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Comment by sashank_1509 | Hacker News Reader

Numbers from GPT Astra - Shopify has 3000 engineers as of 2026

- Google Chrome when released in 2008 conservatively had ~ 60 engineers.

- GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online!

In a sane society, Shopify’s opinion on anything engineering related would be thrown into rubbish because they seem to have managed to complicate a simple app into requiring thousands of engineers and now maybe millions in cloud spending to Frontier labs. This is unfortunately not an isolated case, Spotify for one has the same issue, idk what “engineering” Spotify is doing, it’s the worst app I’ve used in my life.

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When Chrome 1.0 came out in 2008, it only ran on Windows, and it couldn't do basic things like print or export to PDF, didn't have any accessibility, didn't work in RTL languages, and didn't have any graphics acceleration, among other limitations. Don't get me wrong, it was a marvelous piece of engineering - but it was extremely incomplete. By the time it was what we think of as a modern, complete browser, they had many hundreds of engineers working on it.

Also, you're comparing the number of engineers working on one product, to the number of engineers working at Shopify across their entire company today, which includes far more than just one app.

You're entitled to your opinion that Shopify is a poor app or that it's overengineered, but clearly it's not simple. That's just a fact. If it looks like a simple app to you, that's because you're not seeing most of it.

It's like looking at the YouTube mobile app as someone who watches videos and saying that the app frontend looks simple. You're only seeing 5% of the app. The other 95% is for video creators and advertisers, and it is decidedly NOT simple. I think that's the same here.

And it was a fork.

Rubbish. Most of the stuff you’re listing is handled by OS and frameworks themselves, you don’t need hundreds of SE to handle RTL or a11y. I work in one of those companies, most people just regurgitate existing shit into another form of shit and collect salary (not complaining, as I’m one of them, but let’s be honest).

This is plain wrong. For a browser, a11y doesn't just get handled by the OS automatically. In general, claiming a11y is easy or will be done by someone else is bordering on evil.

The original Edge had to switch over to Chromium because it was hard to build a compliant accessible browser from scratch and this is Microsoft we are talking about.

> ...this is Microsoft we are talking about.

Exactly!

More seriously, it not just about building a compliant web browser engine, it is about tracking the dominant browser engine which introduces their own "standards" along the way too.

Microsoft could have easily continued to invest in maintaining their browser engine, but it would have to be comparable to what Google is doing, and yet they'd always be perceived as "behind" due to non-dominant position they have.

I'd say strategically they do not want to invest in tech that's not winning (in marketshare), so when they are not dominant, they'll instead adopt and extend (not just web browsers, look at WSL too).

The didn't had to, MS Browser team was incompetent from the beginning of internet

Oh the memories. Took them forever to introduce something as simple as tabs that virtually all other competitors had since years.

File explorer was the same, only recently it got tabs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

> one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up

> build a compliant accessible browser from scratch

Which is not something even Google ever succeeded. They had a significant head start due to Webkit being open source.

We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. It is easy to forget that this was not the case for the vast majority of time that computers have existed.

Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.

> We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good.

Specifically what are you talking about here? Chrome is c++ I thought?

Chrome was invented in 2008. Abseil[1] didn't exist publicly until 2017, derived partly from Chromium.

HarfBuzz wasn't ported to C++ until 2010. I don't know the entire constellation of libs Chrome would use if it was designed in C++ today, but I bet a lot of them didn't exist before Chrome or were even created partly as a downstream byproduct of Chromium.

In other ecosystems: if Chrome were designed in Rust in 2008, there would be no crates.io to pull from. There would be no NPM, since Node followed V8/Chrome's invention in 2009. Maven Central had ~50K packages in 2009[2], which was a lot back then. In 2026, Maven Central hosts over 3 million.

[1]: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp

[2]: https://mvnrepository.com/repos/central

I think you've come from an npm world because c++ still doesn't have a great library ecosystem if thats what you mean.

> In other ecosystems: if Chrome were designed in Rust in 2008, there would be no crates.io to pull from. There would be no NPM, since Node followed V8/Chrome's invention in 2009. Maven Central had ~50K packages in 2009[2], which was a lot back then. In 2026, Maven Central hosts over 3 million.

