Its due to a deeply embedded business philosophy where CEOs and other business people try to create bigger companies, and not necessarily better companies. Sometimes they are able to trigger a mushroom growth, but most of the times they fail. But due to survivor bias, they create a few more wannabe CEOs who again trey to create bigger and not better companies, and the cycle repeats.

Medium currently had a full fledged Sales, Support, HR and even a big ass operations dept. And 2 or 3 offices across United States. Their operations & other business depts were quite big in head count, even rivaling local oracle offices(which usually have about 1000+ employees). I can't necessarily say whether they had inefficiencies in their company structure, but they certainly over hired.

Even disheartening thing is that they might have already dried up most of their cash, and still don't know how to run a business. Executives are currently playing a dangerous game of "Let's see if we can raise more" and "We'll think of something".

Holy shit, sorry if I'm coming in to this discussion late and empty handed but isn't Medium basically a fucking blog?

It is too soon to say exactly what this will look like. This strategy is more focused but also less proven."

In so many words, "We'll think of something."

Maybe they would try to get acquihired

Edit: Looks like Instagram had raised 50m before being acquihired. Definitely a much different situation than this one, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that a company which raised 100+ million would be acquihired.

See definition from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring): "...the process of acquiring a company to recruit its employees, without necessarily showing an interest in its products and services—or their continued operation"

Isn't it worth considering that those 50 employees should have never been hired, but only were due to incompetence of Medium's executives and its business model?

Or having taken on additional responsibilities (loan, started a family, etc) based on having the job.

Getting a job that shouldn't have existed and then losing it again isn't zero sum.

Yep, we are seeing this time and time again with startups in the Bay Area who went on a landgrab for talent a few years ago and now realize they can't support them as the VC money dried up. I actually wonder if Medium was trying to raise more and they were unable to, therefore they have to do this and are trying to spin it positively.

I respect Ev a lot. He revolutionized blogging and publishing on the web. And I want Medium to do well. And maybe I'm too cynical about the startup and SV world (I moved away from SF in October), but this smells of the same old same old to me.

Serious questions: why and how?

I both write a blog and read blogs. I have never had any desire to move my blog to Medium, and ask myself "is it really worth it?" before clicking on any Medium link.

Branding

I'm not sure there are many companies such a scenario has worked out well for, but I'd love to dig into examples if people have any. And working out well can mean different things for investors vs employees vs customers vs free users vs readers. I would expect the interests to become less aligned the more investment they take on without being profitable (see Evernote's recent moves and resulting user backlash).

I remember a couple years ago there was a guy claiming he could run Twitter himself on 4 really big servers.

Maybe 1 person can't make twitter by himself, but I think the necessary number is much closer to 1 than it is to 4,100

  >Good point. I think it's easy to forget how much work engineers can make for ourselves (Uber has >700 microservices)...

Worse, are these asshole companies crowding out the H-1B system with all these extra positions?

Only a very strong non changing management that say no to nearly all feature changes can make that possible.

99% of companies and projects is not that. New features, new management, new customers, new priorities, leads to exponential complexity of services and staff numbers. And over-head staff such as sales, support, legal, hr, localisation, etc.

There really are no examples of something at Medium's scale being built and maintained by 5 engineers.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

The most straightforward explanation as to why Craigslist remains king is simple: network effects.

Maybe people prefer a "newer" web interface when it doesn't have ads, banners, popups, auto-playing-content, clutter (see yahoo), oversized images, 25 tracking scripts loading, but the lesson seems to be that too simple trumps too complex. An example that gets it exactly right IMHO is gmail.

The OTHER problem with having a nice UI is then people start to want to redesign every year, buy new logos, constantly adapt new design and FE trends (make it flat! make it angular! make it ES6! make it react! now pre-render on the server!).

Even more people like stable UIs.

  People who like modern UIs greatly outnumber
  people who like ones from the '90s.

Just like in games like shooters or Starcraft the pros actually turn down graphics settings - they don't notice the graphics any more so they don't are!

