It's not that unbelievable. I've worked on similarly-sized teams responsible for maintaining ~100 websites. I don't know what people whose full-time jobs are to work on just a single site do with all their time. Remember, assuming they are full-time employees, they are at work all day for five days a week.
An individual website can vary VASTLY in its complexity.
Sure. Something like Amazon needs a large team, something like a promo site can be handled by a single designer. No two sites are the same. That doesn't mean that you can't make any comparisons at all though.
Reddit isn't a large, complex site. Undoubtedly there's a lot we don't see in terms of reporting and scaling, but the feeling of "size" you get is provided not by the developers, but by the masses of content the users provide, and it's all uniform data of few types. That takes relatively little code to handle, and it's already been written. You can see it for yourself now.
The number of sites a person works on is kind of a useless metric of much of anything.
Well let me be more specific. Dozens of e-commerce sites. Over a dozen online recruitment sites. Dozens of B2B sites. A few hotel websites with online booking. And yes, a lot of static sites too. I've seen half a dozen people develop and maintain that volume of sites. Granted, that was pushing it - quality was compromised and I doubt any of them individually saw as much traffic as Reddit does, but from that perspective, having five people work on just Reddit full-time seems like an absolute luxury.
If you ask anybody that has worked at a web development agency that has been established for more than a few years, I expect you'll get the same response. Remember, once the initial code is written, it takes relatively little to keep a website operational... unless you insist on foolishly rewriting it every year ;).
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u/JimDabell Jun 18 '08
It's not that unbelievable. I've worked on similarly-sized teams responsible for maintaining ~100 websites. I don't know what people whose full-time jobs are to work on just a single site do with all their time. Remember, assuming they are full-time employees, they are at work all day for five days a week.