Yeah, this is all web development stuff.... Doesn't apply to c++

A browser isn't drawing its content using OS frameworks, so A11Y is a major undertaking. Much more so because A11Y for web content specifically is a bit of a different beast than native widgets, and the amount of stuff you have on the web these days means that you have to pay a lot more attention to performance.

Okay, since it might’ve been confusing from my comment: I meant mobile apps, not Chrome or browser. Mobile frameworks abstract all of this.

And, importantly, this was 2008.

Most of the modern software tooling you have today wasn't available back then, from great IDE's to popular libraries, writing software in 2008 was a different beast compared to today.

Tja, besides LLMs I can't really see the major improvement todays IDEs and language combination brings over Eclipse+Java. Great docs, good autocomplete, good compiler feedback.

Yes, IntelliJ 8 was out in 2008. From my experience most of the progress since then has been keeping up with language and library updates.

When Visual Studio (not VSCode) incorporated a time travel debugger, that felt like a major advance in an IDE. I don’t remember exactly when that was, but I think it was around 2013.

I am still a little stunned by the rapid adoption of VSCode over IntelliJ and the original Visual Studio. Maybe being free was the important part, but I still chafe at the idea that we should configure our tools using JSON instead of just, you know, buttons and checkboxes.

Of course, VSCode and its ilk are jam packed with AI stuff I don’t not want, so it is mostly back to a fancy text editor for me.

Sounds like you're describing the shit show that is web development

Wasn’t Chrome mostly a wrapper on Webkit, though? You had to add the engineers who worked on Safari and KHTML before to the count..

I agree with what you're saying that it's not exactly what we're seeing which makes it not as simple.

However, I've seen this play out in many a big companies where there's a big mess going on. Answer is always similar pointing to -> "clearly it's not simple" and that's kind of the whole point. They made it not simple. 3k ENGINEERS, my sweet dude. THREE THOUSAND. By any and all account that's half as much as current chrome team or in total if you account for open source contributors as well. If robot is to believed that's also a headcount of windows and macos core teams. What is even going on, I don't even..

Taxes, compliance, regulatory bodies, logistics multiplied by X countries X products has an amazing way to bog you down. If you have money and problems money solves (eg you could hire more people to do something) you do not have a problem (except for people on the internet making arguments from personal inexperience)

> If you have money and problems money solves (eg you could hire more people to do something) you do not have a problem

If you have money there's a greater chance that someone in that X by X matrix might see you as a juicy target to go after so your expensive handling of every item in that matrix needed to be better still.

I get that, I truly do since I see it all and every day. We're talking engineering hands here though. Presumably programmers and infrastructure and SRE.

I think there is something like Parkinson's Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

This is more like the engineering team scales to match your budget.

It is why successful companies, when starting out and getting to their defining project completion state have significantly less engineers then 10 years later when they are massively more successful.

The cost of having the engineers is nothing compared to the profits, so why not hire more so you can defend your position. Are 80% of them needed to keep the system going, I think Elon showed that you can prune most of them away and the system will keep humming along (ignoring some initial problems). The trouble is bureaucracy, lack of technical knowledge at the top, and the hazy difficulty of identifying what is needed is really difficult, and if you mess it up, you could ruin a billion dollar business to save a hundred million dollars in salaries.

That is the crux of it. You can't know who to cut, and even if you are really good at it, you will still create problems and create ill will. Elon was pretty successful, but it did have some momentary problems. If his negative cult of personality didn't get in the way, it would have been better off.

Twitter is an empty shell though. Yes it technically works, that’s about that.

I certainly wouldn’t go anywhere near Twitter these days, but the question is how much of that is to do with engineering failures and how much is to do with the overall change of culture and moderation practices that Musk has introduced.

Very much this. If you have 3000 engineers (and all the associated non-engineering roles that inevitably come with that) then you have guaranteed that no problem will ever be easy to solve. Possibly you might be able to solve some extremely difficult problems that you couldn’t solve with fewer engineers.

And Chrome doesn't even need to support millions (billions) of users on a single, coherent "system". There's no scaling, it's just people running it on their computers and phones.

