I did all of the development for Sync myself. It blows my mind the mobile team is around ~200 people and ~70 on Android.
And your app is still 100x better than theirs even with all their resources. To think the CEO gets pissed off that users prefer yours over theirs even though they have no reason to make an app that bad.
But he doesn't have to add things like NFT and Avatar support... Which is promptly forgotten when the next big thing comes along.
Sync will be an automatic buy for me once you release it, based on how good it is/was on reddit.
The bonus for me is knowing that spez can't actually stop you from getting paid, despite his asshat antics.
Honestly I would say that that's probably the one thing that small teams have that large teams cannot have is autonomy.
I was working on a web app for a small team inside of a large corporation. It was me and two other people and every single time we wanted to make a change we had to get approval from legal we had to get right off sign off from a VP and this was for something entirely internal that only 35 people would ever use.
I imagine when you are dealing with an app that is intended to be used by millions you're going to have the exact same issues but then 200 people all attempting to do minor improvements getting over voted and outvoted and good shit destroyed and for relegated to the dustbin because legal can imagine that there might be some inconceivable problem with it 5 years in the future, or somebody in marketing might say that it interrupts their work flow even though it would be a massive improvement to the app.
This corporate overhead is one of the biggest issues that corporations face when dealing with a mobile active environment. They can't quickly push improvements and changes it's got to go through the process because otherwise nobody will document anything and they'll reach the point where they can't even read their own app.
Happy to see you here, ljdawson. Long live Sync!
Have you ever worked in a corporate environment?
It's basically friction losses with occasional sparks of actual productivity.
BTW: I've been using sync for years. I hope you can find a way to salvage some of your work.
Thank you for all your hard work! I look forward to buying the next Sync on release day.
Im sorry what. 200 people for one app? I work for a multinational and our entire dev team for mobile is 35 people. And thats because we absorbed a few companies that have their own apps.
200 people for one shitty app.
Are they all writing code or just figuring out ways to inject ads and paid content into every orifice?
Anyway your app defined my reddit experience and I'm looking forward to your next one.
Can't wait for Sync for Lemmy. I will buy it on Day 1. Thank you for working on this!
And yet Apollo was made by one guy and it’s far better than anything they’ve made
If it's anything like my workplace, about 25% of them are doing 75% of the work while the rest do powerpoints and stand around bullshitting all day.
More like 90% / 10%
It is called the 80-20 rule for a reason…
Lol, the workers vs the beaters a tale as old as time. Never enough workers.
They could be. Or they could be sales, or brand ad coordination, or hr, or legal handling the various issues related to products, lawsuits, regulations, actual law enforcement inquiries, etc.
Like any corporation there’s a ton of backend staff doing stuff people don’t see because it makes the parts they do see operate.
They are building Ads products, Avatars, NFT stores, Chat, Talk, RPAN. All the "growth" features that no one uses.
Then when no one uses them, they switch projects to shut them down (Talk, RPAN).
You forgot the new TikTok like video feature, ntz, ntz, ntz
and the spotify year end wrap ups
Sure it should be a train wreck. Incompetent management is a hallmark of human society. Brilliant devs built something. Idiots manage them. Devs leave, and the idiots patch together a group of like minded individuals on an equal footing to navigate the future blindly. Steve is clearly the benchmark I submit as proof of my now irrefutable theory. It takes 2k Steves to screw in this lightbulb.
According to what I've heard, reddit has a fuck ton of micromanagers at several levels. So it's just a giant cycle of micromanaging and most likely switching direction constantly which impedes any actual progress.
Reddit's a huge site with ilots of distributed infrastructure, CDN, storage, synchronization, networking, back end services, custom code, etc. That's probably a few hundred folks right there.
Then there are nontechnical administrative areas like advertising, media, marketing & branding, legal, HR, payroll, financial AR and AP, clerical support. Probably another several hundred or so there as well.
2000 is probably a generous estimate, but I could see it easily being 1500 or more.
I believe another part of it is that companies that get venture capital money are also encouraged to hire more employees, because VC's care about growth.
If you are a company relying on the support of venture capital and you aren't hiring people to grow the fastest, then the VC might decide to just fund your competitor instead.
I’d wager a lot of them are looking for new jobs. Those who aren’t are probably making dumpster s’mores.
Diminishing returns. The more employees you add, the harder they are to manage efficiently and in-sync. You need to add more managers to manage more employees, which adds more layers and fragments the business more.
However, the numbers still don't add up to me. The app shouldn't be worse than 3rd party apps. The platform shouldn't have all these downtime issues. The website shouldn't be an accessibility failure.
Let's see. Reddit right now has:
and perhaps many more I'm not aware about. With those whole sets of "features", 2000 seems to be quite reasonable IMO. The marketing stuff is especially all about numbers.
I don't know anything about working at reddit, but I've worked at enough software companies to know generally what people do all day
HR - hires employees, deals with insurance and other perks, fires employees, probably communicates with the board or governing body.
Software - there are a few departments here, the most interesting of which is programming new features. Most will never see the light of day, but they're working on them.
QA - tests new features and bug fixes and patches before they go live.
IT department for when developers computers do unexpected things.
