Oh boy, another Hacker News commenter with zero experience running a large corporation telling experienced folks how they should run a large corporation. Better yet, with no explanation for why. The sheer arrogance.

Although few have any experience operating at that scale, one can make comparisons.

I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook. And they had 55 employees.

So obviously you don't need 4,000 employees for the technology at this scale. I'm not sure what in the world the other 3,945 employees are doing though.

You don't see how person to person and small group messaging is a more difficult engineering challenge than personalized feed multicast? It's also simpler to sell subscriptions than to sell targeted ads - there's at least one whole other product we don't see, which Twitter's advertisers use, and it's probably a few different ones for different sizes and kinds of advertisers. Clearly, there's also a whole group working on the firehose product discussed elsewhere in this thread.

I don't know anything about Twitter's business, but just in general, I agree with your parent commenter that this entire thread of conversation (which happens every single time) is embarrassingly arrogant.

Yes, I see some differences and added complexity. I don't see a nearly 100x difference. Sure, it's arrogant to question them with little inside knowledge. But I have been in business long enough to know that big, public companies do really, really stupid things sometimes.

I'm guessing you would have called people arrogant for questioning Equifax's security practices. After all, it's an enormous company with thousands of skilled employees (interestingly, only about 2x as many employees as Twitter and an arguably much more complex tech stack) and security experts checking and consulting. How could they possibly be wrong!?!

I don't think anyone should assume security practices at companies either are or aren't sufficient, without any knowledge one way or the other. Same thing with company size. Without actual knowledge, it doesn't make sense to assume it's too many, too few, or exactly the right amount.

But as with many engineering challenges, throwing more people at the problem doesn't solve it faster and often makes things worse. A harder problem to solve might just need and other person or two or more time but thousands of people? It does seem excessive, right?

Honestly, it's impossible for me to say whether it seems excessive, because I have no idea what it takes to run their business. But I don't think you have any inside information either, do you?

Let me put it this way: I think it's arrogant that management consulting companies think they can send in a couple recent ivy league grads to learn about a company for a few weeks and then suggest a bunch of changes. This is like that, but without even bothering to go in and learn about the company at all.

No, I don't know anything more that you. But I can contrast the scale of Twitter with other comparable, realtime, multi user sites like reddit and stackoverflow. Both of those sites have 230 and ~330 (I didn't count all the SO employees), respectively. And Stackoverflow is actually selling a product. Is Twitter so different from these sites?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit https://stackoverflow.com/company/team

> I do find it curious that WhatsApp was operating at a much larger scale in terms of users and messages processed when they were sold to Facebook

I recommend you search around HN before you make sweeping generalizations, there are numerous threads that explain how or why WhatsApp were capable of doing what they were. From a technical perspective, as a "core product", Twitter's business has more abstractions

To get you started[0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10225096

Does Twitter's business have 100x more abstractions? Because they have about 100x more employees.

It's a little arrogant, but the commenter is probably more or less correct.

Twitter is bloated.

Their headcount has expanded quite a lot over the last few years - and for what? Their service has remained the same and 'scale' beyond a certain point does not matter.

What is 'labour intensive' - sales? Sure. Maybe some support staff? I doubt they're full time, more likely in Phillipenes off the books.

I don't doubt for a second that they didn't need all those staff members - I've worked enough 'fast growth' places to see how 'hiring for the sake of hiring' happens, it's a political orientation, not really an economic one.

Moderation would be, if they actually did it.

But Im not wrong. Twitter was in dire straits a year ago. Saved by a reality show presidential candidate and might have their first profitable moment after 10 years of existence.

Twitter is easily overstaffed by looking at what they have produced over the years. Even if you shaved the bottom 25% of employees they could still be operational and extremely profitable. They are a public company, growth is stagnant, and expenses are extraordinary. It's not rocket science even for someone with sheer arrogance and zero experience running a large corporation.

