That means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for?
There are significant global engineering companies that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways that have roughly that number of people, including their R&D departments.
When I did a deepdive on Facebook ~5 months ago ("Inside the Facebook Engineering Culture"), I confirmed with people inside the company the company having ~75,000 global employees, ~32,000 working in tech.
While I can't answer the question "what does the company need them all for", consider that the company's products are used by ~3.6B people every month, meaning they have about one full-time employee for every ~45,000 users.
Compare this with Google (one employee for every ~29,000 users) or Twitter (one employee for every ~52,000 users). The ballpark is similar, and shows the trend of it being harder to have fewer employees per thousand users (Twitter is much smaller than Meta, and Google twice the size in employee count while reached ~20% more monthly users).
The company generated ~$117B in revenue in 2021, which is ~$1.46M per employee. Profits per employee (net income divided by employee count) was ~$480K/employee.
There will, naturally be a cost of revenue, cost of customer support (even if not all of it in-house).
Also worth considering that Meta is composed like several companies: Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Messenger, Reality Labs and several smaller/larger bets operating pretty independently.
I'd flip your question around: what if Meta had fewer employees, what would it mean? It would mean:
1. Increasing their profitability even further
2. Likely less support for current customers, and less of an ability to invest in forward-looking initiatives
I'm sure shareholders of Meta would be happy with #1. For #2, short-term shareholders would be happy to see all of this go. Long-term shareholders would likely realize there would be a cost to cutting down on customer support and R&D and I would not expect them to support this, given the very high profits Meta already has.
All in all, I find it remarkable that the company can operate with such revenue and profit numbers, and I suspect they are already deliberately hiring employees more conservatively, to keep up this profitability rate.
As a side comment, I have my thoughts on how non-applicable the linked article is for software engineers at Meta, as discussed in this comment [1] on this thread.
I don't think so - I'm an insider and honestly to me the biggest amount of fluff is the all project manager/program manager/product owner/process owner types roles. Realistically you could put them all under the broad title of business analyst. From what I've seen a given engineering team will grown in size under a given director and the corresponding director on the product/business side will want to grow their side of the house equally and so they do and we end up w/ roughly a 1 to 1 ratio of developers to business analysts of some sort which is about what is cited here.
Nowadays I am seeing enormous growth in product management orgs, product mgrs growing like crazy. In my company, we see that product orgs have ballooned a lot and product managers are also not helping that much. A lot of them don't have any product vision and just act like glorified project managers. I am not saying all are bad, I have seen some good ones, but seems like a lot of them are just there to take advantage of the growth.
Many of the product managers I've worked with have a very simple job: Take the product management direction from some other, higher-up manager, and present it to the engineers. They don't actually manage anything, can't answer any serious questions, etc. They just save time for their manager by fronting for them, and insulating them from questions they'd prefer not to have to answer.
This is an issue in smaller companies as well. A team's architect can generally cover technical architecture, business analysis, running scrum, writing stories better than the POs, etc. The fact though, is that one good "business person" to take over all that DOES help. Not so much when you get 3 roles (scrum master, BA, PO) all of which do about an hour of work a day and still blame everything on the devs.
Sounds like a pretty rotten product org. Glad I haven't entertained recruiters for it. A good PM can really energize a team and bring vision and clarity to things. A mediocre or bad one just gets in the way.
It is surprising that FB would allow the business analysis side of the house to grow equally (or even at half the rate) engineering based on how Facebook was founded and by whom.
When someone has a team or an area they are responsible for, they will try to make that team and responsibity grow as much as possible, whether or not it's good for the organization. This is not obvious to the perpetrators.
I don't really think Mark Zuckerberg is the source of having an aimless PM org. I think that he should serve jail time for wire fraud and overseeing a defective product that causes people harm. But I think that's disconnected from his abilities and vision as a founder, engineer, and creator of one of the most successful companies in the world.
> They will tell you that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are pretty important to them.
Agreed. If someone’s mental model of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp doesn’t extend beyond “scroll through bad posts from distant relatives” then they don’t really understand how those products are used by the general public.
A lot of people in the tech world never really got engaged with social media, stopped visiting (or deleted their accounts), and have anchored their mental models to their personal experience a decade ago. Meanwhile, the world has changed massively and Meta has a lot of users for a reason.
At least 3/4th of people don’t uses Facebook and their average user makes 1 posts per week.
So it’s really not important to most people. It’s numbers are heavily influenced by people who use it because someone or some organization happens to use it.
I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and don't use it ever.
