Why do companies like Meta have so many employees, what do they do?
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All major businesses have several auxiliary staff that do nothing but support the main workers. This is things like HR, accounting, etc. And to add to this you have management & executive leadership teams that are in charge of each department & team. These people are common regardless of the business.
For IT shops, such as Meta & Google, there is a fairly common workforce setup. Most developers are good at writing software, but are utterly clueless of app good ideas or what things our company needs. Additionally, our business partners have absolutely no clue their software needs to work. So we have a whole layer of people whose job it is to take the requirements from our business partners & work with IT leaders to define the apps the developers are supposed to build. And those IT leaders aren’t actually writing the software, they are designing it & then writing the documentation so that the developers can “just work” on their requirements.
Once the software is written someone needs to verify that it actually works. Another thing I’ve learned about developers, we cannot test our own code. It’s almost impossible for us to do a good job testing any software we wrote ourselves, and that’s assuming we actually know the business processes it’s supporting. So most shops will have a whole separate team who’s job it is to understand the business processes & then verify that the software does what it is supposed to. Testers are the bane & boon of every developer, b/c their job is to literally break what we just spent weeks/months building. As much as I hate bugs, knowing I have good testers means I can be assured those bugs are found long before my users ever see them.
Finally you have to have someone to coordinate all the work, from the requirements gathering, to the development, to the testing, and finally releasing the app to users/production. For smaller teams this can be managed by a single person, but as you grow you need significantly more. My company has whole coordination teams that just support the development teams by coordinating the work between them.
Now I just described development work. All of this has to be supported, both the software & the hardware the apps run on. Those teams have a similar structure. Add user support teams, system health & monitoring teams, network teams, security teams, etc. And this is just IT. You likely have a lot of the same structure for other departments and lines of business.
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