Engineering Team Sizes

This is not really news. Whatsapp if I recall had 500 million users with about the same size team. Plentyoffish had and might still better users/engineer ratio too. Stackoverflow as well.

Look at their about page. If anything it looks to me like they have way too many engineers.

Hundreds of full time developers?

Sibling post is correct: I worked in a couple companies backed by Softbank and they specifically asked for engineering headcount increase.Investors and CEOs think they need massive numbers because they misunderstand how dev headcount scales and how much overhead it generates. Hiring warehouse workers, moderators and content editors scale, so they extrapolate that to devs and expect the same results.Also with lots of devs you need lots of designers, managers, product owners and other idea p

Whelp, even for tech-core products, number of engineers are often very insignificant compared to other stuff(legal, license, buying, acquisition, hr, advertising, marketing, sales, security, management, decision board, product management, product owners, agile team, release team, test/QA, support etc.).I used to think that, tech companies could do with like what 200 people max, but after working on few places for a while now, I am no longer surprised, specially when your service spans th

the answer is - not much.the power law applies to any big organization. 20% of the people do 80% of the work, whilst 80% of the people are just there for "support".whatsapp was run by a team of like 20 people or something when they got acquired for $20 billion. for a simple software product, you don't really need that many people. in fact, more people often means bad software. you just need a small group of very talented engineers to run the product and add new featur

Those things you mention hardly justify thousands of expensive developers to maintain and create. I bet a team of 10 top notch engineers could create Spaces+Blue+Crypto pfp's in a couple months and run it at Twitter scale. Don't forget Instagram was acquired when it had 13 employees serving tens of millions of users.Speaking out of experience, most engineers in big tech are bike shedding on internal tools that don't do anything useful. A small minority deliver the majority of t

> What could they possibly be doing?People constantly underestimate the size of the support staff needed to keep the engineering team productive. For every ten or so software engineers you hire to work on a new product or feature, you're going to need 5-10 QA engineers, another project manager, another product manager, maybe another build engineer, maybe more internal IT staff... You need these people. Software doesn't just leap from developers' fingertips directly onto sto

I'd imagine there's some amount of work, I doubt it was a huge team but they probably needed a few people to focus on the various platforms and regions their apps supportit seems easier to have a team focused on a features like that keeping things consistant and whatever dosen't seem that crazy.. fatter than what a startup would but twitter is a multinational worth tens of billions

"more than 20 engineers" on a to-do list app? Isn't that quite an overhead? I mean 37signals have 9 developers and they successfully run several products (even with their easy-going lifestyle).