Why do companies like Meta have so many employees, what do they do?
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There’s a brilliant book written about forty years ago called Mythical Man-Month. Basically in software you start off with a solution that is straightforward but with each simple addition it gets exponentially more complex.
E.g. an algorithm that identifies and counts apples from a picture. You then think, okay simple algorithm but now I need to have a picture feed, and then output the results to a nice UI, then need the UI to translate into ten languages, and then need to have UTC timestamps on the photo, when the algorithm identifies the fruit, oh wait now we need orange identification? What about bananas? No? That’s V2? Good good. Okay so we need to have a team formed on that banana proposal, needs to be aligned with the orange identification team (they’re now called the mandarins? Isn’t that British slang?) Okay so align the fruit division as we need to include tomatoes, kiwis and guavas. But now we need to have a social media feed for the UI so users can tweet their apple count. And I’ve not even touched on architecture, testing, infosec or the bench.
And so on, with each feature needing teams of programmers just to support the existing product. The escalation seems logical at the small parts but soon you have teams doing things that are simply aligning the work of other teams, internal toolsmiths, database admins, product analytics etc. This is why a startup can appear to have a finished product that upsets the market, but then needs to madsively scale to meet the demand of a larger more complex market.
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