Tickets - a team of developers/systems engineers to fix bugs and issues in the production source code. They will typically have 1-10 people on call at all times outside of normal business hours.
Systems Engineering - they decide how and what systems to implement, upgrade, retire etc. They need to coordinate with developers to plan software/hardware upgrades to make sure they don't mess anything up unexpectedly (but it almost always happens during an upgrade)
Accounting - Accounts Payable (when you pay money for something, like AWS); Accounts Receivable (when you receive money, like for artificially inflating posts to the front page for money); Finance - should and how much money should be borrowed/invested to run the business; and a ton more depts honestly, any of which without the business would crumble.
Advertising - Both advertising Reddit in other media, and arranging sponsors to put their ads all over the place.
Executives - they plan the strategy for each dept listed above. Although this being an internet service, the CIO might be slightly more inflated than a typical company.
And there's probably a lot that I'm forgetting. But really, all this is just to illustrate about one of the most trafficked websites every is "How are they running a business with only 2,000 employees"
100% agree, here's some more departments that you haven't listed but probably exist:
Legal, internal contracts, contracts with suppliers, contracts with customers (advertisers), compliance with the laws of many countries/markets
Regulatory, compliance with internal and external regulations
Procurement, negotiating with suppliers
sustainability, there's probably someone in the business reporting on gender balance and environmental impact and a host of other UN SDG considerations
PMO, internal project management and portfolio reporting
market X, there may be a team of people for each major market responsible for sales, infrastructure, compliance, etc. in that market, in addition to central
CI/productivity, there will be some team responsible for reducing costs
Product owners, there will be teams of people responsible for arguing about what features/bugs should be implemented/fixed
monetization, there's probably dedicated teams looking at (and a/b testing!) new ways to push people into spending money on the app and/or interacting with ads more often
An addendum to the non-devs here:
As anyone who has worked in a large company knows: You can easily get a team like this that spends more than half of its time in meetings:
1 Project Manager
3 Business Analysts for different languages
1 BA for tickets
1 QA Lead
2 QA Tester(Intern)
1 Mockup Designer
1 Front End layout specialist(CSS)
1 Javascript developer
1 Backend developer / Team Lead
But that doesn't factor in that with teams like that you can end up with 1/3 to even 2/3 of those dev teams being devoted to development and management of internal tools used to facilitate the end product, or that the project manager will be at the bottom of their own tree of people that spend almost all of their day in meetings. More if you make your own analysis tools.
The tech industry has been under the spell of cargo cult cheap investment money for the better part of two decades. The most cynical but simple and probable reason they have 2000 employees is because almost every other tech company has about 10x-20x the number of employees they actually need to be sustainable and profitable companies.
TLDR: they're throwing shit at the wall until something sticks
So they're just doing what everyone else is doing. It would look very suspicious to investors if leadership said "You know what, we actually can run this thing with a team of 100 people and make a few tens of millions in profit a year!". That's not what investors want to hear. They want to hear "If we have a 100 person company making a few tens of millions in profit a year, imagine how much revenue we could make if we were ten times bigger. We can easily scale operations!".
Investors want the kind of financial growth that would make cancerous tumour cells envious. And most tech leaders have figured out with cheap money that the best strategy for obtaining this growth is by having smart people throw shit at the wall until something sticks. The more smart people you have throwing shit at the wall, the better your chances at stumbling on a product or service that levels up your company.
If a tech leader were just content with running a sustainable and profitable business at the end of its growth curve, they wouldn't need as many employees. They just need the ones who can keep the core business going because there's nobody working on new venture pet projects.
But investors aren't interested in that because that's like putting their money into a savings account at a bank except with a lot more risk of losing it all. Right now, Reddit's investors are starting to realize that their risky investment with a chance at winning it big is looking a lot more like a dud that will pay out more meagre returns or worse, may not pay out at all. They desperately need an IPO to win it big. It's their last hope.
The investors won't throw any more money at Reddit and are at the stage where they're pressuring the leadership to start cracking the whip. The leadership has now removed any illusion of wanting to make Reddit users happy because we aren't their customers or investors. They need their customers and their investors happy. They don't need Reddit users to be happy. They just need to keep them hooked.
It will be like where I was working. On that project there were ~12 people. You could've cut in in half easily:
I ended up working overtime into burn out to get the project through the door (and hit issues due the architect should've informed us of). It would've honestly been easier as just me, one other developer, and a BA
Hmmm, and the third party developers are the reason they're not profitable?
My take at all that mess would probably be blaming upper management for not trusting anybody, so layers of redundancy piled up to 2000. & on the other hand there are individuals (sometimes one-man stand + community input) creating outstanding apps.
That's every bigger software company. As my first job on a startup(ish) company we were 5 devs working on a desktop application and embedded software. This entailed working all the way up from firmware, to Linux distribution and higher level onboard software. After 8 or so years I went for a bigger company on similar market. They had 4 teams of 6 devs each doing a much worse job than we ever did. There was lots of friction and corporate bullshit. The only thing I felt didn't work out on smaller teams was customer support.
Upper management is always the issue. Why put all my talented developers to work on improving user experience when I can implement NFT support instead and keep bloating the app?
Well, one thing is for sure: They aren't working on the reddit video player.
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