I suspect the vast majority of Shopify engineers never touch the core Shopify experience, but work on the long tail of invisible things that are nevertheless considered important. I'm talking along the lines of "direct integration with bank X for UPI in India to save 0.3% on payment costs in scenario Y."

> When Chrome 1.0 came out in 2008, it only ran on Windows, and it couldn't do basic things like print or export to PDF, didn't have any accessibility, didn't work in RTL languages, and didn't have any graphics acceleration, among other limitations.

It also was reusing the WebKit browser engine, work on which started in the 20th century (as KHTML)

As to Shopify needing zillion of engineers: does their backend query seller APIs? If so, I expect many of their engineers work on keeping that working.

DevOps and infrastructure, Security. Internal tools is correct, but speed, video quality as well as sound seems so easy. Google is responsible for many compression algorithms and standards - byproducts so to say. And they are top notch.

I have insights into the matters, and a lot goes into behind the scene optimization. Some specialists in the pre-AI phase were tasked to do nothing else but optimize build tools but in the sense of tweaking every millisecond out of it. This guy saved Google Billions over the years.

Others work in compiler building etc.

There are a couple of hints in the books by Google engineers but I am regularily blown away during meetings what really highly inspiring things are there to discover as well as presented.

Another factor: Google is spread around the globe. Regulation, law. Believe me, having over a billion users per app is mindblowing.

And it is 24/7/365. And support. And research.

Google is a company I admire. Technical provess at its finest.

5% is insanely generous for the YouTube example.

Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.

I am very unsurprised by this outcome.

People wonder why good software becomes bad, and it’s because the people who were good at engineering are often outmaneuvered by corporate-politics savvy people in a growing company. One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.

A couple years ago, an engineer I know who has always been a very poor performer and lacks initiative, but is friendly and non-confrontational, was hired by GitHub. It would not have been hard for GitHub to find a much better engineer, but this person would be an easy person to keep under a manager on a team who wouldn’t leave or make waves. That can be more important to some managers than skills.

>Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.

Spotify or Shopify?

Probably both

Shopify has gotten quite a bit better tho.

Spotify, the comment I replied to drew a comparison from Shopify to Spotify.

I think I’ll start a company called Shpoptify.

I’ll subscribe to your Sphoophtify service immediately

Can’t wait for Sphpoophteefy+ premium subscription to be released!

Shoplifty

You could start a consultancy called Optify to help them optimize their engineering.

Slopify

The mythical man-month ;)

> One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.

This is why I’m sceptical of “AI will kill corporate jobs”. A big company has no profit sharing for successful departments. Everyone is trying to get budget to hire because it makes them feel important.

Any book recommendations, that is not satire, about navigating the political landscape?

Spotify had a good app when it came out, p2p and UDP custom networking...

Such book could be distilled in simple essence:

- stay out of it for your sanity

- sell your soul, organically adapt by looking at those who make it to the top fast

When it comes to number of engineers, always keep in mind that it costs more engineers to maintain (and understand) software than the initial development push.

I’d add on to that lifecycle demands: a development project with no users has a tight cheap feedback loop with high quality bug reports with relatively obvious bug sources, once issues start working through layers of QA and customers the per-issue costs raise by several factors (50x to 200x are numbers I’ve seen from research, YMMV).

I would feel very confident slapping something onto Chrome ‘back then’ with only internal users. Today, with millions of users and CEO-level attention to screwups, I’d use a lot more time per issue. It’s a fundamentally different risk/reward/confidence situation.

I have the impression that for hiring this is fundamentally the most important aspect: Finding a prospect that is just skilled enough for the position without being a risk to the person who is hiring them.

Sometimes I wonder what the tech ecosystem would look like without the ZIRP era.

I look back over 15 years and with the exception of increased smart phone usage, everything else still looks mostly familiar. Maybe a bit more slick, but also slower and buggier despite having much better hardware.

There hasn't been a qualitative leap in software (as was in the 90s). Just larger SaaS companies. Without ZIRP would it have been any different?

That and venture investment has become bane of good.

