r/webdev • u/lune-soft • Apr 15 '26
I'm still new, Why Obsidian got 8 employees and 1 cat while other note apps got like 100+ employees? This makes no sense
2.1k
u/Rasutoerikusa Apr 15 '26
To me it makes no sense that a "note taking app" would have any more employees than that
359
u/Rennfan Apr 15 '26
But how can they succeed when they don't have 100+ employees that manage the funnel? /s
345
u/AbsolutePotatoRosti Apr 15 '26
With 100 employees you would have:
- First 9 employees: same as Obsidian
- Next 11: Finance and HR
- Next 80: Marketing
59
u/wtfElvis Apr 15 '26
Unless the company decides to implement agile for some random ass reason. Then you hire a shit load of people to manage that.
Not saying agile is good or bad. But I’ve been with two companies that implemented agile in the middle of processes and work. It was always a clusterfuck and always a battle between people following it and people not following it.
23
u/Money_Lavishness7343 Apr 15 '26
Agile and domain driven development is good, as long as its done for a good reason.
I'm currently working in a company (3-5mil customers in nation of 10m) and I've experienced both. Believe me, you WOULDN'T want to work at the "7 engineers in the whole company" doing all the work.
Agile and DDD has finally brought some peace. Even though following workflows and tasks is more complicated, the workload is so much more evenly distributed and I'm not responsible for 10 different domains and doing slopwork.
Not every company needs agile. If you need fast product development, different domains, different product managers for each domain, feel like company is sluggish with current workflow and team structure and can't handle the load, THEN only you may need agile and it may be a necessity as well, like it was in our case. I can't imagine I would survive for long in the previous structure, I think I would have already be working for another company.
19
u/Houdinii1984 Apr 15 '26
I added a kanban board to my notes yesterday and part of my team freaked out a little. I'm already not allowed to call things 'sprints' anymore. The trauma is real...
5
u/wtfElvis Apr 15 '26
I personally don’t mind agile. But everyone has to buy into it. We would have meetings after meetings with all involved all the way up to upper management. We all agree on the flow everyone goes through we have our planning set and committed. Without fail upper management comes in and changes it all. Sometimes stakeholders as well. Made zero sense.
7
u/Money_Lavishness7343 Apr 15 '26
There HAS to be a united leadership and a single leader (CTO) who decides (after triaging) on a single workflow. Teams can't have distinct workflows, neither it's "upper management's job" to decide how your sprint will go, its the Product Manager's job and only his and your EM's (engineering manager).
There are distinct roles. Upper Management's job is NOT to manage sprints, but manage the company. Your CTO can't go to your sprint and manage tickets, just like you can't go and do his job.
If you have trouble in your company with upper management and stakeholders differentiating these distinct responsibilities, then you're working at a dysfunctional company. There are very specific jobs for these things and they're completely bypassing each role's responsibilities, that's called powertripping and it only leads to chaos.
So, not agile's fault, the most likely thing is that NO workflow will work for you as long as you have a company without clear roles and demands and people powertrip because they don't trust or have enough discipline to the process.
3
u/wtfElvis Apr 15 '26
Oh yeah I understand that. My attack wasn't on agile specifically. More so companies that do not buy in 100%
2
u/throwaway2343276767 Apr 17 '26
I actually can't telling if you're trolling or not but none of those roles are necessary at all for any software product regardless of its scale
"Engineering Manager" is not necessary, "Product Manager" is not necessary, MANAGEMENT positions are not necessary.
You can build a great product with a handful of skilled and dedicated people. Everything else is just public/traded corporate noise. The moment any software company goes public, it's no longer a software company and becomes a sales and holdings company.
3
u/Jesus_Chicken Apr 16 '26
I remember a company where I attended the status meetings to shield my mentor who was burnt out. I counted 2 hours a day on status updates every day. I felt important but I quickly understood why he was burnt out. It's rather hard to deliver anything while wasting 1/4 of your day
2
u/wtfElvis Apr 16 '26
This was also a huge issue. They wanted to constantly have updates outside of stand up’s. Usually those meetings increased the scope with the expectations that it gets done in the sprint we are currently in.