But that's a really bad way to determine the important of Facebook, for two reasons.
1. You've assumed that the only purpose of Facebook is posting, so a user making an average of one post per week isn't finding it valuable. Bad assumption.
2. You're counting a bizarre measure of market penetration, a standard that only air and food and water would meet. Many, many people don't use cars, and people who do often only use them five days a week. If you think that means cars aren't important to many people, try taking one away!
I really like the car analogy for this. I will frequently go 2-3 days a week without using my car. On the days I use it, there's a roughly 75% chance I am going to drive 5-6 miles to the gym and back, and nothing else. However, a car is a necessity for me. If my car disappeared into the ether tomorrow, I would have a new one in my garage by the end of the day.
> If my car disappeared into the ether tomorrow, I would have a new one in my garage by the end of the day.
And that’s the difference between us. If my car disappeared into the ether, I would immediately launch a series of ether-disappearing experiments, systematically trying larger and larger items and video recording the results. I would post these to HN, admittedly in the hopes of going viral while also doing my best to move science forward.
But you? Noooo, just pop over to your insurance company and get a new minivan, leaving the rest of us in the dark about your amazing ether disposal system.
You’re missing the point of the parent comment. News Feed and FB posts are a small fraction of activity in the FB family of apps. Messaging is massively important to billions of people worldwide. WhatsApp or Messenger usage is greater than SMS is some countries.
I have kept my Facebook account mostly to interact with business. Most of them, especially small ones, keep their FB pages more updated than their websites.
Facebook Marketplace is a whole world of its own. It's become like the Etsy/Ebay/Craigslist in Central America. Payments are confirmed by sending screenshots of bank transfers, and deliveries handed by private post or an informal network of couriers that visit towns and neighborhoods on specific days of the week.
Whatsapp is pretty much the cornerstone of personal and business relationships here in India. I’ve closed more deals over Whatsapp than over phone calls and emails and Zoom calls combined.
I think pretty much Europe + Africa + LatAm + Asia (minus East Asia) is using WhatsApp as defacto personal/work/business communication platform. Even in govt. domain.
IG is also still the top social media as well globally.
I've never used Whatsapp, but I understand it's popular in some countries (to the point of being a de facto common communication medium like we'd use SMS for in the US), but how is it monetized?
I assume Meta gets their pound of flesh somehow or another, but I really just wonder if it's a good business. Famously, Twitter seems like a terrible business (and that's independent or whether you think it's a useful messaging/microbloging/whatever service).
It’s likely not a very profitable business. Very limited scope to advertise on private messaging without really pissing off your customers. Whatsapp has opened up the API and I’m already getting sick of spam messages from businesses abusing the API.
I reckon its a bit like email. Great as a top of the funnel customer acquisition tool. Not that great from a money making perspective.
Whatsapp had 55 employees and 1.5b monthly users when they got acquired by FB. I very much doubt that the product is fundamentally better now that they are part of a company that has tens of thousands of employees. Same could be said about Instagram I guess?
It's the tyrrany of the rocket equation. Each dollar of revenue costs more than the last, and the money keeps getting spent until they are paying $0.999999 for earn $1
IG is a photo sharing site with ads interspersed and WA is E2E texting. We gotta tone down the rhetoric here.
They’ve gotta be two of the least toxic social media sites compared to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube — any why: because the format is cancer to news.
Social media itself is great — Snapchat, IG, BeReal, Radite, Discord as long as
they are successfully able keep them from becoming political megaphones. TikTok has come the closest to being a general purpose broadcast social network that hasn’t been corrupted but long term I’m sure it’ll get poisoned too.
Those work together. But I find the most insidious aspect of these platforms is how it allows companies to exploit our vulnerability to unhealthy behavior. Even if you grant that Instagram's content isn't toxic (which it is, but just hypothetically), the ads are terrible. I, for example, don't drink. I was never an alcoholic per se, but I had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, and in many ways I miss it. Instagram shows me ads all the time trying to convince me how fun it is to drink, and why so-and-so drink is delicious and amazing. Now extend this to shopping additions, misinformation campaigns, et cetera.
"A key factor is Professor Jones’s observation that about a decade earlier he noticed a loss of focus in students."
The exact timeframe when children who marinated in social media grew up. In the book The Coddling of the American Mind (from two different NYU professors), the authors track a sudden change in student behavior, like intolerance, impatience, fragility - all around 2013.
So we can discuss how "important" it is to them, but we are just now beginning to get data about how these apps absolutely destroy our ability to focus, think, and connect with other humans.
