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According to this article[0], product and engineering was ~150 people at the end of 2021 and they hope to scale to 400. Which...seems like a lot for what the company is? Although the hiring landscape has changed drastically in the last month so who knows how accurate that plan is today.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/21/patreon-cpo-interview-doub...

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Yes that's absolutely a lot considering the code to solve Patreon's business problem has been written long ago and works just as well. The core business problem can be boiled down to a set of spreadsheets - based on payments going in and creators subscription timeframes you work out the payout for each creator. If it takes you 150 engineers to do the aforementioned I'd look at you in a funny way or start suspecting ulterior motives (and in this case there indeed are ulterior motives - hint: the objective is not to build a profitable product).

Craigslist had 50 employees in 2017. But a lot of companies like to go down the microservices / complicated architecture path which adds to the dev ops burden.

"Hackernews member could do the same thing with only 5 people"

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