Why do famous IT companies need so many technical staff?

ByTec_estromberg

There are 800 employees of Dropbox, and Facebook requires employees of 10,000 people. However, Dropbox's service has not changed much since 2009, and the Facebook website basically does the same thing as 10 years ago. Although such a well-known IT company provides the same service, it requires a lot of employees in proportion to growth, but it is said that where resources are being used in the part which is not visible on the surface ButWaveWork as an engineerBen KuhnMr.'s blog explains.

Technological dark matter
http://scraps.benkuhn.net/2015/09/02/darkmatter.html


◆ Monetize
Half of the engineers working on Facebook are said to be devoted to advertising technology. Facebook users who do not use the ad blocking tool are seeing advertisements in a small corner of the display page, but that small area has a huge effect on Facebook's revenue. That's why it's a reasonable expectation that Facebook is allocating half the resources to advertising technology that is the primary source of revenue.

In addition, there are many cases where "products for enterprises" exists in "products for consumers", and there are cases where they generate more profit from enterprise products than advertisement systems. As an example, in a company called Theorem where Ben Kuhn previously worked, there was a comment tool "LivefyreHe said he was renting the system. Livefyre's comment system is also used by large companies such as BBC, and companies like Livefyre contribute to monetization by allocating resources to the comment system rather than advertising systems.

ByPictures of Money

◆ Internal tools
In companies established before the SAAS application is full, resources may be allocated to internal tools. For example,StripeAnd, web analysis toolMixpanelBecause it was not mature, Dropbox covered payment process and analytical system with our own tools. Also, it is not unusual for many companies established before the AWS came to have data centers themselves.

◆ Defense
If any company grows to a certain scale, it will be able to warn attackers. You will find that it is legitimate to increase the number of engineers needed for security and spam countermeasures so that users can use the service with confidence.

ByHoria Varlan

Localization
Americans seem to tend to disregard the difference between America and other countries, but localization is an essential element in expanding the service. Amazon, which is developing business worldwide, does not just start the same service in each country, but it is doing a big project to build a new delivery system that will ship Amazon by country. is.

◆ Long tail
A prominent software engineerJoel SporskiMr. says, "Everyone does not use 5% of Microsoft Word's features, and 5% of them are disjointed by people." Individual features in the product may be reachable only to 0.1% of users, but if it comes to something like Word or Facebook, 0.1% of users will be hundreds of thousands. Therefore, if it is a function that can aim for long tail, it is said that taking a resource makes sense in the long term. Mr. Kuhn's work Wave is a relatively small company, but it seems that 80% of its users allocate a great deal of engineer's effort to the "customer support" function that never touches.

◆ Micro Optimization
Kuhn noticed that Facebook is doing A / B testing to tweak the UI every few weeks at a certain time. Small enterprises are not worth implementing such large-scale tests much, but even on Facebook, employing staff devoted to the A / B test to improve just 1% of the product for one year will result in losses It is said that it does not become. Also, Netflix is ​​a tool that prevents service failure by deliberately artificially causing system failure "Chaos Monkey"Many large companies have allocated resources to improve the reliability of their own sites, including building their own sites. According to Kuhn's calculation, if the company has a rate of return of more than $ 10,000 (about 1.2 million yen) per minute such as Netflix, the reliability of the website is changed from "99.9%" to "99.99%" Explaining that it is worth allocating $ 4.5 million (about 540 million yen) to the team to improve it.

ByJeff robinson