When they said Reddit has 2000 employees I was shocked. what could they possibly do onto a website that is basically run by users (and sysadmins) and that is basically feature-wise mature? I really can’t figure out 2000 people working every day on Reddit… on what? just for a quick comparison, the whole IAmA was run by a single person (Victoria), so… what are they doing?
I don’t know anything about working at reddit, but I’ve worked at enough software companies to know generally what people do all day
HR - hires employees, deals with insurance and other perks, fires employees, probably communicates with the board or governing body.
Software - there are a few departments here, the most interesting of which is programming new features. Most will never see the light of day, but they’re working on them.
QA - tests new features and bug fixes and patches before they go live.
IT department for when developers computers do unexpected things.
Tickets - a team of developers/systems engineers to fix bugs and issues in the production source code. They will typically have 1-10 people on call at all times outside of normal business hours.
Systems Engineering - they decide how and what systems to implement, upgrade, retire etc. They need to coordinate with developers to plan software/hardware upgrades to make sure they don’t mess anything up unexpectedly (but it almost always happens during an upgrade)
Accounting - Accounts Payable (when you pay money for something, like AWS); Accounts Receivable (when you receive money, like for artificially inflating posts to the front page for money); Finance - should and how much money should be borrowed/invested to run the business; and a ton more depts honestly, any of which without the business would crumble.
Advertising - Both advertising Reddit in other media, and arranging sponsors to put their ads all over the place.
Executives - they plan the strategy for each dept listed above. Although this being an internet service, the CIO might be slightly more inflated than a typical company.
And there’s probably a lot that I’m forgetting. But really, all this is just to illustrate about one of the most trafficked websites every is “How are they running a business with only 2,000 employees”
100% agree, here’s some more departments that you haven’t listed but probably exist:
Legal, internal contracts, contracts with suppliers, contracts with customers (advertisers), compliance with the laws of many countries/markets
Regulatory, compliance with internal and external regulations
Procurement, negotiating with suppliers
sustainability, there’s probably someone in the business reporting on gender balance and environmental impact and a host of other UN SDG considerations
PMO, internal project management and portfolio reporting
market X, there may be a team of people for each major market responsible for sales, infrastructure, compliance, etc. in that market, in addition to central
CI/productivity, there will be some team responsible for reducing costs
Product owners, there will be teams of people responsible for arguing about what features/bugs should be implemented/fixed
monetization, there’s probably dedicated teams looking at (and a/b testing!) new ways to push people into spending money on the app and/or interacting with ads more often
They have three ads? He gets us, US Army and maybe one more? That’s all I remember seeing. That’s one persons job.
Maybe for you. Remember, ads are based on who they think you are.
When you travel the web, various entities (like Google) record what you’re doing. Then they add any info they know about you like your age, sex, weight, height, race, and a million other things and compare it to other people that match some of those things.
If they don’t have all that info, don’t worry they can make educated guesses based on search topics, websites visited, buying habits, surfing habits, and many other things. They simply compare you to other people who have the same or similar habbits, and they can fill in the blank data. And the more you do stuff online, the more accurate their file on you becomes.
So, and I’m just guessing here, if you’re seeing army ads, they probably think you’re young - maybe just out of high school maybe still in high school, and not sure what to do after. If you’re seeing he gets us, that’s because that group has invested an unheard-of amount of money to get their ads in front of people, so that might be more generic.
But anyway, reddit wants to make their ads better for these advertisers, so they work with data, systems, and programmers to make sure they know as much about you as possible. So they can tell their advertisers “We are showing your ads to High School Boys who may be directionless.”
And they’re also buying your data from Google to make further assurances. And all that is not done by one person, that could easily be a team of 100. And since that’s how reddit increases its bottom line for investors, it’s probably a lot more than 100.