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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If I may ask so frankly: do/did you live completely off Sync or is that just a side project to you?
Wondering. Given a team of 50 people. Do you think your app would have been better or worse ?
Can’t wait for Sync for Lemmy. I will buy it on Day 1. Thank you for working on this!
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
