6 ms·
I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.
by jonatron 5mo ago
I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.
- dlev_pika 5mo agoMoreover, he has no idea what those laid off people actually did or who they are
- teaearlgraycold 5mo agoInternally they operate like a government or military and less like a normal company.
- booleandilemma 5mo agoAs someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?
- teaearlgraycold 5mo agoI've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.
- jldugger 5mo agoNo idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle. And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly. The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
- cft 5mo agoThere is only one problem with Meta: Facebook itself is like a TV show that has ran its course. He's riding off what he purchased: Instagram and WhatsApp, but being a product thief he cannot create anything new.
- sixothree 5mo agoI still feel like he stole the word "meta" from the world. It was ours. Not his.
- Nemo_bis 5mo agoYou don't need 80k employees to self-host. The Wikimedia Foundation does it with a team of few dozens SREs.
- jldugger 5mo agoAnd just think how much more profitiable they'd be if they scaled up (◞ิ౪◟ิ)
- qwe----3 5mo agoYou joke but they fund raise like they love money - lying to their users about needing donations...
- Nemo_bis 5mo agoIt depends on what your priors are for what's "needed". If you think 80k employees are needed to do what the Wikimedia Foundation does, their fundraising is way too humble. :-)
- nneonneo 5mo ago> virtual reality products with no legs This is the most incredibly apt description of Horizon Worlds possible. How is it that I've missed this joke until now? Thank you!
- marcosdumay 5mo agoThere are very few government organizations here in Brazil with more than 8k people under the same management.
- Jensson 5mo agoAll of those government organizations are under the same management: the government. Subsidiaries are still under the management of the parent firm.
- Tarq0n 5mo agoThat's not how it works in many countries. You can have regional governments that raise their own taxes and aren't beholden to the central government organizationally, just legally.
- mlsu 5mo agoThey also take profits a lot like government. :thinking:
- HoldOnAMinute 5mo agoLarge-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. There's also a payment component and everything that comes along with that. The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.
- killingtime74 5mo agoIt's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.
- gary_b 5mo agoI can confirm for a certain very large enterprise that this is not the case. The employees ARE on the books of the company and considered full time employees with full benefits, and the software is custom built for this enterprise, by this enterprise, and not shared with any other enterprises
- PaulHoule 5mo agoYeah, like I don't think ARA could build a mobile app for ordering at a cafeteria, period.
- HoldOnAMinute 5mo agoExactly
- aabhay 5mo agoApple being Apple
- carlosft 5mo ago
- thinkingtoilet 5mo agoI worked at S&P Global for 2 years via an acquisition. The scale is insane. It is completely unmanageable. It's impossible to get anything done. Yet, it shits money. It was a miserable place to work.