A hundred engineers for a site like Reddit is ridiculous. Scale is not an excuse - WhatsApp being the famous example of a hyperscaled product with many native clients and only a few dozen engineers. And who would Reddit be selling to? Are they going to run their own in-house ad platform?

I'm sure Reddit justifies it to themselves somehow.

Reddit provides a pretty large amount of features (once you include advertising, moderator features, subreddit customization, image hosting, etc.) while WhatsApp provided a very small number of features. As a note, Reddit is already running their own in house ad platform and have been for a while.

Yea, if true, that 230 figure is shocking. I wouldn’t have thought they’d have more than 25% of that. What on earth are all these employees doing?

I worked at an avionics manufacturer that had a dozen or so products (things like physical displays and map systems that go into airplanes) that had less than 10 full time engineers. A few software devs, a few EE’s and an industrial engineer who did the chassis. Sure it’s not an apples to apples comparison but wow. Does it really take that many people to maintain an already-working web site? Isn’t the promise of “cloud” that your staff can scale far slower than your user base?

Craigslist has what, 50 people? Better comparison. Even that seems to be a lot.

>Does it really take that many people to maintain an already-working web site?

Probably. Unless you want to get shut down/sued for all the child pornography, narcotics trading, violent threats, doxing, etc, etc which people will use your site for. Not to mention all the other attempts to directly exploit, hack or manipulate your site. And larger scale tends to attract more bad actors.