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How Many People Could Digg Possibly Need?

Digg is a social voting site where all content is posted by users, then other users vote on their content and it rises to the top if it gets enough votes. These are all things you probably already know. But did you know that they have 35 employees and are looking to hire 6 more?

I just don’t see how that many people are necessary to run Digg. Here’s a team of people I’d expect to be necessary to run a site like Digg:

Designers

The site doesn’t have that many main areas: they have listing pages showing many articles, they have single article pages with comments, they have a posting page, and they have profiles which are just yanking info from a database (”SELECT * FROM digg_table WHERE user_posted_ID = $thisuser AND popular = 1″). That’s about it folks, it’s not like they’re maintaining a site with 25 different sections all with different page layouts for each one. It’s a very minimal design and only a few data views. What do they really need to “design” once the main site is up and running? They recently launched the new profile section but that’s the only new thing that needed to be designed in awhile. They could go with 3 designers and 1 creative director. By designer I mean someone who can put together mockups in Photoshop and also move them to XHTML/CSS with equal aplomb.

Developers

The magic in Digg is the algorithm that determines what articles are popular enough to make it to the front and upcoming sections on the site. No one really knows what combination of factors are necessary to get listed on the front page, we just know that if you get enough Diggs within a certain period of time, your post might show up on the homepage… or not. So once the architecture of the site is put together (as it was a few years ago) you’re not really creating new tables and UPDATEing databases much because the system is already built, you’re just going to want to add some new features from time to time. And at the speed Digg moves (where’s the pictures section fellas?) I can’t see Digg developers spending all their days coding, coding, coding since Digg launches new features like old people drive. Let’s say 3 developers, 1 senior developer, and they all report to the CTO. By developers I mean people who can code and create application architecture.

Server Administrators

With a site the size of Digg, you know they’re sitting on some serious hardware, especially when many sites they link to go down from their own traffic. Managing the runtime environment on the server, making sure processes aren’t spinning out of control, planning for scalability, organizing future expansion and purchases, these are all good things to have people working on. I’ll go with 3 server administrators, 2 senior architecture planners, and they also report to the CTO.

Ad Sales

Digg makes money, but not as much as it really could, mostly because geeks are known to not click on ads if their lives depended on it. People who can develop relationships with new advertisers and get them to sign on the line the line which is dotted is highly necessary. Maybe the Valley has warped people’s business brains but companies are normally run with their own profits so people who can manage accounts and sell ads is a must. Digg probably needs 4 ad salespeople and 1 ad sales manager. These are people who oversee an ad deal from the start of the relationship, through the sale, and onwards as they manage the account. Digg isn’t a gigantic site and no ad handoff is really needed, no additional staff needs to be in on the process.

Financial Staff

Well with ad sales and salaries you need people to handle the money for the company. I’ll say 2 accountants, and they report to the CFO.

Support Staff

Gotta have support staff to keep things running smoothly. Let’s include some community management skills into this grouping as well, you know, the bury brigade. 1 support staffperson, 3 community manager type people.

Totals

This list was really generous, Digg isn’t that deep of a site so some of these positions could be eliminated by hiring the right people. A good designer or a good developer can do the work of 2 or 3 lame designers or developers, so keep that in mind. The total including a CFO, a CTO, and then Kevin and Jay is 28 people working at Digg. Do they really need a whole design team since they update the design once in a millennium? No. Do they really need community managers if their designers, developers, and ad people could be managing the community as well as doing their normal jobs? Not particularly. I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt and figure out exactly how in the hell Digg could have so many people on their staff and still want to hire more. I can’t see how Digg could possibly need that many people working for them, unless it’s to just spend their investment money and “look” like a bigger corporation. Hell if they got rid of 10 employees perhaps they’d be more profitable… just saying. Technorati just slimmed down so perhaps Digg should do the same.