This is the wildest part. One company that is proving all the "why does <company> need 10000 engineers?" takes true.
At least compare it to companies with similar businesses. I would argue twitch seems closer. I think they had over 1000 employees. You would have a better point with that comparison if you would want to make that argument.
AWS/GCP/Azure manage physical data centers across the globe, and includes hundreds of services/offerings on each platform.
Additionally, critical industries (hospitals, banks, airlines) often rely on these companies to be available/resilient at all times. Thus the need for increased global workforce. OF on the other hand, nobody is going to die if they can’t access the feet pics they bought for a few minutes or days.
You are not comparing the same companies.
…but as others pointed out there I’m sure there is an army of contractors that don’t factor into any headcount figure. Which doesn’t at all subtract from the insane revenue per employee figure.
Generally speaking, <company> needs <number> engineers because it's rational to keep hiring while each incremental engineer generates more value than they cost in salary and overhead, even if some of those engineers are at less than 50% utilisation and have to generate pointless make-work for themselves to get past performance review.
If Company A sells $100M of televisions which they imported for $95M they've made $5M in profit.
If Company B sells $100M of search ads which they served for $1M they've made $99M in profit.
From a revenue perspective they're equal - but $1M invested in Company A produces a 5% return on investment, while the same $1M invested in Company B has a 9900% ROI.
For instance moderation and community management alone must be a huge pool of people. While the content and comments can be adult, they'll need to deal with all the payment related back and forth, including chargebacks, legal inquiries etc. Same for doxxing, underage filtering, spam and so on.
I assume most if not all of it is a different company which isn't counted in the 42 employees.
Of course engineering can be treated the same, with sub-contracting companies dealing with the actual running of the service or part of the developement.
funnily enough out of the 42 employees still there, i assume less than a fourth are actually engineers.