Normally I'm the one saying "well there's a lot more going on behind the scenes than you know".
But in this case: yeah it's bizarre. How the hell are their official apps and mobile site and new desktop website so fucking awful, when solo/small team app developers can actually provide a good experience working on the outside with a fraction of the resources?
I've tried to switch from old.reddit to new.reddit a handful of different times now, every time I go screaming back after my eyes feel like they want to vomit. I don't generally have a huge problem with modern web design, but their particular implementation just really sucks.
I think people dramatically underestimate the importance of having a small team of passionate, highly skilled, dare I say, 10x developers, creating the actual product. When venture capitalists come in, they just hire someone somebody they know, then get lost in architectural complexity, even outsourcing some coding. The whole thing turns into a mess.
At my company, my small team ends up doing about 80% of the work, while four other teams, each with 10-plus members, seem to do absolutely nothing.
They raised $250m 2 years ago and have tripled their workforce since. Now they're losing money of course but why do they need to IPO if they raised so much money recently?
> why do they need to IPO if they raised so much money
Venture capital funds are for a limited time - e.g. five years. At the end of the time, the fund is liquidated - the companies are either sold, or closed down.
They can sell to another round of VC funding, sell to a competitor (who wants to "acquihire" the team), or by IPO.
That's their main problem. No the APIs but wasting an enormous amount of resources and for what? so they can host videos and gifs themselves? Greed is a very effective way to destroy things.
I realize most of these people are not engineers but what in the hell have they been spending their time on. Terrible