this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
490 points (97.1% liked)

Technology

59207 readers
3158 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 58 points 11 months ago (5 children)

How do they have this many employees and an absolutely trash android app?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (5 children)

A lot of these “auto-pilot” apps have thousands of people employed, I don’t get it. Like, what is there to work on once you have things working pretty well? If anything they just start ruining the product over time…

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Tbh most employees at a company this size become risk mitigation more than anything else. Once you've reached a certain level of success, you're looking at what doesn't move the needle as much as what makes it move positively. There could be a feature that is a major QoL improvement, but because in a test segment it performed 1% worse than base then it won't be implemented.

Spotify, I believe, still works in the tribe and guild model that they created.

Chapter = people with the same skill set, squad = a group of people from different chapters focused on a single project, tribe = a group of squads focused on a large business goal, guild = a collective of folks who have a shared interest like Data Privacy.

Suffice to say, Agile is an imperfect tool and as you try to scale it, you need an increasing number of people to support it and make it run. Coders and Designers are likely just a fraction of their head count.

I've worked places that don't have that support structure in place and they've stagnated for years struggling to get the most basic of decisions made. Decisions is what it is about too. Rarely do you get actual leadership from the c-level and especially from a CEO. So you end up with a lot of cooks trying to work out why the broth doesn't taste quite right and lacking confidence to just add a bit of salt.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Probably data-analysis/AI type stuff to track users and advertise "better," making the backend more efficient to reduce costs, and adding support for new hardware. A lot of big, very profitable companies also have skunkworks-like projects for exploring new ideas and prototypes, most of which never make it into production.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

In my experience it's always new apps that ruin the existing experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well, they have to make new, broken terrible features and then come fix them when people complain by basically putting it back to how it was.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Haha still, does that really require 9,000 people to do? Surely you can half-ass some new features with like a few hundred people?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

To be fair, even Apple Music and Tidal are trash on Android. And Apple is a $3 trillion company with over 150k employees.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's both amazing and annoying that Google is perfectly able to create useful apps for iOS (despite the huge limitations the OS imposes) but Apple can't figure out how to make any Android app that isn't utter crap with fewer restrictions imposed on them.

@d3Xt3r
@hesusingthespiritbomb

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Don't negotiate with or give in to terrorists!

@ohlaph

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I blamed my Subaru for a lot of my issues then i switched apps and amazingly every single issue went away.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

My guess is for every 1 developer there's 10 or more non technical administrative jobs. Most tech companies are grossly fat worth useless non productive employees that do very menial bureaucratic work. Think Office Space, but less neck ties.