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> And, by nearly every metric, he had achieved remarkable success. Under his tenure, the company had grown from 300 employees to around 4,100. Eurgh. I never u

by blowski 10y ago

> And, by nearly every metric, he had achieved remarkable success. Under his tenure, the company had grown from 300 employees to around 4,100. Eurgh. I never understand how the number of employees you have can be a success metric. By that logic, becoming more efficient would be a bad thing.

shin_lao 10y ago
It would mean something in a profitable company as growing the workforce and keeping a company profitable is a considerable challenge.
- rco8786 10y ago
  And Twitter has never turned a profit
- beambot 10y ago
  To GP's comment... I'm not sure growing the workforce is the "considerable challenge" that matters most either. blowski's point about efficiency still stands -- all other things being equal, achieving the same result with fewer employees is more laudable.
rwmj 10y ago
What do 4,100 employees even do at Twitter? It's not that complicated.
- blowski 10y ago
  To be fair, it must be pretty complicated to actually keep it running. Then you've got all the security, spam detection, designers, UX people, search engine, multi-lingual features. And then you've got the overhead of any medium-sized business - marketing, PR, sales, accounting, admin, HR (have I missed anything?). I guess it does add up. But (so as not to contradict myself) just having all those people doesn't count as an achievement. It's just a cost of doing business that you want to keep as low as possible.
  - virtualized 10y ago
    Ten percent of that number still sounds ridiculously high for such a site. They don't even have one competent UX designer. Why would they need dozens of them doing nothing?
- paulsutter 10y ago
  They show each other powerpoint presentations.
- mikeryan 10y ago
  The backend systems for Twitter - advertising, data analysis, spam prevention, infrastructure etc is vastly more complex what you see in a feed of 140 characters. Plus sales and marketing budgets are huge. Whether any of these systems or human resource needs are required to be running at that scale is probably the question hitting Jack directly in the face. I think the ballsiest move he could make would be to shrink it all down to core services. But Wall Street would shit itself with that sort of contraction.
  - jgalt212 10y ago
    > spam prevention Yes, plenty on spam prevention, but seemingly little on bot prevention. Without the bots, there'd be so many less MAUs.
- SEJeff 10y ago
  Twitter has some legitimately hard tech problems. At MesosCon last week (which I was at in person), they stated that their largest Mesos cluster was over 30,000 physical nodes. Believe it or not, handling the hundreds of millions of tweets (or more!) per minute they handle at peak load is an unbelievably difficult technology and platform problem. This takes a team of really smart people to manage. That being said, I'd be shocked if a large number of that headcount weren't marketing and ad sales associates as that is what supposedly keeps the lights on.
imron 10y ago
How many employees did WhatsApp have when it was bought for $19 billion? Signficantly less than 4,100.
askldfhjkasfhd 10y ago
I think of it like a rough heuristic. It's a coarse-grained, single metric, but it does have some meaning if you don't use it as the end-all, be-all. Replying to your comment made me wonder: what would a better metric be? The requirements are that it has to be numeric, a single number, and represent the "success" of any company, in all lifecycles (before fit, growth, mature, yellowpages, etc.)
- blowski 10y ago
  If Company A hires lots of juniors while Company B only hires seniors, Company A is going to need a lot more people to achieve the same level of 'success'. So using this as a 'rough heuristic' would suggest Company A is doing much better than Company B, even though their wage bills may be about the same. What's more, we know nothing about the performance of either company. In another scenario, Company C has outsourced most of its operations work, while Company D does it in-house, so Company D has more employees. Again, this tells us nothing about performance. What's wrong with using net income as a single number?

by blowski 10y ago

shin_lao 10y ago

It would mean something in a profitable company as growing the workforce and keeping a company profitable is a considerable challenge.

rco8786 10y ago
And Twitter has never turned a profit
beambot 10y ago
To GP's comment... I'm not sure growing the workforce is the "considerable challenge" that matters most either. blowski's point about efficiency still stands -- all other things being equal, achieving the same result with fewer employees is more laudable.

rwmj 10y ago

What do 4,100 employees even do at Twitter? It's not that complicated.

blowski 10y ago
To be fair, it must be pretty complicated to actually keep it running. Then you've got all the security, spam detection, designers, UX people, search engine, multi-lingual features. And then you've got the overhead of any medium-sized business - marketing, PR, sales, accounting, admin, HR (have I missed anything?). I guess it does add up. But (so as not to contradict myself) just having all those people doesn't count as an achievement. It's just a cost of doing business that you want to keep as low as possible.
- virtualized 10y ago
  Ten percent of that number still sounds ridiculously high for such a site. They don't even have one competent UX designer. Why would they need dozens of them doing nothing?
paulsutter 10y ago
They show each other powerpoint presentations.
mikeryan 10y ago
The backend systems for Twitter - advertising, data analysis, spam prevention, infrastructure etc is vastly more complex what you see in a feed of 140 characters. Plus sales and marketing budgets are huge. Whether any of these systems or human resource needs are required to be running at that scale is probably the question hitting Jack directly in the face. I think the ballsiest move he could make would be to shrink it all down to core services. But Wall Street would shit itself with that sort of contraction.
- jgalt212 10y ago
  > spam prevention Yes, plenty on spam prevention, but seemingly little on bot prevention. Without the bots, there'd be so many less MAUs.
SEJeff 10y ago
Twitter has some legitimately hard tech problems. At MesosCon last week (which I was at in person), they stated that their largest Mesos cluster was over 30,000 physical nodes. Believe it or not, handling the hundreds of millions of tweets (or more!) per minute they handle at peak load is an unbelievably difficult technology and platform problem. This takes a team of really smart people to manage. That being said, I'd be shocked if a large number of that headcount weren't marketing and ad sales associates as that is what supposedly keeps the lights on.

imron 10y ago

How many employees did WhatsApp have when it was bought for $19 billion? Signficantly less than 4,100.

askldfhjkasfhd 10y ago

I think of it like a rough heuristic. It's a coarse-grained, single metric, but it does have some meaning if you don't use it as the end-all, be-all. Replying to your comment made me wonder: what would a better metric be? The requirements are that it has to be numeric, a single number, and represent the "success" of any company, in all lifecycles (before fit, growth, mature, yellowpages, etc.)

blowski 10y ago
If Company A hires lots of juniors while Company B only hires seniors, Company A is going to need a lot more people to achieve the same level of 'success'. So using this as a 'rough heuristic' would suggest Company A is doing much better than Company B, even though their wage bills may be about the same. What's more, we know nothing about the performance of either company. In another scenario, Company C has outsourced most of its operations work, while Company D does it in-house, so Company D has more employees. Again, this tells us nothing about performance. What's wrong with using net income as a single number?