When they said Reddit has 2000 employees I was shocked. what could they possibly do onto a website that is basically run by users (and sysadmins) and that is basically feature-wise mature? I really can’t figure out 2000 people working every day on Reddit… on what? just for a quick comparison, the whole IAmA was run by a single person (Victoria), so… what are they doing?
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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.
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.
I have and there’s a reason I work on solo projects now…
If I may ask so frankly: do/did you live completely off Sync or is that just a side project to you?
It was my main job for the last few years
Say I’d been learning js, jsnode, python, CSS, HTML for years without aim other than messing around.
And I wanted to make sync.
Where should I be directing my learning?
Can’t wait for Sync for Lemmy. I will buy it on Day 1. Thank you for working on this!
Wondering. Given a team of 50 people. Do you think your app would have been better or worse ?
Probably worse. It’s the old software engineering Moto, nine women can’t have a baby in one month
Wow that really puts things into perspective, like wtf are they actually doing with that many employees?
Reddit to me IS Sync. It’s the only way I could use the site. Without Sync reddit is dead to me.
70 android developers on an objectively worse app. Wtf? I’m so confused
Anyways thanks for Sync, masterclass in app design
I’ve seen similar things. At my last company I helped start a team of 5 people to implement an identity solution, We got it done in about 3 months. Due to shitty management they pushed out the competent devs and back filled with cheaper replacements, either fresh from university or contractors. Fast forward a few years and the over team is now a group of teams with about +/- 40 people and it takes 4 months just to get a plan together which is then obsolete when they want to start due to more shitty management.
Thank god I am no longer there.
And yet Apollo was made by one guy and it’s far better than anything Reddit made
I mean, the complexity of an iOS app is nothing against running one of the world’s largest websites…
And not even one of those 2,000 employees could put in any effort whatsoever?
It’s made bad on purpose because you aren’t the customer, you’re the product
Not all of those employees would be engineers, and out of those engineers, many would be backend engineers improving the speed and ranking algorithms. Apollo would also be taking advantage of that work.
Of the iOS engineers, many would probably have been working on priorities that generate money for the company, but we all hated. Apollo had a great model where he just had to make the users happy enough to give him subscription fees.
I hate the decisions the Reddit leads have been making, but I guarantee that the employees have been putting in plenty of effort. It’s the company’s priorities that are misaligned with what the users want.
The obvious implication in my comment was “into user experience.”
They treated us like cattle, but forgot that you gotta feed your livestock.
That argument doesn’t hold under scrutiny. Reddit employs about 80 people on their iOS development team. And the app blows fucking chunks, compared to Apollo, which was made by one guy.
Yeah 80 engineers and millions of dollars in budget? Pathetic. I’m an iOS developer by trade and if you’d asked me to draw up a project proposal for the official Reddit app, I probably would have told you I needed 3-5 engineers. But 80, that’s just unreal.
Maybe reddit does that thing that Apple does where they have multiple siloed teams work on the same or similar things and just use the one that comes up with the best solution. So they have 80 independent devs each working on their own app and the current app is the least shitty out of all of them. Either that or they have like 50 shitty apps, 20 decent apps, 9 brilliant apps, and the one that they went with which was done by spez’s nephew who took a coding bootcamp one summer and is really good at mobile dev.
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%
Lol, the workers vs the beaters a tale as old as time. Never enough workers.
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.
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
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.
Hmmm, and the third party developers are the reason they’re not profitable?
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.
Of those 2000 people, at least 1000 are not in technical roles at all, but stuff like partner management, HR, marketing, etc.
What exactly the rest is doing, I’m also baffled. I guess, they primarily reinvent wheels. Reddit is relatively easy to scale and has been in its core not changed for years.
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It will be like where I was working. On that project there were ~12 people. You could’ve cut in in half easily:
- AFAIK the project manager did nothing but create meetings (tbh they had no clue what they were doing)
- The QA was incompetent and instead I wrote all their tests and taught the junior dev so he could too
- 2 User Researchers set up various sessions – but the business told them all their findings were wrong (turns out the researchers were right)
- Architect went to some meetings and never spoke to the devs about anything (turns out they were responsible for multiple projects at once, which obviously makes things hard)
- The Lead Developer seemed to be on holiday every other day, dealing with some personal issue, or in meetings
- One Dev was fresh out of a scheme (for non comp sci students, so was slow but that’s understandable)
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
I’d wager a lot of them are looking for new jobs. Those who aren’t are probably making dumpster s’mores.
There’s over 3 million subreddits and over 60 million daily active users. The thing with Reddit is that its so huge that the numbers are so large that we cant properly conceptualize it anymore. Even simple work at that scale requires shit tons of people to be involved when its activities that require a human brain. With the sheer size of Reddit, Im almost surprised they only have 2,000 employees.
I gotta call bullshit. I’ve no doubt that they have a robust team on the IT side that branches into BAU, Devops, Ops, CSC, and Neteng…but to really put it into perspective that staff could run the show with 500 people. That’s also factoring in a good rotation for on-call and backshifts. The other 1500 are broken up into marketing, strategy, administration, and a bunch of other bullshit like “convergence”. I’m sure they have vendor management, government relations, and a few other trappings…but the vast majority of what they have is stupendously useless.
They have developers working on shit nobody wants, nor will they ever use. The way companies work in this day and age is the epitome of resource waste and bullshit job titles. I’m pushing back on that notion. There’s something, sure, but 2k people’s worth is a tremendous waste. You’re not off base being surprised it isn’t more too, as many companies simply waste more time and salary on stupid worthless shit that doesn’t benefit the company or its mission, and it’s often at the behest of the board and/or investors who do risk management and growth strategy (that seldom pans out).
