I feel this is going to turn into a discussion of what a SWE is, and are Data Scientists or SRE's also Developers or not. For Google I think their number is probably 25,000.
As of 2016 they stopped reporting their split of employees. Something that is actually a decrease in material quality of reporting that Wall Street analysts don't seem to have complained about...
Their last 10k to have those numbers said:
"December 31, 2016, we had 72,053 full-time employees: 27,169 in research and development, 20,902 in sales and marketing, 14,287 in operations, and 9,695 in general and administrative functions."
Alphabet had in the meanwhile 200 acquisitions and their total current number of employees is 156,500 employees ( As of end 2021). Taking the very, very, optimistic view that the number of R&D employees augmented in the same exact proportion and that 1 in 2 R&D employees is doing software development we get a number in the
25,000 to 30,000 SWE's
Netflix has only 11,300 employee and it seems most are content development so lets says 2000 SWE's
Apple has a little bit less employees than Alphabet ( 154,000) and I dont believe in more SWE per employee than Google so let's say another 25,000.
Facebook had 71,970 full-time employees as of December 2021 so I am going to
say 10,000 SWE...
For Amazon get's difficult as you need to split with AWS plus you cannot the
number of 500,000 employees at Amazon for nothing. Let's say they have 25,000 SWE what looks like a massive number both for AWS and Amazon.
So I am probably in a range of 50,000 to 100,000. Would still mean we are talking about working on small set of 0,2 to 0.4 % of the worldwide professional software developers and I guess the core point still stands:-)
I debated replying to this, since the thread has long since moved on, but FWIW, I work for Google, and I’m in a position to know how many SWEs we have.
In general, looking at the companies you cite, I would estimate that roughly 40-50% of the employees are SWEs, with some variability based on industry. It’s a lot more people than you think.
Apple and Amazon both are way less than 40% SWEs because they employ a lot of lower paid workers (Apple at their stores and AppleCare help desks, Amazon at warehouses and logistics). Facebook, Google and Netflix may be closer to the 40-50% mark.
