So, you need hardware that physically houses the software. That means you need maintenance workers. Then you need customer support, which will be a large portion. You need people who can fix and improve the software, lots of them. You need people who will maintain your cyber security.

Then all the normal company stuff: HR, Accounting, Management, real estate, sales, marketing, janitors, etc.

They are still producing a product, and as with a lot of other companies a lot of the workforce isn't directly involved with the actual production.

The website is just the user interface. Google is a website. So is reddit. The complexity of the underlying domain and features will determine the size of the team necessary to maintain it.

Here are some of just the roles required to produce quality software: front end dev, back end dev, QA, project manager, scrum master, dev ops, designer, UX/UI, android dev, iOS dev. That’s your average “squad”. A mid-large software as a service company will have maybe 5-10 squads. That’s not even including everything outside of the tech such as advertising, hr, higher up managers and such

Wait until you hear about how many people work at Facebook. The systems behind websites are more complicated than you think.

How does any business that operates machinery have so many employees? If your core business is machinery that stamps metal into widgets it does not follow that you need one guy to turn the machine on at 9am, then off at 5pm. You need to design them, you need to repair them, you need to update them, you need to clean them, you need humans to react every time something unpredictable happens. Then once you have more than a handful of employees, you need hr, bookkeeping, office maintenance, and management to coordinate all that.

Also, a business like indeed is going to employ a huge number of salespeople to sell listings and recruiters to try to fill them. Regardless of what you've heard, websites are not magic money machines that effortlessly operate at a profit once built. They are just a way of interacting with your human customers who still bring all the issues human customers bring.

They aren't just a website. They are also headhunters. Companies pay them to find employees

Sales people make up a huge population of the tech workforce, especially in tech that isn’t “niche” which is most tech

Looks are deceiving.

It is possible to create a website or app with one person, but there is a limit to the complexity.

For example, just glancing at the Indeed website:

• They need engineers to maintain their codebase. For a site like this, it might easily be over a million lines of code. (There is a lot of functionality you can't see, like internal auditing and management systems, in order to prevent legal problems -- see below.)
• They need engineers to maintain their servers.
• They need people to write content in the Career Guide.
• They need database administrators to tune, backup and monitor their databases -- often geo-replicated around the world.
• They need security engineers to prevent hackers from taking all this valuable personal data they have collected.
• They need employees to "answer the phone" when their customers have problems.
• They need employees to work with companies and the schools to find out their needs.
• They need lots of people to keep spam out of their various databases (schools, jobs, training, resumes, etc)
• They may need employees to verify companies aren't scamming personal data.
• They need HR, Finance, Legal, etc. Legal is probably especially big, since they need to know the hiring laws in every country and every state. (Did you know it's perfectly legal to age discriminate in most states, as long as it's not against someone over 40?)

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Mainly because there's not only just development team in a "website".

• If a company wants to have this application be connected to a server, a server cost money to buy/host and run, so now we need account department.

• Hosting a service 24/7 would means we would need people to maintain the server so it can stay up for 99% of the times.

• Now we need our source of income for paying our staff, We would need someone to deal with advertisement and such.

• Alright, we want to make sure our "website" to not get sued by someone for stupid reason, we would have to hire a legal team to deal with that.

• What if someone encounter some issue while using our services, our development team are way too busy for that, customer support it is.

• Hire new employees, too busy to be dealt by anyone, HR department it is.

• Our "website" will store our user's sensitive data, better to hire a dedicated security department for that.

and there's more, all of these can't just simply be dealt by just 3 to 10 people.

Large scale companies have much more complex websites, have graphic designers, front end coders, back end programmers, UX designers to build the websites, and multiple of each role because there is a lot of changes being made, tests being run, issues being fixed. There are also IT people managing the servers or AWS/Azure environment, managing databases, cybersecurity, etc. and people who monitor sites, run analytics, and such.

Then there are tons of sales people/account reps working with companies to manage profiles and set up job listings, tons of support people screening job postings, providing customer service to job seekers.

Then there are the roles all companies have — marketing departments, accounting department, HR, legal, IT and such…

What you need to remember is that it’s not a website it’s a company that uses the website to sell ads, and that company’s needs a lot of manpower for sales, accounting, software development, maintenance, as well as the infrastructure that supports the website like data centres

There will be at least 200+ account managers selling job adverts to businesses and managing the postings for the website. ( I used to work for a competitor)

You'll have then a marketing and comms team to generate natural sales.

HR, office managers for their physical locations, tech staff, developers etc....

It adds up very quickly to lots of staff.

Let's consider the few ways Indeed makes money:

• Premium job listings
• Allow employers to access resume database
• Targeted ads
• Indeed hiring events

So let's look at tech stack since Indeed is a platform company. Each of these streams are pretty distinct and will require different tech infrastructure. Each tech stack will have unique front/mid/backend requirements. A lot of work will sit here on the shoulders of the tech team on finding the most cost-efficient method to scale this to millions of users. People are also accessing this platform via different means (mobile/web) so this adds on to complexity.

And who's going to sell the services? You're going to need Sales & Marketing teams to think of customer funnel strategies to get these employers onboard. Once they are onboard, you're going to need people to service these accounts. These companies can be considered the supply side of the equation.

