Interesting blog post by Evernote CEO

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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jan 5, 2014 at 07:37 PM

Yesterday I read a blog post by a dissatisfied Evernote user, Jason Kincaid. I was going to post a link to it here as a quasi warning to other Evernote users on this forum, but didn’t get around to it. In the meantime, Phil Libin has written a response to Kincaid, one that admits a lot of faults with Evernote and promises fixes. It’s quite interesting and even sounds sincere. I hope it is.

http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2014/01/04/on-software-quality/

Steve Z.

Posted by 22111
Jan 6, 2014 at 03:45 PM

It had not been my intention to comment on EN; I had seen the Kühn post early on, and thought by myself, so what, no sw can be stable at all times, since some of the debugging simply has to be made by the customer (it’d be too expensive to do all the testing inhouse and then wait forever to do the release).

Also, we know now that EN relies on SQLite which is quite straigthforward and certainly not overcomplicating things.

Ok, it’s a cloud applic now, which adds complexity, and I understand its input facilities ain’t bad.

So, it is safe to assume there is not a single developer as in most cases of outliners (except for TB as the presumably only exception of them all?), but 3 or 4.

But then I read this (in the link above):

“Staffing - Today, there are 164 engineers and designers working at Evernote. About 150 of them are currently assigned to our core software products. The total number will increase quite a bit in 2014, but the proportion will stay the same: over 90% of our resources will go towards improving our core experiences.”

And now that leaves me speechless. I had always assumed a ration between 5 workers and 95 people doing nothing was a phenomenon exclusive to public administrations.

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?

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 6, 2014 at 03:47 PM

Thanks for the heads up. I must say that, though a heavy user of Evernote myself (with almost 13,000 notes), I’ve never come across the majority of issues mentioned in the original blog post. They may be mostly iOS or Mac related. Indeed, I’ve often be jealous of Mac and iOS users because new features seem to be first launched for those systems, with Windows and Android following. But that may be a good thing in the end.

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.

Posted by Paul Korm
Jan 6, 2014 at 09:58 PM

I use Evernote daily and regularly and only on OS X and iOS. I read Jason Kincaid’s post thinking “huh”? I’ve not experienced instability and have been pleased to see steady improvement and addition of features that I found useful enough to add to my regular routines. The recently improved “Clip to Evernote” Safari extension, for example.

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:
>I’ve never come across the
>majority of issues mentioned in the original blog post. They may be
>mostly iOS or Mac related

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