
Ask HN: What are they doing there? - gbear605
According to LinkedIn, Shazam has around 400 employees! [1] Why does an app like that need that many employees? What do they do all day?<p>Or some other tech companies: MongoDB had 820 employees as of July 31st [2]. StitchFix had 5,800 employees as of July 31st [3]. Facebook had 17,048 employees as of December, 2016 [4]. Oracle has 136,000 employees [5]!<p>And many other tech companies are like that. For many of them (although of course not all), their product could be built by a small team in a matter of months. Even counting for things like scaling to larger user counts, having 10 or 100 times the number of employees hardly makes sense to me.<p>Meanwhile, SpaceX, which is making rockets to send people to Mars, has only around 5,500 employees [6]. It&#x27;s hard to see that rocket engineering is simpler than a clothing app.<p>So what are all of those employees working on all day?<p>[1] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15900109
[2] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;1441816&#x2F;000104746917006014&#x2F;a2233365zs-1.htm
[3] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;1576942&#x2F;000119312517313629&#x2F;d400510ds1.htm
[4] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;273563&#x2F;number-of-facebook-employees&#x2F;
[5] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.macroaxis.com&#x2F;invest&#x2F;ratio&#x2F;ORCL--Number_of_Employees
[6] https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;company&#x2F;spacex&#x2F;
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brunoborges
Big companies play in many markets (read: countries). Just to deal with
financing, taxes, regulations, legal, and everything you can imagine that is
related to "doing business", not even considering resources to deal with
Marketing/Sales/Support, and definitely not to "building products"
(engineering), it can take hundreds of employees. To make things more
interesting, the bigger the portfolio of a company, even higher is the number
of employees.

Regarding the cost of "doing business", consider this:
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.TAX.DURS?year_high_d...](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.TAX.DURS?year_high_desc=false)

And here's a story about it:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/joeharpaz/2013/12/17/brazil-
ran...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/joeharpaz/2013/12/17/brazil-ranked-most-
time-consuming-tax-regime-in-the-world/#18b3b3694c2d)

TL;DR on both links above: in Brazil, a company may spend as well as 2,600
hours a year to comply with taxes.

Now imagine a company with hundreds, if not thousands of contracts, customers,
multiple invoices, and so on. Even if they outsourced this, it'd still require
a lot of employees, distributed worldwide in every market/country that company
wants to do business in to deal with local regulations.

Oracle has over 136,000 employees, but also has offices in almost every
country - definitely in every continent. Based on the latest Fact Sheet [1],
here's an idea:

More than 138,000 employees, including: \- - 40,000 developers and engineers
\- - 16,000 support and services specialists, who speak 29 languages \- -
19,000 implementation consultants

[1] [http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-
sheet-079219....](http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/oracle-fact-
sheet-079219.pdf)

 __disclaimer: I work for Oracle.

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foobarbazetc
[https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/](https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/)

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SirLJ
It’s the VC money at work for you...

