> All of the above took roughly the same headcount LinkedIn now has. The technology team writing and running all that custom software was maybe 200-300 people.
> So even after I hear all the reasons LinkedIn has to be so huge (sales, support, scale, etc), I'm still left scratching my head.
The reason for your head-scratching is unclear. Your previous company had about the same headcount as LinkedIn.
LinkedIn, being an international company even before Microsoft’s acquisition, probably has a similar level of necessary personnel, including internal and external software development teams.
I don’t see the reason for your confusion from what you’ve written. Perhaps explicitly stating a point of difference between your previous company and LinkedIn would clarify?
My apologies, you are correct. I took some things for granted in terms of why I made the comparison, and on further reflection it probably isn't a fair comparison.
For example, I took it for granted that when I said there were 1500 retail locations that readers would realize that meant probably close to 10,000 out of the 13,000 were just dedicated to running those retail locations (that's going by back of the envelope math, as well as hazy memories of actual numbers).
Add to that probably another 1000 for the warehouses and associated logistics, and you're looking at a pool of maybe 2000 actual knowledge workers split among all of the functions listed above (sales, marketing, support, legal, real estate, merchandising, development, IT, etc, etc).
I also made perhaps an invalid assumption that the software being written to manage and optimize the: 1) design of a product 2) sending it off to China for manufacture 3) shipping it back to the states 4) storing it in a warehouse 5) letting it be found, ordered and paid for online by anyone in the world 6) and finally shipped to the end consumer.... is all somehow more complicated than the development being done by LinkedIn, and being done by only a couple hundred dev and infrastructure people.
In my mind, that felt like evidence LinkedIn might be bloated. But as others have pointed out, I'm sure there are dev challenges I'm taking for granted. And of course you need a healthy headcount to deal with the legal, support and sales operations of a company with the international footprint of LinkedIn.
> So even after I hear all the reasons LinkedIn has to be so huge (sales, support, scale, etc), I'm still left scratching my head.
The reason for your head-scratching is unclear. Your previous company had about the same headcount as LinkedIn.
LinkedIn, being an international company even before Microsoft’s acquisition, probably has a similar level of necessary personnel, including internal and external software development teams.
I don’t see the reason for your confusion from what you’ve written. Perhaps explicitly stating a point of difference between your previous company and LinkedIn would clarify?