Am i reading this right? Once the pandemic hit headcount went 200 -> 1000 -> 830
What is different in the user experience since 2020? I can understand needing an army of SRE's but this feels extremely bloated for a company who was able to run their product on a 200 person crew
They also added a bunch of monetization stuff (discord nitro) and attempted to get more "community" based features like custom emotes/badges/profiles per server/watch party stuff.
The core experience is the same, I think they've done a great job ensuring that doesnt change! They have also done the usual software stuff, improving core outskirts like stability/performance/login methods/slash options. Its the same core product but better.
I think you're more on the money with the miscellaneous other projects. They were even trying to sell games through Discord at one point.
Unlike Twitter or Twitch, they have to diversify, as I believe they are burning money on their core product. The benefits of Nitro is not much. But they aren't going to become profitable by paying engineers $400K on bad ideas and keeping the engineers on reserve duty, which they have probably been doing.
As an SRE I can assure you, you don't need an army of SREs for a singular product.
Senior Executives experience? They look bigger as a company.