When they said Reddit has 2000 employees I was shocked. what could they possibly do onto a website that is basically run by users (and sysadmins) and that is basically feature-wise mature? I really can’t figure out 2000 people working every day on Reddit… on what? just for a quick comparison, the whole IAmA was run by a single person (Victoria), so… what are they doing?
I believe another part of it is that companies that get venture capital money are also encouraged to hire more employees, because VC’s care about growth.
If you are a company relying on the support of venture capital and you aren’t hiring people to grow the fastest, then the VC might decide to just fund your competitor instead.
I think this is indeed the main factor. Reddit needed to grow. Money was cheap. So what’s the first thing you do? You hire more people. Only then you figure out what they need to do, and all of those people will have their own ideas on what to do, regardless of whether it helps the bottom line. And so you get new shiny features such as chat, livestreams, NFTs and other stuff nobody cares about, which all take a lot of manpower to build and maintain. Now the problem is that communication gets harder the more people you add. These people now need a lot of meetings to stay in sync, or to figure out what to do next, or perhaps just to appear busy, which results in work not being done or progressing really slowly. So what do you do? Hire more people, as long as the money lasts of course. This cycle continues for a few years, and suddenly you have 2000 employees.