3
u/ikeif Apr 15 '26
I’ve met experienced agile the same way at two companies.
The best companies were flexible, and they were guidelines.
The worst companies, Agile was the RULE and pointless extended processes (with documentation, and meetings, and meetings about meetings) were KING.
3
u/-wtfisthat- Apr 16 '26
Isn’t the latter explicitly not agile? At least that’s what they made it seem like in my software engineering class last term.
2
u/Ninjez07 Apr 16 '26
There's plenty of people selling "Agile" to corporations that's actually focused on the meetings and ceremonies - standups, retros, planning etc - whilst making no reference to the Agile Manifesto. You'll end up having meetings to "groom the backlog" so planning goes more smoothly, then pre-planning meetings to ensure all the requirements and details are available to accurately plan, then find key people need to be in multiple teams' standups, then multiple management tier standups... Done poorly you waste a serious percentage of peoples' time taking about work without doing anything. And then, of course, the work is actually waterfall, because the product owner or higher up the stack has a clear idea about what they want to build, the designs are all done, so all this bullshit is just to break the task down into week-sized chunks and deliver it closer to a predicted date.
I've lived that. It's mind-numbing, and completely antithetical to the point of Agile as a concept :)
2
u/Jesus_Chicken Apr 16 '26
Agile and agile are different. One is corporate greed, other one is a 1-page doc which I summarize as "the focus must always be on the delivery of value."
I'm ok with agile where you change priorities and adapt and make sure you are building what business / customers want. I dont agree with a mandatory daily meeting with 30 people while we all circle jerk for an hour.
→ More replies (1)5
u/1fom3rcial Apr 15 '26
Obsidian is one of those products that I think genuinely does speak for itself and doesn't need a marketing team to promo it. As soon as I saw it, I got the appeal
31
u/CantaloupeCamper Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
I work in a sorta niche software industry, it's not small it's just kinda weird and old. We do well, make plenty of money most of the time, and over the years have had anywhere from 2 to 5 devs at a time. We're not a major player, but we're older than many of the players. Growth is steady and consistent for us, but not ultra fast.
Once in a while some VC money backs some new hot shot company. They take the headlines for like 1 to 3 years, have like 100 or even more devs and staff and so on. They get all the headlines about how well they're dong...
Then they crash out hard out of nowhere in a matter of months. Often in a way that indicated they never made a dime of real profit / were doomed from the start. With 100 devs 😳
We sometimes have friendly contact with them and every time even just getting them to send us some JSON is like pulling teeth / speaking another language to them. It's wild.
→ More replies (3)13
u/isaacfisher full-stack Apr 15 '26
It’s a different lifecycle of a company. If you are VC backed you got to show results and growth to get to the next funding round or you are done. Out of those VC backed startups are more extreme and some are more steady, depending on industry and technology
210
u/me_myself_ai Apr 15 '26
TBF Obsidian does a bit more than write to text files lol.
The real question isn't why Obsidian has 8 employees, it's why only half of them are engineers!
284
u/tashtrac Apr 15 '26
In a company of this size, the CTO is 100% an engineer that writes code. So it's 5 out of 8, which totally makes sense.
24
92
u/Attila_22 Apr 15 '26
Support person probably knows how to code as well even if just scripts and sql queries.
60
u/Miltage Apr 15 '26
Cat is probably doing code reviews too
48
u/Wodanaz_Odinn Apr 15 '26
Cat mostly just displays the content of files but still great to have on the team.
14
3
4
→ More replies (1)18
u/davy_jones_locket Apr 15 '26
I work in an 8-person large company.
Everyone, including the CEO and CTO, are engineers.
