Interesting blog post by Evernote CEO

Posted by dan7000
Jan 6, 2014 at 06:38 PM

22111 wrote:
\>I’d be very thankful for any insight into the matters all those 145
>people (presuming 5 others do the work) might contemplate about. Where’s
>the trick there?
>

It does sound like overkill, but maybe not given the cross-platform complexity. I used to manage engineering for a top-selling software product in the early 2000s. I mostly managed the windows version. We had about 40 developers, 40 QA, 8 managers and one director. There was also a Mac version, with a much smaller staff (because they mostly ported over the Windows version) and a Web version with a varying staff that was sometimes bigger than the Windows version. Our program was far more complex than Evernote and included interoperability with a lot of other third party systems, which was my area, and I had up to 10 engineers and 10 QA working just on that.

So I’d guess looking at just Evernote Windows, which has far less features, you could get by with 4-5 developers, 4-5 QA and one manager. Multiply that by all the platforms (win, winphone, mac, ios, android, web) and you get 60 engineers and 6 managers. Then you probably have a dedicated team for interoperability - designing the core architecture, implementing it and testing the interoperability across platforms. Add another 15/15/1 for that. So 97 people.
His post specifically included “designers” which I presume means UI design, focus groups etc. I left that out of my calculus above but generally we had 3 people per platform. Evernote does a superb job of that so let’s give them 5 per platform. That’s another 30, plus 2 managers, for a total of 129 people. With that many you need a couple of directors / vp types. Let’s give them 3. Now we are at 132.

Note that I didn’t include tech support because I’m not sure Phil did. If tech support is included (including the 20 or so people they have answering questions on the forums), you are easily over the 145 he cites. Seems like a lot, but they’re doing a lot.