Comment by jonatron
18 hours ago
I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.
18 hours ago
I find the scale of some companies hard to understand, they're laying off multiples of the total number of employees of the largest company I've worked at.
Large-scale enterprises are really something to behold. Take one small example. A certain large company has cafeterias in many locations. Each of these cafeterias is like a small enterprise. And it has nothing to do with the core business itself. To order food, you need an app. Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well. There's also a payment component and everything that comes along with that.
The cafeteria itself is a large scale enterprise, wholly enclosed inside the larger scale enterprise.
It's all true but the cafeteria is generally outsourced. Those employees are not on the books of the real enterprise and the software shared between all of the outsourcers customers. Same goes for many non-core functions.
I can confirm for a certain very large enterprise that this is not the case. The employees ARE on the books of the company and considered full time employees with full benefits, and the software is custom built for this enterprise, by this enterprise, and not shared with any other enterprises
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I would not have wasted my time and yours if Bon Appetit was running it.
“I was a second reloader’s mate on a ship that guarded a ship that made ice cream for the other ships.”
What is this from?
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Someone has to build, test, deploy, and maintain that app. It also has a back-end. Someone has to build and maintain those servers as well.
...and these days, someone has to justify their continued employment, hence guaranteeing that said app and its related systems will be subjected to constant trendchasing and the inevitable resultant enshittification. It's otherwise perfectly possible to create such an ordering system that will keep working with next to no attention, which is why the most stable and reliable systems I've worked with were created by someone who didn't want to have to work on it more than once.
> A certain large company
Which one is it? And, more importantly, why not name it?
I know of a large company that does not like to be named https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Caff%C3%A8_Macs
Moreover, he has no idea what those laid off people actually did or who they are
Internally they operate like a government or military and less like a normal company.
There are very few government organizations here in Brazil with more than 8k people under the same management.
All of those government organizations are under the same management: the government. Subsidiaries are still under the management of the parent firm.
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They also take profits a lot like government. :thinking:
As someone who has only worked for a company with maybe a thousand people, can you elaborate on this a bit?
No idea how the military analogy works but: large companies scale up by "in sourcing" their supplier's functions. Facebook collects their own metrics instead of using datadog. Their own logs instead of Splunk. Facebook's own high cardinality traces instead of Honeycomb. Own datacenters instead of buying from AWS. Own database(s) instead of Oracle.
And then, since you have all these integrated functions, you can spend headcount optimizing datacenter spend down. Hire a team to re-write PHP to make it faster literally pays for itself. Or kernel engineers. Or even HW engineers and power generation. And on the product side, you can do lots of experiments where a 1% improvement in ad revenue pays like the entire department's wages for the year. So you do a lot of them, and the winners cover the cost of the losers. And you hire teams to build software to run more experiments faster and more correctly.
The brakes on this "flywheel of success" is the diseconomies of scale outweighing the economies. When the costs of communicating and negotiation are higher internally than those external contracts you previously subsumed. When you have two teams writing their own database engine competing (with suppliers!) for the same hires. When your datacenter plans outpace industrial power generation plans. When your management spins up secret teams to launch virtual reality products with no legs.
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I've never been in the military but I'm told they work this way. You often have interactions with people across the org chart (which is a massive tree with >100,000 nodes on it). If there's a dispute over resources or requirements that can't be resolved you need to find the lowest person that is above both of you to settle it. The depth of the org chart is a key similarity here as well. I think I was ~10 degrees from Sundar when I worked for Google. A soldier in the US military is a similar distance from the president. Also the financial numbers that are thrown around are larger than what most governments deal with and on par with even large nations. The US military might get a $100B influx for some war. Google/Amazon/Meta/etc. spend similarly on AI initiatives.