Mastodawn

Matte Jun 23, 2023

What are 2000 employees doing at Reddit?

What are 2000 employees doing at Reddit? - Feddit.it

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?

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AB7ORH7D Jun 23, 2023

And yet Apollo was made by one guy and it’s far better than anything they’ve made

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designated_fridge Jun 23, 2023

I mean, the complexity of an iOS app is nothing against running one of the world's largest websites...

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jclinares Jun 23, 2023

That argument doesn't hold under scrutiny. Reddit employs about 80 people on their iOS development team. And the app blows fucking chunks, compared to Apollo, which was made by one guy.

Reddit & Bitrise

Reddit is one of the world’s largest social news and discussion websites, visited by millions every day. See how they leverage Bitrise and our M1 machines!

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designated_fridge

Yeah, I work at a big international tech company myself and sometimes get surprised by the amount of people we have working on our app.

My guess would be that it has to do with

More features (I think the Apollo developer mentioned how some features aren't available through the API?)

More insights (I would guess that the official Reddit app contains way more code to track and quantity the user)

On-call. I assume the 3PA won't get paged in the middle of the night if there's a critical bug in their code.

Experiments. Wouldn't surprise me if the official Reddit app is using experiments (I.e. A/B testing) to try new features or changes in UI

New features. The Apollo developer is the one who has to adapt. API changes, new features are (maybe?) added while I assume in house app developers work together with the rest of the company to bring those features.

Etc.

None of these points explain why they'd need 80x more developers of course. It's also just because reddit is a big company and the bigger you get, the more time you spend in meetings, writing documents, etc. and then you hire more developers to increase the velocity and then you end up with a slow machine.