When a company can run for years, hell, decade+ on the red thanks to investments, that means every competitor now have to compete with company that sells their goods or services below production value. It just kills competition and innovation, which only becomes possible if other company also attracts investors

Things have become measurably worse as open standards have been dropped.

An example is messaging apps. Today, if I want to remain in touch with my friends and family I have to juggle between Facebook messenger (thank the heavens for this app which means I rarely need to open Facebook itself), Whatsapp, Signal, etc.

In the early 2000s, even though I was on more services, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AIM, a single app such as trillian or Adium was enough to communicate on all of them.

While today we have to go to a whole slew of walled gardens to read posts from folks, such as substack, medium, twitter, etc. earlier, the heavy use of RSS meant that a single RSS news client covered everything.

From a socio-political standpoint, “canceling” also wasn’t a thing, since you could trivially self host a blog and discovery would be no different.

Even better, discovery was through human recommendations rather than algorithms designed to keep you hooked on the platform.

> Even better, discovery was through human recommendations rather than algorithms designed to keep you hooked on the platform.

Yeah, that's one thing that is definitely noticeable. Online social services basically became data-driven psychology research companies, with the goal being to improve engagement. Every page refresh became an A/B test designed to keep you hooked.

15 years of extremely well paid engineers and yet we still cannot delete a track from Recently Listened. ಠ _ ಠ

Recently listened is an automatic list like a log, not user curated. I would never expect to be able to delete things from that list.

I don't need an audit log for my audio. What I do need however is to remove something so it doesn't influence the algorithm. I may not remember every time I play music for a kid to turn on the right mode.

You're never going to win against a black box algorithm. Just let Spotify do it's thing or go back to hosting your own music if you don't like it.

That would also then require them to invalidate caches and rerun scripts to rebuild those lists and recommendations, which costs extra compute.

Invalidate the recommendation cache

You mean like, when a new song is added to the list???

This is wrongheaded in so many ways.

To start -- how many of those 3,000 engineers do you think work on the mobile app? And even among those who work on the app -- do you think they're all working on user quality-of-life and just can't get it right? And it's a $175BB company -- do you think it's worth that much based on the quality of its mobile app?

i will bet 175 billion dollars people like that guy are bikeshedding types

What are we talking about here - Spotify or Shopify ?

If Shopify - and you are concerned about their engineering teams, please consider that Shopify's revenue grew from roughly $205 million in 2015 to $11.56 billion in 2025, reflecting an explosive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 45% across the past decade. Market validates !

I have nothing to add about Spotify - I use it to listen to music and it works well for me !

Shopify works well for me but it used to push nonsense like podcasts or audio books that I had no interest in, with no way for me to hide them. I just want to listen to music.

Upon looking just now, seems like they have been relegated to their own tabs now, which is great.

I can’t tell if we’re trolling at this point with the mixing up of Shopify and Spotify

Poor reading comprehension is more likely than trolling.

Or I just made a typo. I dont think anyone actually has the understanding that Shopify is a music streaming service and Spotify is a shopping plug-in. I was addressing the latter half of gp's comment which was saying that Spotify has had no problems and I wrote (or perhaps got autocorrected, as I had to correct my phone several times writing this comment).

I cant speak for the rest of the commenters.

It's accidental. This mixup is essentially a meme at Shopify this point.

When I did some consulting for an e-commerce company that used Shopify, I had a Colombian coworker who kept confusing Shopify and Spotify which was contagious across our company but we always knew what we were referencing because we dont use Spotify to start an e-commerce page.

Similarly, we've had confusion with AWS Amplify and Amplitude (metrics service).

I thought we were talking about Sportifei - the new outdoors retailer ?

> Spotify or Shopify

Both. The post is about Shopify, but some of the comments expanded the conversation to include Spotify as well.

> In a sane society, Shopify’s opinion on anything engineering related would be thrown into rubbish [...].

> This is unfortunately not an isolated case, Spotify for one has the same issue, [...]

fwiw the post mentioned Shopify and Spotify, hence why you see discussion of both

People who has not run software at scale have no idea what it takes to run it at scale. Google chrome is 60 engineers at launch but google same company has more than 100k engineers. Building first version was always easy and only gotten easy, scaling software was always hard and it is still hard.

