Why do companies like Meta have so many employees, what do they do?
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In my experience software companies lean heavily on product and project managers. To stay competitive in tech you have to constantly be trying to innovate (at least that’s the idea), which takes a lot of people to come up with and plan out these projects, even if many never see the light of day.
Beyond that, maintaining a tech infrastructure like that is very complex,, goes well beyond devs. You’re talking lT for local systems and networks and for their actual hosting/website/apps. You’ve got Devs for building features and fixing bugs, DevOps for deploying and managing those updates and changes, techops for investigating issues and reporting to devs/proactively monitoring for issues.
That’s not just for Facebook core products either, (which are a ton: FB, meta, insta, Whatsapp, etc) Facebook also has a huge footprint in the open source community, in that they actively maintain many sophisticated projects they built for their products that are now used by millions of other products, like their React frameworks. Not to mention they heavily use other open source softwares and dedicate some resources to maintaining those as well (this is common courtesy for large companies + they now have influence over a project they rely on), such as PyTorch.
That’s not even going into the loads of people team members that are there to preserve culture and act as an HR. Or the support teams that do content moderation and escalated support (i assume they outsource tier 1 support). Or their legal teams, UX/UI designers, marketing managers, account managers (sales), finance workers, etc etc. And of course, last but not least, a very intensive hierarchy that places hundreds of people that are just there managing the other people, and the relationships between the teams, since things get so unwieldy.
Successful tech companies are incredibly convoluted and complex in my experience. many times there are whole teams working on “nothing” because their part of the business is on its way out, or they were part of another company that was acquired, and in either case, someone in the middle hasn’t gotten around to trimming the fat/reallocating those resources.
Source: have worked for a FAANG company, other huge tech companies, now work as a private contractor bc of how fucking annoying these conglomerates are to work with
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