Sure, until they are sick and they suddenly realize the quality of the medical equipment is actually more important. Or there is a disaster and they realize getting electricity or having satellite comms is more important. God forbid you end up in a war and the quality and innovation in your weapons determines if you live or die. Don't even get me started on food.
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only important when life is good. They are icing on the cake. But once things go south, they can be quickly discarded.
Guess how they'll coordinate with friends and family and stay up to date on news from the government and emergency services. Do you think Facebook's crisis response features are for show? I use the utility's outage map to find out when I'll have power again during storms, but I would bet most people turn to the Facebook page.
> I use the utility's outage map to find out when I'll have power again during storms, but I would bet most people turn to the Facebook page.
Do either of those pages get the power back sooner?
How about regulating and resourcing the power systems so that storms don't frequently take them out. I've lived in the same house for over thirty years and I can count the number of outages on the fingers of one hand. Two of them were planned and all were of less than 24 hours duration.
I'll grant you that I live in an area that doesn't have a lot of storms but even so the electricity company cuts a wide corridor either side of power lines to make sure that trees cannot fall on the lines.
I'm sure that those things are important to those people. But they are less important to the world than the engineering that goes to make sure that there is power to run the servers, routers, laptops, and mobiles. Less important than the engineering that makes the motors that move the trains to get people to work and production lines for the food we all eat.
> That means that Facebook currently has 80 k employees. What exactly does it need them all for?
At Meta’s scale, that’s about 1 employee for every 45,000 monthly active users across their platforms. Many of those MAUs are using multiple Meta products.
I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees. They’re serving a significant portion of the entire world’s population with their products. Of course they’re going to need a lot of employees.
> I’m more surprised that people think this is too many employees
The question that people have is, "what do the employees actually do?" It's because most people have no idea how labor intensive tech is, nor do they understand the math behind the revenue that 45k active users generate. That said, when you look at 80,000 people "to operate a website" it sounds ridiculous (even thought it probably is not).
To understand if that’s effective scaling, you have to know how much the average employee is costing Facebook and how much revenue the average MAU is generating.
No idea, it’d be nice if a few of those 80,000 could get the “hide” button to work properly when I hit it on my iPhone Facebook app. I hate when people post gross closeup pictures of spiders (my friends are weird) then the “hide” button grays it out for a second then instantly re-serves the post in the same spot in my feed.
It has been like this for years now.
It also took months and months for them to fix a “phantom message” where it’d show I had a single Messenger message from the main Facebook app, despite there being nothing there (even in the ‘not friends with you’ section, I checked!).
Oh god yes. Facebook and Messenger have so many such bugs, coupled with general slowness and clunkiness. Having 80k employees would sound so much more reasonable if all of Meta's services worked really well; right now it seems more like they do the bare minimum.
I don't know if these things become fundamentally hard to fix at their scale, like it's possible that a "hide" button becomes too hard to properly implement if your feed suggestion algorithm has to handle millions of users at the same time. It's possible, but sounds hard to believe, because a lot of the quality has degraded in only a couple of years, and they haven't become orders of magnitude larger in that time.
Of course, it would be very reasonable to claim that they simply don't care. But their websites do keep changing, so it's also not like they have decided to halt development of this part of the UX and simply focused on doing advertising right.
Personally, I still suspect that regardless of their motives, there's a high degree of corporate inefficiency.
Update: I think Zuckerberg or someone with some swat at Facebook is watching over us here because this morning my friend posted a picture of a scary spider and I hit “hide” and wouldn’t you know, it actually hid. Maybe it’s a coincidence but I doubt it!
Regardless thanks to whomever at Facebook who got it fixed.
Honestly a lot of the pictures are people in a spina bifida parents support group sharing pictures of their child’s spinal surgery. I don’t want to straight up block these people or even unfollow them as they might have questions I can answer sometime in the future, like I’m good at helping dads get used to the idea of cathetering their daughters without feeling like they’re a total weirdo.
So when I see someone who is going through trauma like this sharing a picture and asking for emotional support I don’t want to block them. I tap “hide” which then promptly does… absolutely nothing.
There is definitely a legitimate use case for the “hide” button where the two things you mentioned won’t really help.
When money was "free or cheap" (low interests) and plentiful I believe many of these large tech firms added head count as a competitive strategy: "If they're behind our desk then they're not behind a competitor's!" Now that interest rates are going up and talk of tighter times are in the mix, "waste" reduction is the new and upcoming wind that these and all firms are adjusting their sails to. Additionally, keeping rumors of mass layoffs can slow and paralyze smaller firms that are looking to hire because many may be holding off longer to actually hire current candidates in hopes of, and counting on, many many more potential applicants in the near future. Plus with the influx of developers they may be hoping for a buyers (employers) market with regards to compensation in the next few months.
