Why do companies like Meta have so many employees, what do they do?
In: 37
I have many colleagues who have worked at Meta. I currently work at a large software company. As a result, I have some understanding of the types of problems Meta likely faces. Meta brings in well over $100 billion every year. They spend about half of it. Where does it go? Here are some of the bigger costs:
* Insurance
* Taxes (minimized as much as possible)
* Payroll (tech workers aren’t cheap)
* Infrastructure
* Facilities
* Marketing
* Financial (stock buy backs, M&A, debt, foreign currency)
* Legal Services
There are several others. Each of these areas requires a variety of functions and services to operate. One of the largest expenses will be engineering (developers, admins, PMs, etc.) and infrastructure (servers, datacenters, networks, etc.). For Meta, this is massive. Facebook alone can serve over one billion people simultaneously. Multiple large-scale technical services must be created, managed, evolved, and supported to ensure these users have a good experience. They are pushing the limits of available technology and hire some of the best technical talent available. These people are often highly intelligent and want to be competitively compensated for their contributions. They require excellent managers who themselves must be looked after. It creates a giant organization.
Let’s think about their most critical area. Meta makes most of its money selling ad space to other large businesses. These enterprise customers require data services, user management, security & compliance, legal support, contract support, vendor services, and much more. They launch multi-million dollar ad campaigns that must be measured, tuned, and attributed back to Meta. The reason why these businesses use Meta is because ads on these platforms are targeted and often highly effective. Meta collects and analyses a surprising amount of personal data about each user to make this targeted advertising work. The infrastructure to track all their users and their personal traits is massive. Meta knows which users are stay at home moms, which are musicians, which are dog owners, who has grandparents living at home, how much each person makes, what they do for a living, how many kids are in the household, which cell phones they use… On and on!
On top of all of this, Meta has acquired several companies. They are trying to diversify their business. There are new areas of technology to grow as well. They also have a great deal of government scrutiny requiring lobbyists, lawyers, political contributions, and more. Each function takes a team of people to operate, with more overhead to coordinate it all.
You might imagine that with all these functions, in a business that must operate 24/7/365 and never go down, it isn’t much of a stretch to get to 70,000 employees.
Latest Answers