When they said Reddit has 2000 employees I was shocked. what could they possibly do onto a website that is basically run by users (and sysadmins) and that is basically feature-wise mature? I really can’t figure out 2000 people working every day on Reddit… on what? just for a quick comparison, the whole IAmA was run by a single person (Victoria), so… what are they doing?

  • erogenouswarzone@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know anything about working at reddit, but I’ve worked at enough software companies to know generally what people do all day

    HR - hires employees, deals with insurance and other perks, fires employees, probably communicates with the board or governing body.

    Software - there are a few departments here, the most interesting of which is programming new features. Most will never see the light of day, but they’re working on them.

    • QA - tests new features and bug fixes and patches before they go live.

    • IT department for when developers computers do unexpected things.

    • Tickets - a team of developers/systems engineers to fix bugs and issues in the production source code. They will typically have 1-10 people on call at all times outside of normal business hours.

    • Systems Engineering - they decide how and what systems to implement, upgrade, retire etc. They need to coordinate with developers to plan software/hardware upgrades to make sure they don’t mess anything up unexpectedly (but it almost always happens during an upgrade)

    • Accounting - Accounts Payable (when you pay money for something, like AWS); Accounts Receivable (when you receive money, like for artificially inflating posts to the front page for money); Finance - should and how much money should be borrowed/invested to run the business; and a ton more depts honestly, any of which without the business would crumble.

    • Advertising - Both advertising Reddit in other media, and arranging sponsors to put their ads all over the place.

    • Executives - they plan the strategy for each dept listed above. Although this being an internet service, the CIO might be slightly more inflated than a typical company.

    And there’s probably a lot that I’m forgetting. But really, all this is just to illustrate about one of the most trafficked websites every is “How are they running a business with only 2,000 employees”

    • Windexhammer@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      100% agree, here’s some more departments that you haven’t listed but probably exist:

      • Legal, internal contracts, contracts with suppliers, contracts with customers (advertisers), compliance with the laws of many countries/markets

      • Regulatory, compliance with internal and external regulations

      • Procurement, negotiating with suppliers

      • sustainability, there’s probably someone in the business reporting on gender balance and environmental impact and a host of other UN SDG considerations

      • PMO, internal project management and portfolio reporting

      • market X, there may be a team of people for each major market responsible for sales, infrastructure, compliance, etc. in that market, in addition to central

      • CI/productivity, there will be some team responsible for reducing costs

      • Product owners, there will be teams of people responsible for arguing about what features/bugs should be implemented/fixed

      • monetization, there’s probably dedicated teams looking at (and a/b testing!) new ways to push people into spending money on the app and/or interacting with ads more often