
Ask HN: How JetBrains with just 500 employees can do this all? - edpichler
I got impressed after read that this company has just 500 employees https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;JetBrains<p>How they handle all these complex products? Do they have an army of contractors?<p>JetBrains Products: AppCode, CLion, DataGrip, Hub, IntelliJ IDEA, Kotlin, MPS, PhpStorm, PyCharm, Gogland, ReSharper, Ultimate, Rider, RubyMine, TeamCity, Toolbox App, Upsource, WebStorm and YouTrack.
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peoplewindow
Very experienced and skilled devs. Plus they build everything on the Java
platform and always have, so they get a big productivity boost over many
companies that use less effective tools.

Also, not VC backed. A 'real' company, that actually makes money because
people buy their products. Our expectations of how many developers are needed
for things is inflated by the prevalence of unprofitable venture backed firms
that over hire.

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Justsignedup
They built Kotlin because writing pure java was being too inefficient for them
and had too many null pointer exceptions. They build language parsers, why not
build a language :P

They are also based in Russia so their costs are a bit lower probably.

Also as peoplewindow mentioned they grow based on need, so we know they didn't
hire 200 developers just because.

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marmaduke
Prague actually. I've heard informatics is pretty strong there so unsurprising
that such a strong PL company is also in Prague.

[https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/](https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/)

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peoplewindow
JetBrains was and largely still is a Russian company. The Kotlin developers
are all based in St Petersburg for example.

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rl3
I love JetBrains, but that number isn't that impressive. If you were to assume
only half of that 500 were actual developers, that's still 13 developers per
each product you listed. All of their products tend to use the same core
technology as well.

Consider that Todd Howard's team that built Skyrim consisted of roughly 100
people.

Epic Games employed 250 people as of 2016. Most of those are not developers.
Yet, their Unreal Engine 4 changelogs are mind blowing:

[https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Support/Builds/inde...](https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Support/Builds/index.html)

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traviswingo
How many people do you think it takes to make a single product? From what you
listed, they average 26 employees per product. The products aren't released at
the same time. Most of their products are the same, with minor differences
depending on the language they're supporting. IMO they have too many
employees...

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edpichler
Just to maintain, evolve, support and do release testing of only one product:
Intellij IDEA, checking the thousand of details and flows, between frameworks
and platforms it runs, to me, it seems a good amount of work. And a company
have more departments than Software Development: Finance, Administration, RH,
Marketing, etc.

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smacktoward
But a lot (the majority even, maybe?) of JetBrains' products are just IDEA
plus some extra language-specific tooling. So presumably they have a
relatively large number of people hacking on the core of the whole product
line, IDEA, and then just a small number of people to add whatever language-
specific polish each IDEA-based product requires.

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quantummkv
All of their complex products are actually plugins on top of a single base
called the intellij Platform(which is open source). Any changes they make to
it automatically percolate to all their products. This allows them to keep
small teams for every product that focus only on the specific language plugin.

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Zekio
Most of the Products are basically IntelliJ IDEA with only features pointed at
a specific language, so you have a smaller install really

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notdang
Still a company like Soundcloud had 420 employees before layoffs. Spotify:
more than 1600

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xiaoma
Look at how much more Microsoft did before reaching 500 employees. They wrote
not only compilers and languages, but also games and productivity apps for
poorly documented platforms and even OSes.

Jetbrains is doing well for themselves, but it's far from unprecedented.

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dasmoth
The linked Wiki page now says 700 (looks like it was updated fairly shortly
after this was posted).

I'm curious how this breaks down between developers, customer support,
marketing, and admin. My guess is that developers might be a fairly small
fraction of he 700...

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dsacco
That's about the amount of employees I'd expect, actually. You might be
surprised at how many products or engineering initiatives can be accomplished
by an efficient 300-500 person team.

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edpichler
Update: they ended 2016 with 650 employees:
[https://www.jetbrains.com/annualreport/2016/](https://www.jetbrains.com/annualreport/2016/)

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LoSboccacc
"Just"

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netspider
Hi they all based on intellij ide platform

