"We’re talking about a company that had 1500 employees, with just around a dozen on the infrastructure team" - what the rest 99% of the company is doing, marketing?
Yes, marketing. Also software development, web development, design, customer services, corporate services, support, sales, PR/comms, human resources, finance & accounting, legal, and so on.
1500 sounds like a lot, but keep in mind how many customers they have, and in how many countries they sell their services.
The wording got mixed up a bit. "Infrastructure" was a much larger organization, but there was an infrastructure team of about 12 people who worked on Magic Pocket at the time.
I was also thinking that those numbers are really weird, for a company which does infrastructure(fileservers)-in-the-cloud. Obviously some devs doing software for various platforms, business-side folks and so forth. But 1500:12 is a really weird ratio, given the core function of the business. If they're not spending on infra staff... what staff are they spending on?
1500 sounds like a lot, but keep in mind how many customers they have, and in how many countries they sell their services.