PS - Spotify i can't defend the product sucks.

I wonder how many of the 100k+ enginners at Google work on that "simple" text box that shows you relevant websites to the input text.

I'm guessing that maybe 4 of them maintain that in their "20% time", while the 99,996 other engineers are:

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." -Jeff Hammerbacher

It’s not that much about scalling software, as scalling software on highly concentered nodes. Distribution downstream can be its own hell, admittedly, but otherwise having fully independent copy of software copies that run in local terminal is a no-brainer if all that matter is running software at scale.

I am quite curious about what people hat so much about Spotify. I made some excursions the last few years to competitors like Tidal and Apple Music but I just found myself coming back because the Spotify mobile app experience (and desktop) was just plain better.

I wonder what gripes people have.

The website, desktop app, and mobile apps all have different feature sets, for one. There are things that you can only do in one of them, but it is a different one of them for each thing. There is no one feature set. It feels so cobbled together, with each platform doing their own thing.

Also, the website is slow and buggy, and the Electron “desktop” app is even worse. Both gobble up way too many resources and soft-crash constantly. The app does not lock up, but simply stops working. Often it even shows an error like “Spotify cannot play this song right now.”.

Also, probably due to some DRM bullshit, resuming a song from the middle doesn't work most of the time. I have to seek to the beginning for it to start playing.

Like that's literally the only thing it should be able to do 100%..

It's cool to hate on Spotify now I guess. But I agree with you, Spotify works really well for me.

The article is about Shopify, not Spotify.

Spotify works mostly fine for me but there's weird rough edges that I don't always see in "simpler" apps.

Stuff like transitioning between desktop and mobile - it tries to work and most of the time it does, but sometimes I need to manually make my desktop play on my desktop. Not a big deal but sometimes I'd be happier if this feature didn't exist at all.

On my desktop, Spotify can be finicky when I connect/disconnect my bluetooth headphones. Sometimes it refuses to play after I connect my headphones, and I need to restart the app. I think it's trying to do something magically for me after it detects the headphones and gets into a wedged state, but a simpler "play to active speaker, whatever it is" audio app wouldn't have this problem.

> GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online!

Just so it is said: my understanding is it's really easy to not end up on the credits list for games despite having worked on it. I don't know if contractors end up on there for example, at least beyond some team leads or the like. I don't know R*'s policies though, I've heard stories of people not being in credits because they, for example, changed jobs near the end of the development.

I get your overall point though

I remember hearing in an old podcast (Dad & Sons), one of the guys there worked at Rockstar in QA in 2012 and he's still listed in the credits for Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), so the policies are unclear to say the least.

https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-v/thankyou

They have updated their policies a bit. You may not be in the game credits but you'll show up here.

FWIW the social club team which handled a lot of the online components was small around the time GTA5 released. They built the APIs to handle user generated content, telemetry, accounts, etc. But, there were other team members that made it so the game would call said APIs.

You're comparing a company (Shopify) to an application (Google Chrome). A better comparison would be the number of engineers at Google (90,000 [1]) vs Shopify, or the number of developers actually working on the mobile application instead of any other area (website, backend database, internal systems and processes, infrastructure management and maintenance, etc.).

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rpandey1234_its-mind-bending-...

Video games are much easier than what Shopify do which will be a long tail of business cases and local permutations for all the countries they operate in.

Commercial software is usually a simple core and a long tail of business exceptions

That’s different difficulties.

Like comparing a climb and along run. Sure both require some physical abilities, but in the first case any error and the collapse mean dead end bringing progress to zero, while the second one you can rest on the side any time and still have the miles behind you accomplished.

It's externally mandated difficulties vs internally created ones. I think the latter should always be easier, because you can change the requirements.

It's complex vs complicated. A compiler may be very difficult to build but it is largely complicated.

Human issues are often complex and may not even have a real solution. Consider human issues like Brexit and the Good Friday Agreement - at face value they are a contradiction and yet a solution must be found.

Coding is absolute - trying to build software that can handle all these edge cases, let alone adapt to environmental changes like the law changing around you, when the decision makers have no insight (or interest) in the details is what makes software difficult.

