I don't understand why you'd need 1000 or even 100 developers to produce such app. It's a CRUD frontend for a backend that already exists. What am I missing? Are you counting the developers of all the third party libs they integrate?
Probably a million features that are all relevant to different people who use the app? As a developer you probably use maybe 1% of LinkedIn, but you're not the primary user. It's a professional social network. It's going to have a lot to do.
> I had conversations with that manager where I was told in literally so many words, ‘You’re too idealistic. You don’t care enough about the bottom line. You should change your values.’ And I was like, no, nope, that’s not how this is going to work, man. Uh, outside I did the politic.
If you in the web app and open the network tab you will ve surprised how much junk they are moving around for a seemingly simple app.
The apps were roughly identical in the services that they provided (they both sold the same products but maybe some of the payment methods were different).
I'm still not sure why one company needed 10x the people to maintain the same thing.
So the group of users can be small, but those can be the "whales".
Also recruiters and HR who use paid features also probably use the app.