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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

> I also distinctly remember learning that Google had 100K+ employees. To me, that is moving into "big bank" size territory and it's clearly impossible for EVERYONE who is former Google to be amazing.

Ive worked at 3 places, sizes: <10, ~10k, and ~20k.

I cant even imagine 100k. 100k for Toyota or Walmart, sure, that makes sense. But at tens of thousands of engineers you must have a lot of people not doing anything. Even at 20k, so maybe 5k engineers you only have so many people pushing on new stuff. Most are doing maintenance on crud and batch apps and keeping up with whatever "initiatives" are being pushed while attending meetings.

Most impressive to me imo are the instagram type companies that have 20 employees when they are sold/ipo or whatever.

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When I was an industry analyst and had more exposure to large companies at fairly high levels, the thing that impressed me was that they were able to function at all. So many layers of management, so many moving parts, so much coordination needed.

It also wan't unusual for me to be consulting with some group and some topic would come up and we'd be--you do know that so and so at your company is working on this, right? And they usually wouldn't.

I worked for a company with over 200,000 employees and honestly it feels like working at a small company that is at war with 1000 other small companies and four times a year we get together to re-sign cease fire agreements. Except for the endless amount of corporate bullshit it feels like a much smaller company than you'd think.

I did places with 300k, 8k, 1k and 150 (industrial companies).

Believe it or not, but the places I slacked the least was (obviously) the 150 employee company and the 300k! It was really well organised, you had no time to spare.

I'm now in the 8k place, and it's crazy the amount of people doing nothing.

100K+ employees doesn't necessarily mean they're all engineers, even at Google. Many of them are probably either engineer-adjacent (meaning they work with engineers but don't code themselves) or are scientists of another sort (not coders).

> at tens of thousands of engineers you must have a lot of people not doing anything

Although the org sizes may be large, the smaller subgroups within run like smaller semi-independent companies. They have their own business targets, roadmaps and backlogs just like any start up or mid-sized company. Some of the most productive times I have had have been at >100k companies.

Walmart has like 2 million+ employees, which is insane to think about. I have worked at a few ultra huge corps, one which had about 140k people, and like 240k devices in their org.

When I changed jobs there in 2007, I had just come from a hosting provider where we had engineers that managed 500-1000 servers per person, depending on their role or the amount of automation. It was like I stepped back in time to 1999 and everything was manually managed/maintained.

ROFL (we had well over 100K other engineers at DEC when I worked there and connected via a pre-Internet system called EasyNet and were managed in a matrix)

We plumped up to over 350,000 after the Compaq, HP, EDS mergers. When the HP and the DEC engineers got together it was like a 1960's love in and then...Czarly.

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