In the corporate software world, especially anything to do with the web both front and back, most people really don’t know what they are doing. The goal is hiring/firing and agile.

Compare that to companies that release actual software products. The goal is product release at high enough quality. There are real performance and security targets to achieve.

Your typical corporate developer, on the other hand, does not have release targets. The actual goal is compatibility with the industry least common denominator expectations and retaining employment. This is why so many people are needed to do the work and why the result is so slow and bloated.

What's an "actual software product" and why don't you think web products count as them?

I'm a full stack web developer. I've worked for startups and F500 companies. There is always a push for release targets. The less technical the leadership, the stricter the release targets (its hard to sell a critical refactoring to management when they cant sell a shiny new feature or kpi to their own boss). We've kept our teams pretty lean too.

We still aim for high quality, and performance and security.

I do agree that many people dont really know what theyre doing and are kinda just winging it, especially with AI at the helm, and many companies are likely overstaffed, but I dont think theres a correlation between headcount and slow/bloated software. Any team of any size can make slow and bloated software.

If you are selling the code as the product, it could be said to be an “actual” software product, rather than a mechanism for selling other products, or software as a substrate for some other business.

Those other businesses aren’t any less valid, of course. They just aren’t software businesses. They are businesses that (quite sensibly) use software.

Shopify is literally selling software.

That’s right, they are. I don’t think I said they weren’t.

Is Facebook, a company that build software to sell ads, a software company or an ad company? I think its a bit bikesheddy, if not pointless, to try to confine companies to labels like this.

Absolutely an ad company, 100% without question.

I worked at Expedia for a bit. Ask yourself if they are a tech company, software company, or travel company. It’s not a trick question. They have a shit ton of software developers that work there. Same with Bank of America where I also worked. In fact BoA has more software developers as employees than almost any other company.

Compare those to a company whose only product is software or is primarily a software service.

The difference is directness to the goal. If you are a big bank you need software and web services just like everyone else, but if you get it wrong it’s not going to bankrupt you. You can always hire an outside consultancy to fix it knowing your employees suck at what they do. If all your business does is sell a retail software product and it turns out to be slow broken shit then you have nothing. That’s the difference and layoffs aren’t a bandaid.

At places like Expedia and BoA you can absolutely suck at what you do. Sucking is actually the expectation because 20% of the people solve 80% of the problems, nobody provides substantive training, and everyone is easily replaceable. If you are the guy building innovative solutions on an original software product for a company that only sells software as a retail product you are still ultimately replaceable, but not immediately so.

One key identifier if the business intends to hire sucky people for a sucky job is degree of abstraction. Is the given job about solving a real problem directly, for example using JavaScript to create a new transmission system that achieves higher availability and lowers costs. Or, is it a tech stack nightmare pretending to not write JavaScript to do the same boring shit everyone is doing in a half ass way?

I dont see the correlation between company type (tech/software/X company) and sucking at your job though. Ive never worked for a, as you define it, "software" company because the software ive built has always been in service of selling other things, but people who sucked at their jobs got let go quickly.

And there are absolutely software companies that hire sucky people. I don't know for certain if the people who work there are sucky, but the software they build and sell certainly are.

Maybe for big corporation non-tech companies the calculus is different? But both Shopify and Spotify certainly cant exist without their software.

> I dont see the correlation between company type (tech/software/X company) and sucking at your job though.

The difference is in culture and expectations. People can suck when they are allowed or expected to suck. They can’t suck when the employer sets high expectations. If a company wants to ease hiring and employment flexibility they have to set the bar low to increase the prospective candidate pool. Otherwise they have to be extremely selective and/or train people.

Perhaps the distinction is outside your imagination because it’s outside your experience.

> People can suck when they are allowed or expected to suck.

This is not a unique concept to software or any company type though. You don't have to look far on the antiwork subreddit to find people who work in all types of different industries, technical and not, big and small, where some people just suck and everyone knows it and no one does anything about it.

That is true, but it’s also why most industries require licensing and/or certifications. These things are not 100% effective, but are still excellent at removing disqualified candidates.