But which employer is going to upload their job listing or pay to access resume database if there's no prospective employee browsing or uploading their resumes? You're going to need another similar team here to take care on the demand side. There needs to be a lot of work done to get people convinced that uploading their resume and job searching on Indeed is going to be worth their time.

Recruiting is also one of those things that can turn into a complete shitshow with cross-region regulations. Indeed obviously doesn't only operate in the US, so just imagine the amount of countries it wants to sell into, and the different amount of employer regulations it needs to keep abreast on. The team here needs to be very, very solid to avoid regulatory risks.

Want to run a multi-national business? Better make sure your corporate functions are solid too then. Here lies your unsung heroes, finance folks, office ops, HR, the people making sure your IT equipment are available and functional when you're working from some remote place on the planet... list goes on.

In a fast growing company, all of the people seemed necessary at one point or another. When Indeed was growing, and there were significant numbers job-seekers looking for a place to work who were not using Indeed, then adding features, advertising, expansion of facilities, maintenance, etc. made a lot of sense.

Markets are limited in size though, there are only so many useful features that can be added, new leads to acquire, etc. so eventually, usually when growth slows, a large number of people are being employed without much to do. A classic example of this was twitter, which if you've heard some of the stories from ex-employees required 2-4 hours a week in remote work by their programmers. Mass firings might signal negative financial health in a company, so any executive who suggests it would need to be up against a wall. It's much easier to keep hiring at all costs if you're in charge.

At one point all those employees had something to do, and probably were very productive, but employees have a lot of incentive to "seem" like they have a lot to do, so it might take a while before management realizes 90% of their workforce is working less than half the time.

I work for one of their direct competitors and we have 500 or so employees so quite a few less than them. We run fairly efficient but there are dedicated teams to match, sales, marketing, content, and then the various sections of our site and our apps. Our leadership is very adamant that we will not face layoffs as we mainly didn’t over hire like most companies did 2 years ago. Could we cut some fat? Of course everyone can.

I haven’t seen anyone say this but they have a massive legal department (remote positions all over the country). Labor/Employment and litigation are the two legal departments Ive seen postings for, but I know there are many others

The "website" by itself isn't really what makes them the money, it's being a middle man for connecting job seeker with employers.

For that, they have large teams to sell their services to employers, account teams to manage the relationship of employers, customer service teams to help employers with any issues they see.

The simplest explanation I can provide is that it is not a "website", it is a "company" that provides a lot of their services to their customers on a "website".

They are a global company. They need people who know those countries in order to operate there.

The people who build the website are one group of people responsible for managing the company. Who designs the website? Who manages the projects they are working on? Who pays for all of those people? Who interviews new people that they need? Who works in the customer service department? Who sells the services they provide to other clients or companies? Who services their office spaces? Who ensures facilities are restocked for their office workers?

It is a company.

No, it’s a recruitment based large multinational business with all the complexities that come with that. With a lot of their clients “cutting their cloth to measure” they need to do the same.

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I worked for a website that had hundreds of employees. The development department probably had two dozen. Some were database devs, some were user interface devs, some were "full stack" devs, which I understand to mean they can do it all. There were people working on strictly search engine optimization. There were folks working strictly on improving the search function. That was only the dev team. The IT team was in charge of the company infrastructure like internet, servers, computers, networking, security, etc. The finance team had probably 15 people max during my time there. This company sold physical merchandise internationally from three fulfillment centers. There was a logistics team and all the fulfillment centers had dozens of employees. There was a customer service department with a couple dozen employees. There was a creative department that made content for the website. So, sound guy, film guys, editors. There was a legal department, an HR department, a product development team, a marketing team, a graphic design team, content writers, data analysts, so on.

That company was doing about $120 million per year and roughly about 300 total employees during my time there. So you can just scale those numbers up or down depending on the revenue of the company to get some idea of how personnel can grow and shrink.

If you apply your same line of thinking to a physical store then why does any company have more staff than the cashier? The point is that a company consists of way more than just what you interact with directly.

You need staff to clean, staff to provide support for other staff, whether that's catering, technical, or anything else. You need staff to ensure that your operations are not violating any local or national laws. You need to break the company up into smaller units in order to be manageable and you need management staff for those units. The list goes on and scales up as the size of the company grows - especially so when it's an internationally operating company.

How does a “building” have so many employees?

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To the people saying that websites need a load of staff to run, this is baloney - especially for something like indeed. Truth is these companies scaled way too much and then realised they were hugely overstaffed.

if you are a cynic, lots of people not doing much, keeping people from working at competitors, employees won't tell the world that the company isn't that great, as long as you are hiring more people you can convince investors that company is doing great and growing so the company will grow in value

Honestly, I think the same as you. Maybe not 10 people, but even being generous, it would be below 500 people. The thing is, when these companies get funding, they start hiring more than they need.

So while before you had maybe 3 FE devs, now you have a whole team. Before you had only one Product Manager, now you have a “Product Owners Team”. Before you had 1 QA, then 1 QA per team, and now a whole QA team. And the same goes for marketing, UI/UX designers, and of course HR and accounting. Where the numbers really blow up out of proportion is IT and Marketing.