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