A lot of shopify's engineering probably work on the back-end business logic for payment processing, sales tax, etc. Shopify has to comply with financial norms, rule and laws in so many different jurisdictions.

I know someone who works for Gusto (HR and payroll SaaS for small businesses)... most of their code-base is also business logic and whatnot for all the jurisdictions they support.

Comments like these make me wonder if people don't understand the difference between engineering and business.

That’s what they said about Elon firing 80% of Twitter’s staff. But X is doing pretty well.

Twitter was never a profitable business. You actually renforce his point.

(Maybe that was intended I might have missed some irony here)

I'm not sure why people keep repeating this when Twitter was profitable at the point that Elon bought it.

For some definition of pretty well which doesn't include human user numbers, revenue, profit, or ratio of humans to bots

Pretty well from an engineering perspective. But they've lost so many advertisers because it's intentionally not very moderated.

The site is currently running, yes. Don't forget it went down quite often immediately following the mass firing though. They seem to have fixed that.

There was certainly a ton of bloat to trim, but the haphazard "just pick 80% of the people and fire them" was incredibly stupid. Should have chosen whoever was producing the bloat, at least.

Pretty well if you don't mind some features being built twice or three times and appearing inconsistently at different screens, or users being able to bypass usage limits by pressing the back button on the usage limit sign...

The usage limit is trying to block scrapers and xcancel. It's already reset by the time your cursor gets to the back button.

I'd be shocked if a ton of contractors haven't worked for X since then

most people don’t. that’s why they are employees.

Add to it that they need a compiler team for a Ruby JIT, due to the language choice to run an heavy load server infrastructure.

And now we learn they use Swift and Kotlin to replace React with. So they are not replacing it with Ruby. I think they've hit the limits on Ruby (like twitter had on Scala).

P.s.: I find Kotlin "an acceptable typed-Ruby" with an industrial strength VM (the JVM) and two compiles to native stories (KMP and GraalVM-native).

They'll be mostly involved with the parts that make money. I worked in a similar situation as one of about 5 people keeping the core infrastructure of the product working, meanwhile about 500 people optimized the ads

How is life at Google nowadays?

Oh you said 500, not 5000, my bad.

I wonder how many of those are there to consult with customers and help them build their stores.

How many of those 3000 engineers are working on the core engine?

That is vs infrastructure, customer support, partner outreach etc? Then you have all the people working on localisation, not just changing the words, but local regulatory issues.

Chrome only has one customer to deal with, Google itself. And since Shopify is saas and hosted for thousands of customers, vs Chrome running on the users pc, the infrastructure complexity does not compare

>what “engineering” Spotify is doing, it’s the worst app I’ve used in my life.

Engineering is app usability. Theres no other possible thing an engineer might do. Chrome ofc has infrastructure to distribute a binary. Spotify of course having a global content delivery network for terabytes of music. Hey GANG CAN WE WOKK OUT WHAT THESE ENGINEERS MIGHT BE DOING?????? WHY HASNT JIM STORAGE ENGINEER IMPLEMENTED A UI REFRESH YET!!!!

Shopify supports multiple countries both as a buyer/seller. I assume there is all kind of customizations needed to comply with each country weird rules. Are all of these software engineers doing core engineering? Probably not. But they are probably tagged as software engineers within the organization.

> GTA 5 in its credits had 150 software engineers. Surprising even to me who has had many an experience of being in a bloated FAANG team, this 150 includes GTA Online!

This is so... wow. You think only 150 devs made GTA 5? Despite the fact that rockstar has 10 studios and you think only 150 people in 5 years touch the code of the game? You should learn how those credits work. It doesn't mean what you think it does.

Furthermore, game dev also includes so many artists and other work. It is so insane to claim gta 5 was made by 150 people that I don't think the rest of your comment can be taken seriously.

Shopify as a company works on a lot more products than Chrome developers do.

More relevantly, a lot of their work involves interfacing with hundreds, if not thousands, of external partners, competitors, etc. systems.

When you see seemingly simple products have too many engineers, most are almost always there to cater for enterprise customers.