No you're probably wrong

According to my Wikipedia research, they had ~2.5 billion in revenue last year and ~450 million in net losses

If they shaved the bottom 25%, to reach ramen profitability they'd need a savings of $450,000 per employee cut, and do that without having any negative impact on the productivity of the org as a whole (be it through hours worked or employee morale or additional churn)

Corporations are giant container ships moving in one direction, you can't just snap your fingers and turn 90 degrees

"Let's force ourselves to be profitable right now, regardless of the fact that it will destroy our future profitability"

Soundcloud just had a similar shock happen, and after all the people they had to fire, I would not be surprised if that will kill the company in the mid-term, even with their new investment. If you have no ability to innovate due to missing staff, there is a good chance that your competitors will eat you alive.

I think SoundCloud's downfall would be it's huge investment into record label deals, it's paywalling to support said deals and then the lack of adoption for it's subscription service for access to those label's music.

Essentially, SC tried to pivot to Spotify, pissed off free users, and let it's actual paying user base stagnate for 2 years.

Then all that capital investment had no return and they're stuck in big contracts with hefty guaranteed payouts.

10+ years of losing money.

According to the headline, Twitter has lost money every year of its existence. Random Google result says -$2 Billion profit as of 2016.

Anybody who has done better than that should feel free to give tips, in my view.

Idea: redirect Twitter.com to a Geocities page with ads for fidget spinners and fire everyone. I predict record profits.

it doesn't seem that arrogant to me to imagine yourself being able to turn a profit at a tech company bringing in 2+ billion dollars a year

Instagram had around 20 employees when Facebook bought them.

I've often wondered how Twitter ended up with so many people as well. I'd love to see a breakdown of what they are all doing.

Instagram’s CEO has said one of the most valuable parts of being acquired by FB is they could just hook into their vast revenue org (probably thousands of employees, and battle tested ad targeting tech and expertise). Twitter has to build its own, and I’m sure that accounts for most of their headcount.

For a while stories popped up describing Devs lounging around or playing table tennis, waiting for their stock to vest. I've no idea the truth in these anecdotes and they're annoyingly hard to find due to google finding lots of tweets instead of articles about twitter.

You can add -site:twitter.com to remove all tweets from your search results when you're trying to find something about twitter instead of something on twitter.

It's because they need the headcount to speculatively try to achieve the growth numbers needed to support their valuation.

Suppose they cut back to just keeping the lights on in engineering, along with obviously-profitable sales staff to sell advertisements and make business deals. Twitter is instantly profitable, but the net present value of those cash flows is something like a third to a tenth of their current valuation.

This is what happens when you over-fund a business at too high of a valuation. They do what they can to try to "grow into" the valuation, because otherwise management's junior equity positions and stock options are worthless.

This makes the most sense to me. Constant growth to meet investor expectations.

They can easily get by with 1000? Are you sure about that? What does the timeframe look like for reducing 75% of your workforce and what kind of costs would there be in such an initiative? What lay-off laws are tripped when you do this sort of mass firing?

In 2016, they spent $957M on marketing (which is the area I often hear people saying they should reduce), most of which was personnel expense, according to their 10K filing. I suppose it's easy to look at it and just say "cut it in half" (which would nearly make up the $457M profit deficit from 2016), but is that truly realistic? What affect would that have on top line revenue?

And you came up with that number, how? Do you have in-depth knowledge of what their staff makeup looks like? If you don't, how do you even begin to think about making such an absurd statement. You are saying that Twitter can continue to do what they do if they fired 3 out of 4 employees. You know what, you should propose this to their leadership, I'm sure they haven't thought of this great idea.

I'd fully expect many of those 4,000 to be sales staff, each of whom presumably brings in more than their salary in revenue to remain employed.

Twitter was massively overstaffed before they began to meaningfully grow sales. It goes back to the days of their faster user growth when they were anticipating competing with Facebook and having over a billion users. They built the company ahead of time for that outcome rather than restraining employee growth and focusing on profitability.