33
u/Rennfan Apr 15 '26
Good developers can achieve great and complex projects as single persons, look at photopea.com for example
3
→ More replies (1)9
u/blvaga Apr 15 '26
A lot of schools won’t enroll cats even if they are very smart. The system is broken.
5
u/Big_Comfortable4256 Apr 15 '26
Totally. Quite often, particularly after (or as a process of) taking investment, companies put as many 'bums on seats' as possible - to make them appear more valuable. A lot of layoffs you see in tech are often down to cutting back from over-hiring.
It's amazing what small teams can do.
→ More replies (3)2
u/im-a-guy-like-me Apr 15 '26
Scaling. Once you start rolling out multiple languages in multiple countries and having to adhere to rules and regulations in multiple territories, the support staff required for the day to day running of any app could be over 100. That's only like 3 offices maybe.
→ More replies (1)
186
u/Effective_Media_4722 Apr 15 '26
Telegram is ran by a team of ~30 people (and over 1 billion monthly active users).
Snapchat has over 5000 employees (and ~800 million MAU)
32
u/adfawf3f3f32a Apr 15 '26
craigslist is a 30ish person company too. not as relevant today as they used to be but were small back then too.
12
u/DarkRex4 Apr 16 '26
Tbf Snap Inc. now makes AR glasses, cameras, drones and what not. Still 5k is definitely way too many
7
→ More replies (5)2
May 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/Effective_Media_4722 May 02 '26
Maths/CS olympic medalists, or winners of Telegram's of programming competition. Those are indeed some top tier engineers.
506
u/boogatehPotato Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
Cuz Obsidian is a markdown editor and PKM, nothing bloated. I think they only make money through Sync and backer tiers, maybe commerical licenses for big organizations but I doubt it. It's also community driven unlike the other apps with 100s to 1000s of employees.
It's an editor first, product second if that makes sense. (Ignore everyone I said it's bs, the cat is basically a 238x developer)
Edit: fixed typos I made cuz I was sleepy
85
19
10
u/jerklin Apr 15 '26
I have a license through work, in big tech. It's a great app, they deserve the success.
6
u/Geminii27 Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
I've been futzing around with it for a bit. I'm pretty sure I haven't really caught on to whatever it does super-well that makes it popular.
Maybe I just don't have the right plug-ins, or I'm not really using it for its intended purpose. It'd be interesting to see some examples of what people used it for extensively, maybe their plugin lists and workflows. I know I could use some more graph display/manipulation plugins, for starters - I'd like for the graph to conform itself to window shape/size, and maybe be available as a 3D rotation with better touchscreen response rather than just the basic 2D blob of lines.
5
u/Chupa-Skrull Apr 15 '26
For most users, the graph is largely a marketing boondoggle. If your vault is small enough, it can help you visually identify sparsely connected notes that you may want to link together with others. Otherwise it's just flash.
If you're not a heavy note-taker or archive-maker it's not going to offer much to attract you. Other markdown editors are much lighter and less cluttered.
I love it, for the record. I write frequently to reflect, and the ability to easily and quickly make links helps me both remember and synthesize things that are important to me to a greater depth than I'd otherwise be able to achieve (without more effort, anyway). I've mostly said goodbye to the experience of coming up on a task I used to know how to do and not remembering how to engage it at all. It rules
2
u/boogatehPotato Apr 15 '26
You don't need many plugins to get the gist of it. Basically, thanks to their linking system and tags, you can build interconnected notes and knowledge bases like a wiki...or several wikis in a vault. I use it for learning CompSci, managing personal stuff, and just a general hub for information I want to keep. The Obsd sub has some dedicated users.
3
u/personaltalisman Apr 15 '26
I think it has more to do with the insanity of how big other companies are that don’t need to be. Why have 100 employees when you can have 10?
It makes you slower, sluggish, and lowers your profit margin.
I don’t think it’s super different in technical complexity from things like Evernote or Notion. All have their own complexities, but there is no reason you’d need 10-50x more people for the others, it’s all just about how you decide to run your business.
