Yeah 80 engineers and millions of dollars in budget? Pathetic. I’m an iOS developer by trade and if you’d asked me to draw up a project proposal for the official Reddit app, I probably would have told you I needed 3-5 engineers. But 80, that’s just unreal.

Yeah, I work at a big international tech company myself and sometimes get surprised by the amount of people we have working on our app.

My guess would be that it has to do with

1. More features (I think the Apollo developer mentioned how some features aren’t available through the API?)
2. More insights (I would guess that the official Reddit app contains way more code to track and quantity the user)
3. On-call. I assume the 3PA won’t get paged in the middle of the night if there’s a critical bug in their code.
4. Experiments. Wouldn’t surprise me if the official Reddit app is using experiments (I.e. A/B testing) to try new features or changes in UI
5. New features. The Apollo developer is the one who has to adapt. API changes, new features are (maybe?) added while I assume in house app developers work together with the rest of the company to bring those features.

Etc.

None of these points explain why they’d need 80x more developers of course. It’s also just because reddit is a big company and the bigger you get, the more time you spend in meetings, writing documents, etc. and then you hire more developers to increase the velocity and then you end up with a slow machine.

Maybe reddit does that thing that Apple does where they have multiple siloed teams work on the same or similar things and just use the one that comes up with the best solution. So they have 80 independent devs each working on their own app and the current app is the least shitty out of all of them. Either that or they have like 50 shitty apps, 20 decent apps, 9 brilliant apps, and the one that they went with which was done by spez’s nephew who took a coding bootcamp one summer and is really good at mobile dev.

Not all of those employees would be engineers, and out of those engineers, many would be backend engineers improving the speed and ranking algorithms. Apollo would also be taking advantage of that work.

Of the iOS engineers, many would probably have been working on priorities that generate money for the company, but we all hated. Apollo had a great model where he just had to make the users happy enough to give him subscription fees.

I hate the decisions the Reddit leads have been making, but I guarantee that the employees have been putting in plenty of effort. It’s the company’s priorities that are misaligned with what the users want.

It’s made bad on purpose because you aren’t the customer, you’re the product