They could have probably done both, given what Facebook managed to accomplish financially. FB was profitable at $500-$600 million in sales and around 200 million monthly active users. At that same size Twitter was losing an immense amount of money. At the $2.5 billion sales level that Twitter hit in fiscal 2016, Facebook had around $750-$900 million in net income.

Sales Departments have way too many people. I like that they employ people, but that’s a separate conversation. On a team of 8 sales people, typically 2 people together sell enough for the team to break even. The other 6, usually because of poor sales territory luck, sell maybe half their salary worth of services, but since growth is everything, an employee who makes 100k but only sells 50k is considered valuable.

>On a team of 8 sales people, typically 2 people together sell enough for the team to break even.

Likely this is true for engineering as well. 25% of the team pulling the weight of the department.

Yes, but it makes sense for things that like to occur because when you think about it, firms care about the total contract value - meaning it might be a 50k contract per year for 2-3 years. Companies are looking at the longer term. At least that's how it is at my company. Clients generally sign a 2 year contract at $X per year. So if a sales person only sells 50k in a given year but every contract averages 2 years that's really 100k.

Right. As you said, companies aren't optimizing just for this year's sales; they're going to be balancing acquiring customers this year, the cost of each sale, and the retention of those customers year over year. So if a sales guy gets a huge commission and salary for the first year for his acquired customers, but the company's retention rate is high, then that sales person's salary could be paying multiples in revenue over several years.

Are those numbers from a study or something?

Probably just anecdotal numbers from experience. I've seen similar things as well. The division of prospects/accounts is kind of a big deal, and usually defaults to geographical area or industry as the primary dimension, with size/revenue of prospect as the secondary.

Given that, if you're selling something like Github or container management services, you can imagine that the person who's selling in the Pacific West Coast region might be having an easier time of things than the guy who has the mid-west. This isn't universally true for all products, but sales people will complain about leads being bad in any industry (see: Glengarry Glen Ross).

All of that is to say is that empirically, usually there are a few outperformers on any sales team that are crushing quota, and a bunch of others who are skating by at fractions of quota until they get canned. As some evidence, there's a lot of churn in sales teams and for the average sales person, which is partially because of the above, and also because good sales people will kill it as a company is getting a lot of adoption, and then jump ship when a better opportunity arises.

So maybe there's been a study on this stuff, but you could talk to any number of people who work in sales orgs and hear similar stories without the study.

Oh, and yes, when companies get 'serious' about sales, you'll see sales quickly expand to encompass a third or half the total company size. I won't make any guesses as to whether that actually makes sense and how many people are being productive, but large sales orgs are common in my understanding.

I see, thank you for the reply. I guess someone might want to make similar claims about an engineering team, but eng teams probably don't have hard numbers to judge with.

How's that been working out for them? All the sales staff in the world hasn't made them ANY profit.

> each of whom presumably brings in more than their salary in revenue to remain employed

Good sales people bring in enough revenue for a company to be profitable. But I have no idea how many sales people Twitter has, I think even if they had 100 it'd be plenty.

Add one zero.

Remember that Twitter works in multiple countries and in different languages. Then there is a lot of face to face meetings required, so add offices and service staff as well.

1-1,5K would sound reasonable for global sales and customer services.

I would agree, but I think their sales is doing a terrible job if they have that many and are not bringing the appropriate amount of money.

I would blame management/top more, than sales. Sales can work only with products they were given. AFAIK Twitter was pretty aggressively hiring 2-3 years ago sales reps across the globe and they were stealing top employees from FB and co.

I would assume that it is the lack of products/top commitment that causes poor sales.

I agree again, I think there is a lot of blame to go around in Twitter, also another reason why I think they could have a healthy purge and move forward with some fresh vigor.

i think their past issue was having to hire more sales people to scale revenue in a manual fashion talking to companies rather than having a robust programmatic platform they can rely on to bring in revenue with fewer headcount. not sure if this is still a problem for them or not.