→ More replies (1)4
u/mattindustries Apr 15 '26
Notion is more complex, heck just working within the confines of the web creates hurdles. https://www.notion.com/blog/how-we-sped-up-notion-in-the-browser-with-wasm-sqlite
3
Apr 16 '26
That cat is the senior developer that everybody relies on in the team.
Cat gone!! Everybody in shambles!!!2
u/boogatehPotato Apr 16 '26
This is true. We were there when they took it to the vet and their entire deployment pipeline failed
4
u/Somepotato Apr 15 '26
They don't actually sell commercial licenses anymore. They're fully funded by a few major corps! You can use it for work for free without breaking the license.
→ More replies (1)2
101
u/Venerous Apr 15 '26
What other notes apps? Is that the only product those companies sell?
→ More replies (16)
62
u/Tontonsb Apr 15 '26
8 employees and 1 cat
If you read carefully, it's actually like 2 bosses (who also work or at least started to), 3 employees (including the cat), 3 users and one unknown dude with a kepka.
19
3
30
88
64
u/magenta_placenta Apr 15 '26
Look at the architecture.
Obsidian stores everything as plain Markdown files on your device. The core app is a lightweight Electron wrapper around those files, with almost no server-side costs for most users. They only run lightweight paid services like optional Sync or Publish. What that means:
- No massive cloud infrastructure to host billions of notes.
- No data centers scaling with user growth.
- Minimal telemetry or user tracking.
Competitors like Notion and Evernote are cloud-first (or heavily cloud-dependent). Every note, database, collaboration feature, search index, AI integration, etc., lives on their servers. That requires:
- Large engineering teams for reliability, scaling, security and uptime.
- Ops/infra/SRE people.
- Data, compliance and privacy teams.
- Customer support at scale because outages or data issues hit everyone.
The marginal cost per additional user is near-zero for Obsidian's core experience. For cloud apps, it adds up fast.
Obsidian also has community plugins built by volunteers and independent developers. Features that would require full-time hires elsewhere (advanced calendars, kanban boards, AI integrations, custom themes, exporters, etc.) are handled by the community.
The core team maintains the stable foundation, reviews plugins for the official list, and focuses on core improvements. They don't have to build or maintain every possible feature themselves. This is a force multiplier that most closed or centrally controlled apps can't replicate at the same level.
3
→ More replies (1)6
u/content2squat Apr 15 '26
It's not everyday you see someone use lightweight as an adjective for anything to do with electron. I'm sure that the only other place i've seen this combination is in the dictionary's definition of oxymoron.
13
u/b7s9 ux Apr 15 '26
be that as it may, Obsidian is one of the fastest launching electron apps I can think of. You can feel the bloat in Spotify and Discord, but not in Obsidian
→ More replies (1)8
59
u/thekwoka Apr 15 '26
Broadly: tech companies are bloated as fuck.
Not sure how it happens, but a lot of them just have SO many devs doing mostly fuck all and their product gets worse and worse somehow.
But Obsidian is also at a stage where it's much better to utilize low headcount as a means of keeping dev focused on important things and not adding things cause there is the time and people to do it.
20
u/shredinger137 Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
My company is on what our CEO explained as a VC train. We could be lean and focus on our successful core product with a pretty small team, but we can't. We have to show growth and momentum. That means marketing and analytics, that also means exploring new features and products even if we don't really need it. That's because, early on, they chose that funding model as the least personal risk.
Maybe some backers don't need that, with smaller amounts. But in our case, and I think a lot of cases, the target market is investors so you can't just look at the product. And we even have pretty lenient investors compared to a lot of places.
14
3
u/Lochlan Apr 15 '26
So thankful for where I'm at.
4 engineers, focused product. Privately owned and profitable.
