Zoom's core product development is in China. Their Bay Area office is apparently support roles.

700 engineers for a software company the size of Zoom is actually pretty small.

You do realize development include software engineering, right? 700 people doing programming isn't even remotely surprising.

Not to defend them against the recent security fiasco, but innuendos such as this that links "employees working in China" directly with "shady business" makes me at least uncomfortable.

For one product...? I’m sure they have a great deal of internal software and versions for numerous OS and platforms - but we’re not talking about a company with hundreds of consumer facing software products.

To be more clear, I meant "it can't only be development and QA". Meaning, there has to be something else included in that number that is not traditional R&D.

Also, to be clear: the statement is meant from the perspective of, how do they have that many employees (what are they all doing); not "why" do they have that many (which, while seemingly very large, I am not in a position to judge), nor meant to be a slander against outsourcing R&D work to China (though, to be crystalline clear, I inherently trust Zoom less because of this, just like I trust companies who base or outsource R&D to Australia less because of Australia's laws on these matters).

I didn't read it as suggesting it was "shady business". I read it as an insinuation that the company didn't know what it was doing from the top down, so they didn't hire smartly or manage well; they just threw numbers of people at the problem (and got predictably bad results).

With good management, a team of 50 should be able to provide what Zoom provides.

Yeah, moments after replying I realized there is a more charitable read :-)

Of course, with this read comes the age old question of "I can build Google/FB with 20 good men, what are they doing?"

> Of course, with this read comes the age old question of "I can build Google/FB with 20 good men, what are they doing?"

Well, this would explain Google's pattern of constantly churning out new products on the theory that hey, maybe someone somewhere wants it.

If you need 20 people to run your actual operations but you've hired 20,000 people, what are the other 20,000 people supposed to do?

The answer might be that truly good people are not willing to work for FAANG, so they have to make do with 100 so-so instead.

Why can't 700 people do development and QA?

I think it was more a jab at Zoom being buggy and (in light of recent revelations) inadequately secure - that is, implying that those 700 employees are obviously not doing development or QA given the state of the product.

That's actually the most interesting fact about Zoom I feel like I've learned so far!

Edit: I looked it up... thought it seemed crazy high but it obviously includes all the support staff too. So they might have only 300 engineers total, for example. I guess that's more reasonable. [1]

"As of January 31, 2020, we had 2,532 full-time employees. Of these employees, 1,396 are in the United States and 1,136 are in our international locations."

"We also operate research and development centers in China, employing more than 700 employees as of January 31, 2020."

[1] https://investors.zoom.us/static-files/09a01665-5f33-4007-8e...

Is "Support" traditionally categorized under research & development? Possibly enterprise support or solutions engineers?

Skype had 500 employees in 2010 a year before they were acquired. 700 doesn't seem clearly out of proportion.

500 employees versus 700 R&D employees.

If that 700 count is including support staff, then it becomes slightly more believable, but even then, I'd expect Zoom to be at that 700-1500 number in terms of total employees, not just R&D.

"Wow. What could all of these people possibly be doing?"

There are 20,000 google engineers working in "research and development", what could all of these people possibly be doing?

Google is many orders of magnitudes larger than Zoom. Zoom has one product, Google has thousands of products, many more complex than Zoom.

Yeah, 28x the engineers for research at Google makes sense -- I'd say the work Google is doing is at least 28x more expansive, complex, etc. 700 engineers is quite a lot for a company of this size!

Google has maybe 5 products that matter.

Violating humanity's privacy?

Machine learning on everyone's video feeds to make better deep fakes of common people?

You get the face and the voice of people talking directly to the camera. You get the people who they constantly talk to so you know their relations. You know the content of what they are saying.

Deep fakes can only work for so long. When it becomes ubiquitous people will naturally learn that anything can be deep faked. We would need some process of verification, then.