I understand a good portion of them are there to work on new developments, but why does Snapchat need 5,000 software engineers for example? What do they do on a day-to-day basis? Why does Google need 27,000 software engineers when they’re website works fine as is and most of their products and apps have already been made?
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Okay, Uber is an outlier here, but…as for the rest: they “need” thousands of engineers, especially software engineers for a number of reasons. Among those reasons are 1) development of new products and 2) protection of current products. In the case of #1, it’s not enough that they have the most groovy search engine ever devised. They want to own, control or manipulate everything you do online so that it all goes through them at some point. So, they develop new software, new hardware, and new strategies. Remember Circles? Remember a time before Google Hangouts? Yeah, without engineers, we’d have never had the failure of the first or the arguable success of the second. In the second case, engineers work to protect current services because, for all the thousands of engineers engaged in protection, there are (at least in Google’s case) a literal *billion* people who could potentially break that service on accident, and several thousand that are, at any given time, actively *trying* to do so. Engineers on both sides are constantly tried to find hacks, weaknesses, and exploits. On the “white hat” side, they work to counter those and on the “black hat” side, they work to exploit them. So, it’s a constant war of of hacker one-upsmanship.
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