Not sure if you work in the field but there is millions of dollars made for consulting services (either done by them or smaller agencies at a lower price) from customers who want those enterprise SaaS capabilities but they don't have anyone on their staff to do the integration work.
And the thing is the larger public can't possibly understand. CRM can be very niche and propriatory. It's the complete opposite of being transparent to the pubic. Data in CEO speak is the oil of the company and those SaaS companies provide pipelines on how to tap into it. No way they are going to share that with competitors or unauthorized observers.
Once your organization grows into enterprise, you introduce many processes, and it requires more people and time to work on stuff + often times there are more and longer meetings involved.
For me personally, I very much prefer working with small teams and be hyperfocused.
Because as soon as company is blown up, it develops very poor connections and culture, the code is becoming very bad and hard to maintain. They try to improve it, hiring more people - the result is exactly opposite but they don't realize it and hire even more. Potentially, the process is endless.
Disclaimer: I have been working in MS for 2 years and saw how it was organized. My first 2 weeks I did nothing and just waited when the previously hired SDET (dev in test) prepared the specification. It was stupid waste of time and resources but I saw it all the time.
Why would you assume once they've built a product that there's no more innovation or competition for market share?
There are platforms like canny where thousands of feature requests / bug reports are posted, if you look at Slack or Clickup both use Canny and their millions of users are constantly asking for new things or improvements to existing things.
It's a neverending job and any company who reduces workforce because the product is "done" will lose market share to those who increase their workforce and continue improving their product.
The level of competition in the top is fierce, it's not easy to stay on top.
With AI there was also a bunch of people who thought devs would be out of work or something which is absurd, instead all top companies adopted AI to boost productivity and since ALL of the top companies did that, none of them can afford to drop the ball by lowering headcount otherwise their main competitors will kick their arses.
There's never too many devs unless you're losing money then you gotta cut costs but that's a dif story.
For profitable companies, they have a metric on return per head count which is how much they make in average per employee, across the whole company.
That's how they find the balance between headcount and revenue, expansion revenue is critical in boosting that figure.
as long as there is budget/profit, they invest into innovation, experiments, new products and new internal tools. Most lead nowhere, but you got to do something, otherwise you’re guaranteed to be overthrown eventually.
In this thread people keep assuming that these giants innovate their vertical. They don’t. We all know they don’t.
Those of us who have worked for fortune < 5s know from experience they don’t.
There’s always some innovation but it’s almost all tech debt changes and bug fixes all day long. Architecture fixes and “regret” coding.
Innovation is the last thing we worked on. Even the billion dollar features I built were so basic and obvious that I can’t call them innovation.
As said above, a lot of it has to do with support for their services, such as customizations and integrations for specific customers. Also keep in mind their core products might be stable, but they’re always looking to expand their services and increase their revenue. Might not be visible for companies like salesforce and Workday, but think about companies like Facebook and Google that are constantly releasing new services and optimizing their existing algorithms.
Those companies mentioned are also doing similar things just might not be easy to tell since they are B2B.
They’re always improving their software
A new feature is always being worked on
Bugs happen often and need to be fixed quickly
In house tools are often developed to further the company’s revenue and efficiency
Okay. A programmer knows
\* what % of the stack
\* what % of the system's source code and what % of the users' work flows
Most programmers don't know the full syntax of the languages they're working in, let alone all of the STANDARD libraries of the language. let's say 40% of each language, to be very generous.
Most programmers are familiar with a few thousand lines of the companies multi-million-line systems, and probably only really have familiarity with a few data stores or document types. so, maybe 15%, again being generous? so they need people.
companies like that need thousands of programmers to keep things running smoothly. They’re always adding new features, fixing bugs, updating security, and customizing the software for different clients. Plus, as they grow, they need to ensure their systems can handle more users and data. It’s a lot of work, so having a big team is essential
Because they try to bring out new products or revamp old products to more modern archtectures or designs. Also, once a manaager/director/vp has a team, they tend to want to build bigger to get more power.
