[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.