Delivering the part of LinkedIn which provides value to end users is relatively trivial. A small number of engineers (20-30) could do that. The problem is ironically how much profit they make.
Look at ad-blocking for example. You as the user won't see how this affects LinkIn, but they likely devote dozens (hundreds?) of employees to fighting ad-blockers and optimizing the site so people don't notice how their anti-ad-blocker solution completely destroys performance. But as a company that kind of investment in staff is profitable because the cost of those engineers is vastly lower than the cost of losing 1% of their advertising revenue.
Likewise, ad fraud, and a dozen other issues which might impact LinkedIn's revenue flows. When you hire your 4000th developer, they aren't providing as much value to the company as engineer #50, but they are providing enough value to cover the cost of employing them (at least net, it's likely 50% of them at that point are dead weight but hard to identify).
Multiply this kind of decision making over 500 other decisions and engineering "Bloat" makes a lot more sense.
And that's before you start adding in things like sales, HR, marketing, etc. Remember, each additional person doesn't need to provide as much value as the first 50, they just need to provide $100-500k worth of value.
Look at ad-blocking for example. You as the user won't see how this affects LinkIn, but they likely devote dozens (hundreds?) of employees to fighting ad-blockers and optimizing the site so people don't notice how their anti-ad-blocker solution completely destroys performance. But as a company that kind of investment in staff is profitable because the cost of those engineers is vastly lower than the cost of losing 1% of their advertising revenue.
Likewise, ad fraud, and a dozen other issues which might impact LinkedIn's revenue flows. When you hire your 4000th developer, they aren't providing as much value to the company as engineer #50, but they are providing enough value to cover the cost of employing them (at least net, it's likely 50% of them at that point are dead weight but hard to identify).
Multiply this kind of decision making over 500 other decisions and engineering "Bloat" makes a lot more sense.
And that's before you start adding in things like sales, HR, marketing, etc. Remember, each additional person doesn't need to provide as much value as the first 50, they just need to provide $100-500k worth of value.