Why do companies like Meta have so many employees, what do they do?
In: 37
It’s a lot like the army. For every soldier that does the actual fighting, you have several people who do all the other work like maintaining supply lines, cleaning/repairing equipment, tending to the wounded, etc.
A big company like Meta is the same way. You have a lot of programmers who do all the coding work, and for every one of them there are people who do all the support work like human resources, accounting, marketing, etc.
The same or similar jobs that other large companies. You have accounting and legal and managers and HR and designers and PR/marketing and janitors and cooks for the canteen and so on and so forth – on top of the engineers and programmers
lol didn’t you see that video posted to Reddit the other day?
They “vibe” and get coffee and do yoga while their SO dj’s for the cat. So many responsibilities so little meta. “#workislife#selfmade”
Aw, tiktokkers be mad lol.
They’re not in customer service, that’s for sure. My instagram got hacked in June and there’s literally no way to directly contact them to get it back (aside from reporting vulgar content). All those employees and no human responses if you actually have a problem (unless you know someone in the biz)
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.
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
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.
Like any larger organization once you hit a certain size there starts to be overlap in responsibilities. This is not good. So one easy solution is clearly delineate responsibilities. But this means your guy that used to do 5 things now does 1 thing. So now you need 4 people to fill in the previous responsibilities.
It’s a matter of how organized the organization is.
They do? Their customer support definitely doesn’t show it.
Surely Meta has many many people working on ad acquisition and placement since that is how they make their money.
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