- N people to just juggle live incidents/emergencies. Actually triage, live, why the Desantis campaign launch on Twitter isn't working. Give the server more RAM, spin up more instances, pray it works.
- M+N people to do the work to prevent the incidents/emergencies (maintenance). Actually ensure the next big giant event on the streaming service doesn't cause failures. Create automatic scaling up of new capacity as needed. But avoid overprovisioning and costing the company a bazillion $$. Get to the bottom of what triggered the incident. Build practices, runbooks, etc the next time this happens.
- M+N+L people to actually create new stuff. Create a new feature on the live streaming service to comment or somesuch. (and all the work M+N people do to handle incidents with this new feature)
So X * (M+N+L) people if every product area is trying to create new stuff.
But the reality is most teams have T people where M < T < (M+N+L). Which is very company dependent.
Seriously, what do you expect the answer to be? Have you worked in any large org with thousands of employees? They are all pretty similar, there's tech debt, there's new initiatives, there is maintenance to be done. You need to work in one to understand how the whole machine works, there's no simple answer to be given on HN about what they are all up to, it's a mix of all of the above as it'd be in any large org...
With a few k more you might plug leaks, and do actual maintenance of the ship. While you’re not always firefighting, you're also mostly just doing basic maintenance to ensure people don’t always work at 3am bailing out the ship to barely keep it afloat. No actual new fancy features being added to your ship.
If you want to actually build NEW features on your speedboat, you need even more people. And if you care about features, and not burning out employees, that’s how you get to 8k.
(Actual numbers may vary per business)