And how many engineers does Google have? The people working on Chrome are a tiny, numerically insignificant fraction of Google’s employees. A much better comparison would be people working on Google ads and their other commercial products.

3000 engineers or 3000 people on the engineering side of the org ?

Not sure I'd trust Astra in its numbers.

Shopify also seems to be very solid and reliable and I imagine that could require a lot of QA and edge cases (and a lot of support engineers)

Shopify is handling customer payments worldwide, 90% of their work is probably localization issues rather than customer-facing feature development.

GTA V developers don't give a fuck whether the game is running on a computer in North Korea or in Sweden.

Extremely ignorant comment.

Ironically enough, you using "GPT Astra" to query for such simple information is probably in no small way correlated to the state of software engineering (in these large corporations and otherwise) today.

When business is booming, you can do nothing wrong, as with that revenue even big mistakes stop mattering.

All I want from Spotify is API so someone can make better player/plugin to a better player.

Tidal is pretty nice to use. Plus the music isn't compressed.

I love Tidal. That said its UI is remarkably heavy for what it is. You also used to see what quality the songs were in without playing them, but they removed that. They added bpm and key, but that is not as useful to most of us as seeing the quality of the song beforehand.

And you also have to make sure you're getting the most out of it manually. Here are three steps for those who have Tidal and wan't to make sure that they're getting the most (ish) for their money:

1. Hardware Source: If you're using the soundcard in your computer, make sure to bump up the sample rate: on macOS you go to "Audio MIDI Setup" and change the sample rate to highest possible for your output.

2. Software Source: In Tidal itself you have to go to "Settings" and under "Audio quality" choose "Max". Under "Playback" turn off "Normalize volume". If you're having a dinner party and playing the music through a bluetooth speaker, you might want to leave it on. But otherwise off; the normalization causes distortion.

3. Output Device: You have two options here and you can go with both or invest more in the other one:

  * Option 1: Invest in some decent studio monitors. They don't have to be expensive or be able to play super loud, they just have to not lie to you. I would 100% recommend buying higher quality low power monitors for small spaces and/or spaces that lack acoustic treatment.  

  * Option 2: Buy some actually ok headphones. Bluetooth headphones are not good. I got Sony WH-1000XM6 which I mostly use outside. Inside I can plug them with an audio cable and turn them on and then they double their sample rate from 22kHz to 44kHz. But I also got Sennheizer HD600 which cost about the same and I plug them into a cheap headphone amp, and these headphones are really a world appart.

Note: You have to actually find the high quality songs on Tidal to enjoy all those changes. Aim for the 24-bit 192kHz or at least 24-bit 96kHz (personally, the DAC on my Mac only offers 96kHz anyway). Remasters are often a good source, but sometimes they're from the loudness era and are horrible comparing to the originals.

Did they finally implemented Last.fm integration and sleep timer?

Comparing Chrome in 2008 to a company in 2026 is a choice.

its actually not that weird if you consider that those shopify engineers are probably not even exceeding 150,000 usd on average salary wise

canadian dollar is very cheap so you'd likely see 40~50% more headcounts for the same burn rates you get in USA

i definitely dont think those shopify engineers are going to be retained long term however

"A simple app" well there's your first mistake, it's not a simple app is it

In a sane society we would be less willing to pass heavy judgement on so many things at passing glance.

Lazily researched comment. Pretty much anyone who isn't in sales can have "engineer" in their title. I'm sure there were plenty of "support engineers" in the Shopify number you cited, and I'm sure there were zero in the GTA and Chrome numbers you cited.

One word: Ottawa. There's a lot of engineers, most of them underemployed.

Shopify has approximately 7,600 employees globally

I don't share your opinion.

With no deeper knowledge to the matter, it is pretty senseless to speculate.

"Numbers from GPT Astra" - well, well...

Currently roughly 1000 engineers are working on Google Chrome.

GTA 6 has around 6000 developers working on GTA 6 since 2019.

So sounds a bit off what you allegedly researched. But, hey, AI slop is real.

We have no idea how many of these engineers work on the mobile app. This comment is somehow both AI slop and human slop.

> Numbers from GPT Astra

Come on.

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