[ken]

> Keep in mind Imgur is not a large company despite their high traffic, even at their peak of employees the engineering team was pretty small (probably about 12-15 people after series A)

12-15 engineers is small? I'd call that a full-size team, for any single project.

"Officially" Google makes an entire web browser with less than double that: https://www.quora.com/How-large-is-the-Google-Chrome-team/an...

Conway's Law in action here. If it were one person, it'd be one IMG tag. When you put 12-15 engineers to work making a social website for serving one IMG, you get this.

[oldmanhorton]

Chrome.... definitely has more people working on it than that. It's absolutely ludicrous to try to say Google only pays 23 people to work on chrome. Perhaps that quora answer is being pedantic and saying only 23 people work on the closed source, non chromium bits?

Regardless, 15 engineers to make a webapp and mobile apps with all of the features mentioned for a site that gets "lots" of views (not sure how many but I'd guess we are counting in hundreds of millions of clicks a day at this point) seems pretty efficient to me?

[ken]

Chrome is at the top of a giant tower of abstraction. Sure, millions of people built the tower. Imgur is even higher on the tower of abstraction, though. It should be much simpler. That's the whole point of the tower.

15 engineers doesn't seem especially efficient to me for what it does (or ought to). Just because you get a lot of views doesn't mean the software itself has to be terribly sophisticated. It usually means you host a ton of user-generated content. Websites which are relatively straightforward hosting of user content, like Wikipedia [1] and Reddit, tend to have orders-of-magnitude fewer employees than other types of equally popular websites.

[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation/Annual_...

If you assume WMF were about 20% engineers back in 2010-2011, as they are today according to their Staff page, that would mean they had about 16 engineers. Is Imgur today as complex as all Wikipedia properties in 2011? That seems rather inefficient to me.

[CydeWeys]

Chrome has hundreds of people working on it, at least. Aside from that Quora link likely being wrong anyway, it's also 7 years out of date.

[saagarjha]

Even Safari/WebKit has like a hundred people working on it, and the Chrome team is much larger. Probably an order of magnitude more.