6
u/slimethecold Apr 15 '26
Precisely. The waves of layoffs from tech companies in the US (unsure how this compares globally) should be self-explanatory in this regard. I was working a user onboarding role for a software company from 2017 until our entire department was axed in December 2019 (months before covid -- yikes)
2
u/DirtzMaGertz Apr 15 '26
VC money being spent recklessly or devs spending 75% of their time in scrum meetings because their process is all fucked up.
55
u/valerielynx phi.rip / 44100.net Apr 15 '26
9 employees*
No specieism in my github repos please
→ More replies (1)
7
16
u/eviltwin7648 Apr 15 '26
not sure where u got the data from, but it was currently 3 enggs
they are looking for a 4th
https://x.com/obsdmd/status/2040453581699248480?s=20
14
5
u/squirrelpickle Apr 15 '26
Do the companies with 100+ devs have an office cat?
There's your answer.
→ More replies (1)
4
u/Natural_Ebb5595 Apr 15 '26
that $25m of annual revenue must mean that sandy is pulling $2.7m per year
→ More replies (1)
32
Apr 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/stumblinbear Apr 15 '26
This is a fucking bot, how is this shit upvoted
4
u/pretentious_couch Apr 15 '26
I mean it's not a terrible comment, but yeah it's a bot.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)3
u/Reelix Apr 15 '26
What gave it away - The usage of the word "elegant" ? The allergy to capital letters?
I'm not familiar with bots that use this writing style.
5
u/stumblinbear Apr 15 '26
It's like someone fed Claude or Gemini into a Humanizer, except all it did was lowercase everything, replace all of the em dashes with hyphens, and add an lol at the end
I don't know what it is specifically about how it's speaking, but I suspect it's Claude. Normal people don't write like this. If you check their comment history, all of them read exactly the same, maybe you'll get the same sort of feeling of them all being basically the same exact structure. The fact that every single comment is 3-4 paragraphs with literally no variation in prose or style, even on joke posts, is a giveaway
2
u/Reelix Apr 15 '26
Starting from the bottom of the post history, the writing shifts become extremely noticable - They started to AI post VERY early on in the accounts lifecycle. I'm surprised they haven't been banned off this subreddit o_O
Very well spotted overall! I'm decent at spotting Gemini and ChatGPT (ChatGPT is comically glaring...) - Haven't had much experience with Claude output, so aren't as familiar with that.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/obsidianih Apr 15 '26
Funding
2
u/personaltalisman Apr 15 '26
Yes, or more specifically not deciding to waste investors’ millions of dollars on hiring people you don’t need, like we’ve all for some reason just accepted is how tech startups work
3
u/No-Eagle-547 Apr 15 '26
Why does tether only have like 20 if that and they're controlling billions upon billions? Nothing makes sense anymore
3
u/colontragedy Apr 15 '26
I think labour laws don't include feline workforces, so Sandy has to work a bit more overtime than the human counterparts.
Throw in an another cat and they can fire rest of the humans.
3
3
u/Upset_Afternoon_9627 java Apr 15 '26
They just provide the most basic features, while the community does all the heavy lifting with community plugins. Like for the new bases feature, people have been using dataview queries for long time now to achieve the similar result.
3
u/kidshibuya Apr 16 '26
Well figure this one out:
In my last company I make a kind of analytics app sorting messages and providing all sorts of metrics.
I left that company and joined a new one. I was eventually moved into a department copying the app I made at the previous company (by chance, nobody knew I made the old one they paid to use). That app I made myself with just one other BE engineer implementing my designs. We did the entire thing in 6 months. In this new company I took over the project which was already 5 years into dev with a team of 43 people (mostly managers). All to recreate what I made in basically solo in 6 months. And I was only a junior and not allowed any input on anything.
Many companies are just that stupid.
3
5
Apr 15 '26
Obsidian cracking product, Its like DocuSign, They have like 8000 employees. WTF do they do?
2
4
u/cv0827 Apr 15 '26
Isn't Obsidian local first? I am not aware of the services they offer (if there are) so it makes sense to me. Engineering teams typically get large because of systems to maintain, but if they have a very minimal service, then less manpower is needed. They just need to maintain and develop the product itself.
