Personally I read it a little differently, more along the lines of "I didn't realise Nokia was that big! Are they involved in other sectors I don't know about?"
This is correct. All I know them from is their mobile phone business, which is all but gone nowadays. The Nokia brand lives on through HMD Global so I figured Nokia itself must do a ton of other stuff. I got a few replies with what they do nowadays, thanks!
Maybe on Reddit. Here, I instead did learn that Nokia still has a substantial worldwide stake in telecommunications, especially wireless. And that Nokia has much older origins than that dating back to selling rubber in the 19th century. even if their heyday of consumer products is long over, a few responses helped me see otherwise.
Regardless, the user already clarified their point so this is simply a thought exercise rather than a search for truth.
You don't need to accurately assess it to be surprised they still have a lot of employees. They don't seem to do much anymore that is visible. Quite a long time ago they were a leading company. I have no idea what they even do anymore.
I would read his comment more as "I didn't know the company was still so big" than "wow how stupid are they that they didn't fire all those people years ago"
there are more inscects in a cubic mile of rural land than humans on earth. are you surprised?
Humans in general are horrible at encompassing large numbers. We can interpret and understand them, but our mental model sense of scale isn't flexed often enough in daily life (where we maybe deal with thousands at most) to truly appreciate hundreds of thousands, or millions intuitively.
To be fair, 86000 is the size of Meta. and I'm surprised to begin with that Meta has 86000 employees to begin with. They weren't saying that they shouldn't have that many employees, just unaware of the scale of the company.