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.
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.
This guy corporates
This all sounds right. Currently at some large company, it sucks so much compared to working at smaller projects and startups
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?
Happy to see you here, ljdawson. Long live Sync!
I love your app man. I’ll be buying your Lemmy app on day 1, even though I mainly use kbin to access the fediverse.
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.
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Thank you for all your hard work! I look forward to buying the next Sync on release day.
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.
It’s wild, and sync was an awesome piece of software that I’ve been using over a decade, and I never had a problem with it, that’s not often I can say about something. The reddit app has always been pure garbage.
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.
Some people want to only recruit people that are less skilled by them so that they can remain in their position of power.
If you have a company with a few like that and several layers of recruitment I guess you can have a bunch of incompetent people spending their time in pointless meetings and not getting much done
70 android developers on an objectively worse app. Wtf? I’m so confused
I’ve been a developer for more than two decades. There is absolutely a negative correlation between the size of the development team and the quality of the application, with the optimum development team size being one.
Can’t wait for Sync for Lemmy. I will buy it on Day 1. Thank you for working on this!
I’ve never used any apps (I avoid mobile apps at all cost) and Lemmy seems to work perfectly well on the web, both on desktop and on mobile. Can you point out what makes you want to use an app, and even pay for it, for Lemmy (or Reddit and similar websites)?
That’s an absurd big team for one mobile app, I could imagine they just failed to scale.
“SAFe is the best, we are so productive!”
They’re dumb lol
I’m an iOS user so I only know of Sync by reputation, but my understanding is that it’s up there with Apollo as the definitive way to experience Reddit on its platform. The fact that Reddit’s 2000 employees couldn’t remotely approximate the superior experiences of Sync and Apollo, both developed by one guy, is frankly bewildering. I’ve worked in big tech too as an engineer so on one level I get it, but we’re not taking about rocket science here. The sheer manpower and budgets involved should have meant that the official clients would be light years ahead… and yet 😁
Apollo is how you use Reddit on iOS, sync is how you use it on Android. It’s the best of the best
I used sync pro for years. Only when forced I’d use their mobile website, and I’d I used desktop I had res installed. I couldn’t stand their interfaces.
Let’s see. Reddit right now has:
- NFT
- real time chat
- image and video hosting (imgur used to handle these). needs manpower to make sure they’re not hosting something illegal like cp
- various one-off functionalities (r/place, polls, etc)
- react-based frontend (and the mobile counterpart)
- mobile apps for Android and iOS (seemingly a separate codebase)
- ads/marketing departments that case around big companies to place ads on Reddit
- various virtual goods (gold awards, profile pics customization)
- probably a community team that monitor what’s reddit users currently up to, like banning subreddits that breaking TOS or insulting spez.
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 really feel like that instead of just focusing on running a lean and efficient site, perfecting the fundamentals, and outsourcing the other stuff to their users (third party apps, content creation, the bulk of moderation). They’ve truly become bloated trying to expand.
I guess this was ultimatively due to them taking on venture capital and thus having the pressure for rapid growth and profitability. They really want to transform themself into a social media site, gathering as much user data as possible and keeping them on their site as long as possible. All with the goal to be able to sell more adds. Which also means pushing out unmarketable content.
Yeah, add in the “support” functions as well (you mentioned Marketing but HR, Finance, Legal, etc) and #s can add up quickly.
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…
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.
Yeah, I work at a big international tech company myself and sometimes get surprised by the amount of people we have working on our app.
My guess would be that it has to do with
- More features (I think the Apollo developer mentioned how some features aren’t available through the API?)
- More insights (I would guess that the official Reddit app contains way more code to track and quantity the user)
- On-call. I assume the 3PA won’t get paged in the middle of the night if there’s a critical bug in their code.
- Experiments. Wouldn’t surprise me if the official Reddit app is using experiments (I.e. A/B testing) to try new features or changes in UI
- New features. The Apollo developer is the one who has to adapt. API changes, new features are (maybe?) added while I assume in house app developers work together with the rest of the company to bring those features.
Etc.
None of these points explain why they’d need 80x more developers of course. It’s also just because reddit is a big company and the bigger you get, the more time you spend in meetings, writing documents, etc. and then you hire more developers to increase the velocity and then you end up with a slow machine.
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
Yeah but isn’t it a better product when people are forming positive associations with the brand being advertised because it’s being displayed on an app that works well?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Impossible, reddit in no way shape or fashion has somebody that deals with the goddamn customers so the engineers don’t have to
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
I’m out of the loop, what is this?
and the spotify year end wrap ups
No offense to the people on it, but I could not stand the fucking RPAN era. It was like no matter what I did or what setting I changed every fourth fucking post was a livestream of some jackass on a guitar.
I’d wager a lot of them are looking for new jobs. Those who aren’t are probably making dumpster s’mores.
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.
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.
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.
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 LeadBut 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.
Don’t underestimate the amount of heads needed in ads and marketing
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 think this is indeed the main factor. Reddit needed to grow. Money was cheap. So what’s the first thing you do? You hire more people. Only then you figure out what they need to do, and all of those people will have their own ideas on what to do, regardless of whether it helps the bottom line. And so you get new shiny features such as chat, livestreams, NFTs and other stuff nobody cares about, which all take a lot of manpower to build and maintain. Now the problem is that communication gets harder the more people you add. These people now need a lot of meetings to stay in sync, or to figure out what to do next, or perhaps just to appear busy, which results in work not being done or progressing really slowly. So what do you do? Hire more people, as long as the money lasts of course. This cycle continues for a few years, and suddenly you have 2000 employees.
I could understand 250-500. 2,000 is just outrageous to me.
I worked at Tinder, we had something like 100 engineers for 20 million or whatever daily active users., and I think it was rather well managed with everyone doing a part. Reddit is 20x user wise and far more complex feature wise, so maybe it makes sense.
It seems absurd, but there’s a lot of things going on that you don’t think about. Bots, Ads, Moderation tooling, User management, Chat feature, NFTs, revenue features, push notifications, user targeting, ranking algorithms, etc all consist of whole teams.
I mean, I work for a manufacturer in a niche industry with sales offices around the world. We not only have all of those non-tech administrative depts, but also a R&D department, product support, and sales managers. That’s a small fraction before you get to mfg production, mfg engineers, production management, purchasing, warehouse, shipping, & building mgmt (for multiple sites). It’s maybe around 1500 people.
It’s not really a comparison to a tech company, but considering we complain about the “80/20” rule all the time (80 percent of the work is done by 20% of the people), it’s probably still bloated as-is. And we produce something besides bytes. And there’s no unpaid staff doing most of the work.
No, I rhink you make a great point. There probably IS a lot of bloat because reddit has been VC funded and probably DO waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to monetize things like NFT and short firm video
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?
Lmao they put all their developers on actively making the site worse. They intentionally made the whole desktop experience so shitty so you use their shitty app.
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.
My very much hardware company has problems like this. Sometimes we can’t deal with a customer direct we have to go thru another company. When that happens there is an entire layer of people insisting that we are doing everything wrong. Forcing us to produce mountains of paperwork and revisions.