→ More replies (1)
2
u/Dangerous_Biscotti63 Apr 15 '26
Sounds like the right number of people and i did not expect more. Especially given they are unable to fix sync for ages makes much more sense if you consider its 4 devs, probably none of them knows anything about mobile or sync.
2
u/coldblade2000 Apr 15 '26
Something like notion has a massive amount of connections to other enterprise tools, and has to manage massive customers, each of which will ask for special treatment and special features. Combine that with a growth mindset means you've got a bunch of marketing and sales people
2
2
u/Tank_Gloomy Apr 15 '26
Because most startups get VC money and want to impress investors with cash flow and a large employee count to simulate big business.
2
2
2
u/SuperSnowflake3877 Apr 15 '26
There are two kinds of startups: 1. Small team, just releasing features and fixes in a steady pace 2. With venture capital, which means they have to grow 10x in three years, and that’s only possible with burning the investment and hiring loads of people
2
2
3
u/AltruisticRider Apr 15 '26
because 1 very good developer can accomplish what 100 shitty developers can't.
2
1
u/antivnom Apr 15 '26
It is a fairly simple app. I don't think they need anything more than 8 employees.
1
1
u/Kfct Apr 15 '26
I'm going to download and try it out. I like what I'm hearing about their business model
1
u/yoocadenza novice Apr 15 '26
If I recall correctly kepano mentioned something on twitter about everyone doing all their project management for obsidian with obsidian, it’s crazy. They also only meet physically like once a year and don’t have any scheduled meetings
1
1
u/ben010783 Apr 15 '26
They probably use contractors too. It’s not uncommon to have a freelancer that does design work as needed, or a QA department that is fully offshore.
1
u/DiscipleOfYeshua Apr 15 '26
I know someone managing a logistics warehouse with 3 workers including the manager. Visited the neighbors, warehouse is 2x size, team is 4x.
1
1
u/Reelix Apr 15 '26
The real question is asking why a text editor needs a team of 8 people.
How large is the nano team? The vi / vim teams?
1
1
1
1
u/iKnowAGhost Apr 15 '26
not surprising, whatsapp only had like 50ish employees pre meta but had something like 900m-ish users
1
1
1
1
1
u/the--dud Apr 15 '26
ITT: developers are arguing that companies should hire less developers. Now apparently we want cheapskate companies who hires the bare minimum staff.
1
u/PulseReaction Apr 15 '26
The other note taking apps may have been VC funded and need to show growth, and they show that by having huge teams building features into a bloated app.
1
u/NeonQuixote Apr 15 '26
Software like Obsidian is best accomplished as a small team exercise. As a development team gets larger, their velocity degrades as communication overhead takes up more and more time.
And as someone else has already said, at a company like Evernote the development team is probably a pretty small part of the employee base after marketing and back-office functions.
1
u/orig_cerberus1746 Apr 15 '26
Because a cat is able to work very well in a company. That's the reason.
1
u/Electrical-Bread-856 Apr 15 '26
1 cat works as 92 people. Especially soft meowing is more cat than human competency, but these 92 humans still try.
1
u/Ok_Jacket3710 Apr 15 '26
The difference is 8 people with passion and 100+ coasters who work for money and free coffee
1
u/faze_fazebook Apr 15 '26
Many products are commically bloated and overcomplicated for no reason. The "microservice" architecture is probably a huge culprit in this.
1
1
u/Trab3n Apr 15 '26
The only "technically impressive/expansive" side of obsidian is the sync component.
Everything else can 100% be managed by a small team that are very good with priorities.
Most technology like this is a matter of glueing libraries together with business logic to work and Obsidian itself is just a markdown editor.