Facebook is an ad company, and if that market is declining, those cuts may come from non-technical groups meant to serve those accounts and markets. There are likely other programs necessary with high marketing needs that I could imagine need culling and thus fewer people.
Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams) and has a high rate of turnover. They also spend a lot of resources on stuff tangential to their core business like open source libraries. Project managers have also very aggressively been pushing attendees at conferences I've been to to apply to work at FB.
In all likelihood we're also not talking Facebook but Meta, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever else they have been buying up. Depending on how the acquisitions were handled, there's likely a lot of structural redundancies there too.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not suggesting all of the layoffs were developers. But a company like Meta has a vast number of support staff and this number scales with the number of developers. A good chunk of the layoffs might just be service staff being replaced with external service companies. And even if they layed off thousands of developers, that would likely mean also laying off thousands of other workers no longer needed to support the developers.
> Facebook infamously allows for redundancy in development (each team developing its own solutions instead of trying to solve the problems across multiple teams)
Example or sources for this claim? I spent close to a decade working there and this doesn’t sound familiar at all.
That's pretty much what multiple people working at FB at the time told me over the past years. It was also the conclusion of a third-party analysis of the FB mobile app which literally included multiple libraries for doing the same thing for different parts of the app which were developed by different teams. This was also true for the Facebook web app at least during the early React years.
Its more like, if x team doesn't deliver a functionality that y team needs, y team would need to come up with an alternative/short term solution in order to answer y customers/users. Sometimes alternatives doesn't go away even after a permanent fix comes along.
Also since Meta is multi app you could have one solution for FB and one solution for IG etc.
Eh, redundancy doesn't have to imply a lack of coordination, it can be strategic. I haven't worked at FB/Meta so you may have deeper insight here.
If you have something extremely critical you need done and enough resources, especially at a high risk of failure, you often have multiple groups tackling the same problem to increase your odds of overall success.
I live really close to their largest data center and only about 500 people work there. It’s 4x larger now than when they initially broke ground and even then it was insanely huge.
Edit.
I just saw the photo for their Nebraska data center, so I guess each of their locations are about the same size and shape.
I'm actually surprised there would be that many. This report [1] from the US chamber of commerce says 157 after initial construction and I've seen numbers lower than that. (Some may be a function of presumably outsourced workers like security guards and janitorial services.)
Datacenters bring money to an area while they're being built but there are very few local jobs once they're operational. (Obviously engineers do work connected to datacenters from other locations.)
> Datacenters bring money to an area while they're being built but there are very few local jobs once they're operational.
I really wish local politicians would get this. Here in Norway, several small communities got wooed by businesses wanting free land and cheap electricity for data centers, in return for promises of hundreds if not thousands of jobs from all those supposedly using the data center.
One even ended up having to buy back land they gave for free[1] for ~$700k.
The front end apps are not all the same. If you built an app that handles 3 users well do you think it would easily handle 3 billion with no tweaks at any layer (app, framework, OS, network, hardware, edge traffic routing, internal dc network fabric, caching layer, storage for binary/ graph/ KV/ relational, cluster scheduler, security )? Another example, ML backed products (eg. Search, any RecSys) requires tuning features based on product specific needs.
You also end up leaving massive efficiencies on the floor by not hiring more specialists as you scale. This is a good read which explains it in detail https://danluu.com/in-house/
I would also suggest reading their published papers on in house systems to understand the challenges that come with operating at a large scale.
Yeah, most of that is backend issues. Part of them dictated by product requirements eg. We require serving 5 year old, <4MB photos with 99th percentile latency of 1 second.
Product and UI has its own complexities, but it seems clear each product is unique and would require different logic.
What size crew do you infer when thinking of a “huge data center”
I’m still thinking it’s just enough to repair failures in a timely manner (and assuming there is spare capacity so you are not blocked if something breaks). Which means only a few hands on deck and the rest being triaged remotely.
Or not maybe we are still in the 90s when you need someone sitting at a desk in a server room to handle password resets :P
I'm in the same area, and agree the scale is dramatic. One land surveyor a friend ran into has been working there for 7 consecutive years. I think if I were in that role, I would want to see different environments from time to time.
There are significant global engineering companies that do real things that benefit the world in concrete ways that have roughly that number of people, including their R&D departments.