How they handle all these complex products? Do they have an army of contractors?
JetBrains Products: AppCode, CLion, DataGrip, Hub, IntelliJ IDEA, Kotlin, MPS, PhpStorm, PyCharm, Gogland, ReSharper, Ultimate, Rider, RubyMine, TeamCity, Toolbox App, Upsource, WebStorm and YouTrack.
Also, not VC backed. A 'real' company, that actually makes money because people buy their products. Our expectations of how many developers are needed for things is inflated by the prevalence of unprofitable venture backed firms that over hire.
They are also based in Russia so their costs are a bit lower probably.
Also as peoplewindow mentioned they grow based on need, so we know they didn't hire 200 developers just because.
https://www.jetbrains.com/company/contacts/
Compare to one of their primary competitors, Visual Studio. VS is still struggling with the transition to 64 bits because they can't take the plugins with them. It essentially can't be made cross platform with the result that they gave up and started a rewrite (VS Code). Despite Microsoft having vastly more resources than JetBrains, IntelliJ seems to have more features.
I credit a lot of that to the underlying platform being higher level and more productive.
Visual Studio isn't 64-bit for performance reasons. They have decided instead to take components that are most constrained by the 32bit limitation and move them out of processes, leaving the core application 32bit [1].
1: https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud...
Consider that Todd Howard's team that built Skyrim consisted of roughly 100 people.
Epic Games employed 250 people as of 2016. Most of those are not developers. Yet, their Unreal Engine 4 changelogs are mind blowing:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Support/Builds/inde...
there's a reason they moved to a subscription model
Jetbrains is doing well for themselves, but it's far from unprecedented.
I'm curious how this breaks down between developers, customer support, marketing, and admin. My guess is that developers might be a fairly small fraction of he 700...