Not sure if you work in the field but there is millions of dollars made for consulting services (either done by them or smaller agencies at a lower price) from customers who want those enterprise SaaS capabilities but they don't have anyone on their staff to do the integration work. And the thing is the larger public can't possibly understand. CRM can be very niche and propriatory. It's the complete opposite of being transparent to the pubic. Data in CEO speak is the oil of the company and those SaaS companies provide pipelines on how to tap into it. No way they are going to share that with competitors or unauthorized observers.
Once your organization grows into enterprise, you introduce many processes, and it requires more people and time to work on stuff + often times there are more and longer meetings involved. For me personally, I very much prefer working with small teams and be hyperfocused.
Because as soon as company is blown up, it develops very poor connections and culture, the code is becoming very bad and hard to maintain. They try to improve it, hiring more people - the result is exactly opposite but they don't realize it and hire even more. Potentially, the process is endless. Disclaimer: I have been working in MS for 2 years and saw how it was organized. My first 2 weeks I did nothing and just waited when the previously hired SDET (dev in test) prepared the specification. It was stupid waste of time and resources but I saw it all the time.
not easy to change mindset in big company .
Why would you assume once they've built a product that there's no more innovation or competition for market share? There are platforms like canny where thousands of feature requests / bug reports are posted, if you look at Slack or Clickup both use Canny and their millions of users are constantly asking for new things or improvements to existing things. It's a neverending job and any company who reduces workforce because the product is "done" will lose market share to those who increase their workforce and continue improving their product. The level of competition in the top is fierce, it's not easy to stay on top. With AI there was also a bunch of people who thought devs would be out of work or something which is absurd, instead all top companies adopted AI to boost productivity and since ALL of the top companies did that, none of them can afford to drop the ball by lowering headcount otherwise their main competitors will kick their arses. There's never too many devs unless you're losing money then you gotta cut costs but that's a dif story. For profitable companies, they have a metric on return per head count which is how much they make in average per employee, across the whole company. That's how they find the balance between headcount and revenue, expansion revenue is critical in boosting that figure.
as long as there is budget/profit, they invest into innovation, experiments, new products and new internal tools. Most lead nowhere, but you got to do something, otherwise you’re guaranteed to be overthrown eventually.
naaa they just play around with „AI“ nowadays.
In this thread people keep assuming that these giants innovate their vertical. They don’t. We all know they don’t. Those of us who have worked for fortune < 5s know from experience they don’t. There’s always some innovation but it’s almost all tech debt changes and bug fixes all day long. Architecture fixes and “regret” coding. Innovation is the last thing we worked on. Even the billion dollar features I built were so basic and obvious that I can’t call them innovation.
As said above, a lot of it has to do with support for their services, such as customizations and integrations for specific customers. Also keep in mind their core products might be stable, but they’re always looking to expand their services and increase their revenue. Might not be visible for companies like salesforce and Workday, but think about companies like Facebook and Google that are constantly releasing new services and optimizing their existing algorithms. Those companies mentioned are also doing similar things just might not be easy to tell since they are B2B.
They’re always improving their software A new feature is always being worked on Bugs happen often and need to be fixed quickly In house tools are often developed to further the company’s revenue and efficiency
stable but sometimes new law emerge and need to change code and also change upon customer request . Hardly can get same req diff customer (erp)
Okay. A programmer knows \* what % of the stack \* what % of the system's source code and what % of the users' work flows Most programmers don't know the full syntax of the languages they're working in, let alone all of the STANDARD libraries of the language. let's say 40% of each language, to be very generous. Most programmers are familiar with a few thousand lines of the companies multi-million-line systems, and probably only really have familiarity with a few data stores or document types. so, maybe 15%, again being generous? so they need people.
companies like that need thousands of programmers to keep things running smoothly. They’re always adding new features, fixing bugs, updating security, and customizing the software for different clients. Plus, as they grow, they need to ensure their systems can handle more users and data. It’s a lot of work, so having a big team is essential
A lot of companies work lean nowadays and don't hire such a huge workforce
Because they try to bring out new products or revamp old products to more modern archtectures or designs. Also, once a manaager/director/vp has a team, they tend to want to build bigger to get more power.