Both Facebook and Google (!) aren't really large-scale by the standards of tech companies gone by. Facebook has about 9000 employees. Google has 50,000. By contrast, Microsoft has 128,000, HP has 300,000, IBM has almost 400,000, and DEC had about 300,000 at its peak.

In the startup world, we (rightly) focus on growth, but it's worth remembering that there are giant companies out there using really, really boring technology. In some segments IBM mainframes, DB2, and COBOL are still the technologies of choice.

To add to what you're saying there are also government departments and giant companies out there that do your tax, pay for the roads, handle your insurance and handle your banking where somebody 20 years ago chose a technology that wasn't boring.

These entities are now having huge problems trying to get off 1980s or 1990s non-boring non-standard technologies that are no longer supported.

There are places that have bought the company that was going insolvent that built their non-standard database or framework....

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" had good reason behind it.

> Google has 50,000. By contrast, Microsoft has 128,000, HP has 300,000, IBM has almost 400,000, and DEC had about 300,000 at its peak.

How many of those were really engineers, rather than managers, marketing people, consultants, support?

A lot are consultants, at least at HP and IBM. (Microsoft and DEC are much more engineering-heavy; I've heard that Microsoft has the structure of 1 engineer, 1 PM, and 1 tester per team.) Remember that out of Google's headcount, only about 20,000 are engineers. When I was on Search, Bing had more engineers working on it than Google Search.

> By your measure, Facebook is still not a large-scale engineering organization

"9,199 employees as of December 31, 2014" -- that's probably close enough to his metric to call it a large-scale engineering organization.

Of course, there's the real question of why Facebook needs to be a 10k+ engineer organization. For a minute it looked like they'd grow past their MySpace 2.0 roots. That becomes less convincing every day.

>that's probably close enough to his metric to call it a large-scale engineering organization.

Maybe 1/5th of that are software engineers of any sort. Sales, marketing, management, admin staff, QA, sysadmins, etc tend to fill up organizations.

Ah nice catch, I misread the quote as 9k engineers. That said, after seeing their new offices, I'm not sure I can retract the general sentiment of my previous post.