EVM chains is probably around 20k/day. Major airdrops like Optimism and Arbitrum went out to like 600k wallets (and most have multiple wallets). OpenSea has like a few thousand daily active users.

Which makes you wonder - all these billions in funding for serving just…100k real users? Because if its not onchain, it might as well be a database.

It has been reported that CZ had 300 accounts himself, so like most things in crypto the 100M number is to be taken with a grain of salt.

To be fair, exchanges are pretty complicated. That said, it seems like a pretty high number.

you need a lot of operations people like customer service for an exchange. not really surprising.

I don't know if I'm just naive, but I'm always confused when I see such a high headcount for companies with such simple tech, the staff of Twitter (even after mass layoffs) confuses me also.

I feel like these companies are solving a relatively simple problem, and a single skilled engineer working full time could probably make and maintain a decent scalable solution.

True sign of the arrogant software engineer, believing they can single-handedly recreate an entire company just because they went to school in one subject for 4 years.

Such vitriol! It's safer to assume they're inexperienced than arrogant.

Pretty much the definition of arrogance, being inexperienced and still thinking they can do the work of a hundred people

I work at one such company and I still think most of us aren't needed. I swear it's 90% red tape and BS holding everyone back. I know I can build things 30x faster outside of work, but I will also confess that it might not meet at the accessibility guidelines and i18n and be user tested and so forth.

every profession does this. Have you ever spoken to marketers about how important marketing is? or accountants? most people have a massively outsized idea of their own role to the point they wonder what other people even do.

The only difference with engineers is they can believe at least in theory they could create the backbone of some services, so they could have a shoddy mvp made in a few days which they assume just needs a "little" work to top it off, whereas others can't start without tech help, but massively underestimate how much tech work is required for their ideas.

If you dont believe me, hang around a startup space and see how people talk about trying to find technical cofounders

I mean feel free to make the next Twitter with a single Engineer if you think it is possible.

Twitter is a weird example. The next Twitter has to be at least as good as Twitter without the growing pains. The initial product didn't scale well and probably was written quickly by very few people.

The author didn't say "early Twitter" they said Twitter.

They claimed you don't need more than one Engineer to run a product like Twitter in their post so I said they should try.

An exchange is not simple tech. It isn't a simple problem.

Isn't it "an exchange at scale is not simple tech". I'd imagine I could build an exchange to handle 100 users pretty quickly.

Simple tech at scale rarely stays simple.

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