Same as why after a month you stop noticing the wonderful paintings you carefully selected for your home's walls. I haven't looked at mine in years. That#s why we get reddit /r/funny posts where people replace the family portraits in their parents house and then make a reddit post with the funny replacement picture "2 weeks and nobody has noticed anything yet".

Brains are made to tune out anything

a) not new

b) not used

So you end up with Google and reddit as major websites.

I'm not quite sure where that leaves websites like USAToday, but I highly suspect people learn to navigate it despite the graphics, and the design only serves to attract people initially. I on't think it helps retain users once they've been there for a while, except that keeping it stable helps keeping customers.

I know that Germany's top 1 or 2 news website www.spiegel.de (the other one competing for the top spot is a tabloid, bild.de) decided to stick to a much more text-based linear design even after a recent major redesign.

So while a look at actually successful websites doesn't tell us that simple designs always win your claim certainly isn't supported by the facts. Probably not as-is, and when it applies a lot of terms and conditions apply: What kind of people does a site attract? What kind of content do they serve? How long do people stay, how much do they interact with and use the site? Is it mostly "look at" content, or are there many interactions (reddit: lots of "using", USAtoday: mostly "looking")? Etc. I would make the claim the more people actually use a site (interact with the contents - clicking, navigating, writing, searching in the broadest sense, not just the "Search" function, for example trying to quickly find the top comments on a page) the less important the "fanciness"/"modernity" factor. As you use an interface your brain stops noticing how it looks and concentrates on how it feels (for example when it's always hard to hit that tiny "expand" icon on a comment thread right next to a complete different icon separated by only two pixels, how the icons look like will be lost).

Apartment searching on Craigslist was so bad for so long, services like Padmapper sprang up to supplement it. Now Craigslist has a similar mapping feature to Padmapper, but still far clunkier.

Their forums were never very good, and have largely atrophied.

Sometimes change is good.

There’s WhatsApp. A billion users, and 35 employees, running on less than 100 off-the-shelf servers.

It looks similar but to say it hasn't changed is silly

I love Medium and I hope it succeeds. It sounds like their headcount was substantially higher than it needed to be and that this layoff was the right move.

I wish Ev had mentioned all the additional facts that are in this article by one of Medium's investors: https://500ish.com/long-medium-b9ddfe2c3a0a#.ch2benant

Not the number of servers, necessarily, but running a big site with a small number of engineers.

https://blog.linkedin.com/2009/06/15/video-linkedin-scala-te...

(Video is offline)

To which Twitter's Nick Kallen replied on stage, incredulously, "... I don't think that's correct."

I worked with said person and I feel like he would get along very well with Arthur Whitney.

It's definitely easy to make guesses on how an org could be streamlined from the outside. Though Medium needed to grow quickly and that takes having a lot of people to create features, sell, etc. They didn't grow and needed to scale back and change their strategy. I've seen quite a few startups go through continuous hiring booms then layoffs over and over again.

But then again if you race to investor money and immediately have to make $1 billion to appease investors, it suddenly makes sense.

Now why you need 150 people to build a pretty straight forward blog platform is a very valid question...

Because it’s not straightforward, and it’ not that many people? Facebook has 100x that number. Twitter has 25x. Airbnb hired almost 10x that number in 2015 alone. Stripe has almost 4x that number.

the only hard technical part of Medium is perhaps their content recommendations, but thats it. dealing with a ton of pageviews is hard, yes but nowhere near the complexity of dealing with what others are doing. you can solve that problem with more machines and money if need be. hard problems (ie google search) can only be solved with PHDs and thinking.

While true, this doesn't really answer the GP's question, does it?

I'm guessing they have a lot more than 5 reviewers, writers, editors...

Interesting people freaking out about this when if you point out the bloat at Twitter (which dwarfs Medium many times over and goes years without shipping anything user facing) HN posters will jump to defend it just because they have a few dev centric open source projects that are widely used.