[Shaanie]

Have you ever worked at a company with more than say 1k employees that's active in more than one region? I'm honestly intrigued in your opinion, it sounds similar to what I thought back in uni before I had any work experience, but from your profile you don't look like a complete junior, so I'd really like to better understand how you can think Spotify could possibly operate with 5 backenders.

[pdimitar]

I am 43. :D And with 22 years of experience, 95% of which in backend and some sysadmin-ing.

Though I have only once worked in a huge corporation (and I couldn't understand what did they need all the people for either).

I was almost always working in smaller tight-knit teams that got a LOT of stuff done (too much contracting for my now 40+ y/o self).

So I err on the side of "be efficient" and that's not even for the purposes of cost efficiency. It's more about being able to iterate with a reasonable speed. My observations from my career support what Bill Gates and others said i.e. that the productivity of a tech team starts to decline when it goes beyond 7 people. Generalization, sure, but it's very often true.

As for the 5 backenders thing, OK, my perspective might have been too narrow i.e. "writing code to move bytes from our servers to CDNs to user's devices can't be that hard" and I mostly stand behind it. Sure you might need much more devs to author complex login systems, SSO and such (if you even need it) but again, after the product somewhat stabilizes, how much backenders do you really need?

I am also interested in your opinion. My entire career has been a proof that small and tight-knit teams get sh1t done and everyone else drowns in bureaucracy.

[Shaanie]

For larger companies, there's a lot of "hidden" functions that you're probably not aware of as a customer. Just payment integrations in 100+ countries, with all the local regulations and reporting requirements is probably going to be rough to handle with a single team of 5 backenders. Then we have functions like marketing content management (every country has different copy and will probably want to be able to surface things slightly differently to maximize conversion), artist/podcast/audiobook tooling, the ad platform, hardware integration (for Spotify in your car/speaker etc), legal stuff (including GDPR and its equivalents), metrics & data analysis tools. And much more, and those are just some of the things you don't really see as an end-user.

I absolutely, 100%, agree that a small and focused team is the best way to get shit done, but for a large company the size of Spotify the amount of work is absolutely massive. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many teams at Spotify are small and tight-knit and doing great work at delivering kick-ass anti-fraud systems or moderation software to detect and report child porn etc.

Not to mention the obvious thing where the higher your revenue, the less percentual impact each employee needs to have to more than pay for themselves. While you might think it's ridiculous to have a full team dedicated solely to the main marketing page, that could be extremely worth it if that team increases conversion by 10%, as an example.

[pdimitar]

Okay, that's all valid.

But as another commenter pointed out -- it's actually 13900 people.

Again, everything you say it's true but I am finding it hard to imagine the scale and the degree of the problems that mandate ~14k people. Sure, 1000. Maybe 2500.

But 13900?