On: Shopify to lay off 10% of workers in broad shake-u...

[ActionHank]

Multiple products targeting multiple users, both internal and external.

[stephc_int13 → ActionHank]

Alright.

Let's say that each product dev team is about 80 engineers. Let's double that number for support, HR, admin, etc. Let's add a team of 10 people for sales ( not needed for internal products but hey)

Now let's round it up to 200 heads.

That would make 50 large software products, is that right?

[ggreenbe → stephc_int13]

It's more than 50... I mean just look at the number of API endpoints across multiple APIs both internal and external. It's easily hundreds then add sys ops, dev ops, dev content writing (docs/guides), frontend, design, pm, support, etc.

I feel like most of you all are unaware of the complexity and scope of Shopify...

[jokethrowaway → ggreenbe]

I've seen companies where a team was managing 10 services and companies where a team was managing one endpoint

The former had some stressed principal engineers, the latter was terribly inefficient and people had 1% productivity.

There is a happy medium, but nobody can manage a large headcounts without splitting in a lot of tiny products.

The core product of shopify is not something that needs 10k engineers for maintenance, even if they can afford that.

[woofcat → stephc_int13]

On a large chunk of Enterprise Software you'd have teams of people working on specific features / subsets of a larger product.

I.e. a team that is working on only Facebook Messenger back-end, a team working on Facebook Messenger Front-end, a team working on Friend Recommendation, etc.

Each of these teams is let's say 10 Dev, 2-4 QA, 1 Product Documentation, then all the normal overhead of HR, etc.