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How are the 3800 engineers divided up at a company like this? I know it's easy to say "why on earth are there 3800 devs, what are they doing all day?" but that does seem like a substantial amount.

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Join a large company and inspect the engineering org structure, and you will have the answer. Or ask someone that works at one :)

Not every large company.

Yes I wonder the same thing - I think about Apple and how many engineers they have which also seems crazy for their "output" in terms of product variations. Uber is on a whole nother level, at least from the perspective of the average consumer.

Not everybody works on customer facing products. Apple has a ton of software to manage their supply chain and other logistical things, which requires a lot of engineering effort. That’s what happen when you try to control every part of your product development.

That engineering work is largely contracted out through IS&T. Apple’s product engineering org is famously lean.

Apple builds a lot of pretty complicated desktop software, cloud infrastructure, two popular programming languages and tooling for them, and even their own operating system, and their own hardware.

I don't think it can truly be compared to a company built around a single app. Even if that app is very popular.

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