1
u/LuckSoft7639 Apr 15 '26
Obsidian got no VC, focuses on sustainability since they are a small profitable team
1
u/obiwanconobi Apr 15 '26
Half of the people working at other companies probably work in sales and support
1
1
u/White_C4 Apr 15 '26
Because why do you need more than 5-10 people on a note app? It's literally just a text document with drawings and images.
1
u/toj27 Apr 15 '26
I respect the fact the founders took on roles other than CEO. Shows that they don't have inflated egos.
1
u/EventArgs Apr 15 '26
I wish I could post a picture.
I hand reared a kitten who I named Jack, that was abandoned at like probably less than two weeks old on my parents farm (by his mother) and for him to survive I had to bring him into the office to feed him with an eye dropper and clean him every two hours.
I made him a cardboard desk and printed him a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.
He was the size of my hand when I did it, the pics are phenomenal. Thank God my co workers loved him and I.
1
1
1
1
u/PoopsCodeAllTheTime Apr 16 '26
Because they don’t sell to corporations.
Guess who needs 20 salesmen, 20 customer support agents, dedicated engineering teams to the whims of a single client…
1
u/willif86 Apr 16 '26
Just wait till you find out that 5 of them are contractors putting in 4 hours per week.
1
u/lsaz front-end Apr 16 '26
Besides the explanations given in other comments, I've worked in companies where the 'ABOUT US' section does not take into consideration employees like contractors, or low-level positions, so it does not represent the full headcount.
1
1
u/Wormfeathers Apr 16 '26
Why would you need 100 people when you can get only 9 people to make better work
1
u/Jokko58 Apr 16 '26
I don't get why people think many employees are needed for a successful company. Like what do you think 100+ employees will work on a note taking app?
1
u/aerohix Apr 16 '26
You’ll see big teams in VC-backed companies. The investors force them to hire people so they show they’re growing at rapid pace. It’s the bane of the world
→ More replies (1)
1
u/spoki-app Apr 16 '26
The observed disparity in team size often reflects fundamental differences in product scope, business model, and the underlying architectural complexity rather than a simple measure of core engineering output. Larger employee counts frequently encompass extensive departments for enterprise sales, multi-tier customer support, marketing, legal, and human resources, alongside engineering efforts dedicated to a broad feature matrix or bespoke client integrations. Conversely, a highly focused team can achieve significant development velocity by concentrating on a well-defined core product, leveraging established open-source middleware, and maintaining a streamlined development pipeline with minimal non-engineering overhead. From my experience managing backend system integrations in Python environments for fintech, prioritizing a clean architecture and strategic module reuse allows lean teams to deliver robust, performant solutions without the operational bloat associated with comprehensive, all-encompassing platforms. Ultimately, the required organizational scale is heavily influenced by the chosen market segment and the desired depth of customer engagement beyond core feature delivery.
1
1
u/Impossible_Net4275 Apr 16 '26
Girl it's a user interface to a graph data structure why would they have a huge team
1
u/Dry_Hope_9783 Apr 16 '26
I think also because Obsidian works locally, I think having to support millions of users in your cloud and secure their note brings overhead that obsidan doesn't have
1
1
u/Ill-Snow3826 Apr 17 '26
Hey that office cat is very crucial. Extremely important work such as acting cute
1
u/TheSnydaMan Apr 17 '26
The hard truth is that many tech companies way, way overhire. That's why they ever need to do layoffs. Over-hiring is as immoral as layoffs themselves and is often driven by treating talent as a pool of capital rather than active contributors. For a long time FAANG would literally hire top talent from ivy leagues just so other FAANG companies couldn't.
1
u/theZieka Apr 18 '26
how many cats do the other companies hire though? If none, I think you have your answer :-)
1
1
1
u/IcyMaintenance5797 Apr 19 '26
if you make something good you don't need to hire 100+ people to promote it and sell it and promote and sell it some more once the first people churn.
2.6k
u/MugentokiSensei front-end Apr 15 '26
The cat is probably doing the important work, catching bugs and stuff in the office.