[LastNevadan]

I'm sometimes amazed by how many people work at some of these companies.

Nine percent is about 1,000 jobs. So, a back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that about 11,000 people work there. I don't doubt that running eBay is more complex than it appears, but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods. That's an army of people!

[bombcar]

This comes up every time a company’s employees is listed, in the software world.

If someone mentions that Walmart employs more people than the US Military, nobody blinks an eye. We can “Richard Scarry” imagine what they are doing, because there are lots of stores and we see what they do. (Reference: https://www.comicsbeat.com/if-your-job-wasnt-performed-by-a-... )

But a company like eBay or Google; we only see a website and can’t imagine what they’re doing. And Xitter continuing to not be completely on fire lends to this.

What do those balls of employees do? Sales, marketing, localization, etc. You can get some 50-80% of the total with a smallish group, but to get it all you need more and more people. And then you need management on top to keep everything moving. At some point it turns from “what do we need to do X” and becomes “do we get more revenue from this hire than it costs”.

[camdenreslink]

I think Walmart is a bad example because there are thousands of giant stores across the United States full of employees. I think most people assume they also do their own distribution/fulfillment shipping of goods to their stores and customers, which requires warehouses also full of employees.

eBay doesn't do fulfillment, or payment processing, or really anything other than running the website/mobile apps/api, customer service, marketing, etc. There has to be a lot of waste there.

[rainonmoon]

The way people bring up "X is basically fine" on this site (not you, other comments) drives me insane. It's gone through multiple seriously breaking issues, its valuation has plummeted, and there's no indication that it's solved the bot and misinformation issue Musk was very loud about before purchase (but some indication it's worsened.) Regardless of your political leaning it's hard to imagine the site being a better experience than it was three years ago (unless you were chronically moderated for posting ToS-violating content.) Maybe nobody can speak with certainty yet that the layoffs have contributed to those issues. It's not hard to imagine that some of this carnage could have been avoided by not slicing out everyone with domain knowledge so the new owner could go on some extreme ideological warpath. Yes, the domain resolves to an IP address and renders a page in the browser. If this is the baseline to justify laying everyone off, we've gotta expect more from the web.

[bombcar]

For me, and perhaps a decent number of users, it does what it always did, be links I could look at now and then when linked, and laugh.

I can't do that with Facebook and Instagram anymore as there are logins up the wazoo.

So for my use case (and I'm not a customer or even a user), it's still the same.

[O1111OOO]

> I don't doubt that running eBay is more complex than it appears, but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods. That's an army of people!

It's interesting that I had the opposite reaction. eBay is a _worldwide_, multi-billion dollar institution. They've been around for about 28 years (~1995) - since the start of it all...

I really thought the number of employees would be higher.

I turned to Wikipedia for some numbers (apple to oranges comparison, I know... but I was curious).

   Walmart   : 2,300,000 : Jan 2022
   Amazon    : 1,684,853 : Nov 2023
   Target    :   440,000 : ??? 2023
   Microsoft :   238,000 : ??? 2023
   Alphabet  :   181,798 : Jun 2023
   Best Buy  :    90,000 : Jan 2023
   B&N       :    24,000 : ??? 2019
   eBay      :    11,600 : Dec 2022

(People really have the audacity to compare eBay to Amazon)

I didn't realize that eBay was so small. Now they lost 1k. I haven't visited eBay in eons but a 9% reduction in their workforce from such an already low number is devastating (to me).

Are we looking at the end of eBay? They may have become staid... old in their thinking.

I constantly see Amazon, for example, open up new territories in other areas. They went from eBooks to general ecommerce to servers to hardware to voice AI to home gadgets. There seems to be nothing this company won't consider. They think like a startup.

eBay may be another Xerox (or Mozilla...) unless they can get their management team thinking outside their comfort zone.

[O1111OOO]

Replying to myself. I wanted to include other companies that are somewhat similar to eBay as far as what OP implied. I only looked at companies between 6k - 22k employees.

   Ubisoft   :    20,665 : video games
   Yandex    :    18,004 : search
   Equifax   :    14,000 : credit bureau
   Autodesk  :    13,700 : software
   EA        :    13,400 : video games (electronic arts)
   Netflix   :    12,800 : video streaming
   Shopify   :    11,600 : eCommerce
   eBay      :    11,600 : Dec 2022
   Unity     :     7,703 : video games
   GoDaddy   :     6,910 : domains, websites

It's hard to make sense of these numbers without lots more info but it's interesting - as a first pass - to match number of employees with expectations.

[OJFord]

And it's quite a horror show to use, click around your settings/profile/account type pages in particular and it seems that your thrown through 3+ different apps from different eras.

[kjkjadksj]

If it blows your mind further, about 10 years ago ebay had almost 40000 employees

[malfist]

> but it's just a web site to buy and sell goods

That is a gross oversimplification.

[hallway_monitor]

I think about this a lot as well. The massive value multiplication provided by software allows companies to become insanely bloated. At most companies where I've worked you could do it 20% layoff of the tech staff and not notice it. Lots of dead weight.

[asylteltine]

11,000 people can’t make a database/schema that can store their data such that they stop purging listings! They literally have to purge listings due to their design. It’s so annoying