When they said Reddit has 2000 employees I was shocked. what could they possibly do onto a website that is basically run by users (and sysadmins) and that is basically feature-wise mature? I really can’t figure out 2000 people working every day on Reddit… on what? just for a quick comparison, the whole IAmA was run by a single person (Victoria), so… what are they doing?
My take at all that mess would probably be blaming upper management for not trusting anybody, so layers of redundancy piled up to 2000. & on the other hand there are individuals (sometimes one-man stand + community input) creating outstanding apps.
My very much hardware company has problems like this. Sometimes we can’t deal with a customer direct we have to go thru another company. When that happens there is an entire layer of people insisting that we are doing everything wrong. Forcing us to produce mountains of paperwork and revisions.