- Legal is generally part of G&A (General & Admin.) - Support is one category that I hadn't thought about, but perhaps they are contractors. - I can't imagine Uber having more than 50 or so design people, all in the 'apps' category.

What are the others in the 'tons' more category, not part of any of the categories I have mentioned? It may be a super mass market consumer service but part of the reason it's so highly valued is the efficiencies of scale it brings to these things.

Fifty design people? It's going to be at least an order of magnitude more. (To confirm, did a LinkedIn search for Product Designers at Uber. 521 results. Pretty close!)

I work at tech company you've probably heard of (consumer-focused, international, relatively large scale, though probably a couple orders of magnitude smaller than Uber). We have ~200 engineers (client, backend, ops/infra, data eng, ML, etc). We have ~15-20 designers. We're international but we do very little feature and/or design customization per market, beyond localization, unlike Uber, which does customization even for different cities in the same state, let alone separate countries!

Good heavens! What are 500 design people doing at Uber? Is this a case of managerial empire-building? I was at a small company of a comparable size to yours where the product was a mobile app (Apple and Android). It had fewer than ten (roughly 6) designers. This app was reasonably complicated (but, reading an account of Uber's struggles with controlling the size of it's app, nowhere close to Uber's apps' complexity) and was very important in the general scheme of things.

Most major tech companies have a 1:8 ratio of designers to developers.