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This question gets asked pretty much every time there is an article about the size of tech companies. If you think about what is required for running something

This question gets asked pretty much every time there is an article about the size of tech companies. If you think about what is required for running something at the scale of Vine, 50 people makes a lot of sense, and if anything that seems somewhat lean.

PeCaN 10y ago
You still didn't explain why they need that many people. What exactly _is_ required for “running something at the scale of Vine”? Yes, they have/had a lot of traffic, but traffic in and of itself does not require a large staff to manage.
- timcederman 10y ago
  I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people, and for folks who work in the industry this should seem like a reasonable number just from their own experience. However, let's do some rough numbers. It says they had 3 product managers. I would guess this means 8-10 engineers. 3 QA folks would be a decent enough ratio. You've then got a GM, a head of product, head of UX, head of data science, head of BD, editorial lead, and head of engineering who all just left. We're up to 26 people already. Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over 40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, help centre and customer support, a DBA, ops, or IT support. Does that all make sense now? It's a company within Twitter and there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly. I'm not then going to go into what each person does each day, but with a product that you're trying to drive growth and new features for, while supporting existing customers, and just generally running a company, that takes a lot of bodies if you want to do it effectively and not cut corners.
  - mbesto 10y ago
    > Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over 40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, a DBA, ops, or IT support. All which presumably can be filled by pre-existing Twitter people. In the M&A world these are called "synergies".
    - timcederman 10y ago
      Depends on how they're running the company. Post-acquisition at my last startup it was much easier to keep our startup intact within the larger company. Regardless, the point is whether 50 people is reasonable to run something like Vine.
  - PeCaN 10y ago
    > I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people Good thing I didn't ask you to. > It says they had 3 product managers Seems like a lot of product managers for a company with one product which isn't especially complicated. Smells like a sign of hiring really fast to try to grow. > I would guess this means 8-10 engineers The fuck do they even do? You don't need that many people to make something like Vine. Unless I'm missing something and there's more to the service than the video-related social CRUD app? > You've then got a [bunch of dept heads] Eh, I can see those I guess. > Now we've got […snip handwaving about team sizes and numbers…] over 40 people easily. OK. > help centre and customer support Yeah pretty sure Vine doesn't have a custom support team. > ops [and] IT support If they're managing their own servers that would add a lot of overhead I suppose. If they're just running off EC2 or Linode or whatever then there's not a whole lot of staff there. > Does that all make sense now? No. > there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly I think it takes more people to work out a revenue model for Vine than to sustain 25-30 million active users. --- Basically, bullshit. In Vine's case, you really don't need a big engineering team, which means you don't need a lot of people to manage your engineering team. I find it much more likely that Vine hired a bunch of people (engineers and otherwise) with VC money when they were growing fast.
    - timcederman 10y ago
      If you think you can come run a team more leanly and successfully, I invite you to come do it - clearly, if there is a market inefficiency here you could reap the rewards.
      - bmon 10y ago
        This kind of reply isn't really that constructive, the guy raised some fair points... A lot of smaller companies and startups seem to do incredibly well with not even 10 employees, let alone 50. I understand there's more to running a company than meets the eye, but I really do wonder if all 50 people spend their days at vine being productive.
        10y ago
- skybrian 10y ago
  I don't know either but use your imagination. More traffic means more weird edge cases, more spam, more abuse, and more difficult policy decisions.
- taternuts 10y ago
  Video processing at that scale can't be that easy
rimantas 10y ago
Wasn't Reddit run by just a few just fine? Or am I imagining things.
- ForHackernews 10y ago
  Reddit is kind of a slow-burning tire fire. The site is down or responds with an error page frequently. They have no good revenue model, and they're too old to easily attract new VC funding. They're a small team because they don't have money to hire a bigger team. (Also, stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2u7ddq/the_real_reason_ryan_charles_was_fired_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2u7ddq/the_real_r...)
ForHackernews 10y ago
WhatsApp handles much more traffic than Vine (~1 billion users vs ~200 million) and they apparently do it with only about 50 engineers: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-use... I guess serving video is somewhat more complicated than delivering text messages (although texts need to be delivered in nearly real-time). Maybe staff size follows a logistic curve w/r/t traffic?
- ladon86 10y ago
  So WhatsApp had did have bigger team (you're comparing 50 engineers vs 50 employees total), and now it's even bigger. There are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp. It seems to me that WhatsApp and Vine have a similar staff to user to ratio.
  - g8oz 10y ago
    If there are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp I wonder why it's so difficult for them to continue supporting Blackberry 10. So what if it's not popular, they should aim for complete coverage of modern mobile OSes. Then again this is the same team that could not implement encryption without outside help.

PeCaN 10y ago

You still didn't explain why they need that many people. What exactly _is_ required for “running something at the scale of Vine”? Yes, they have/had a lot of traffic, but traffic in and of itself does not require a large staff to manage.

timcederman 10y ago
I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people, and for folks who work in the industry this should seem like a reasonable number just from their own experience. However, let's do some rough numbers. It says they had 3 product managers. I would guess this means 8-10 engineers. 3 QA folks would be a decent enough ratio. You've then got a GM, a head of product, head of UX, head of data science, head of BD, editorial lead, and head of engineering who all just left. We're up to 26 people already. Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over 40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, help centre and customer support, a DBA, ops, or IT support. Does that all make sense now? It's a company within Twitter and there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly. I'm not then going to go into what each person does each day, but with a product that you're trying to drive growth and new features for, while supporting existing customers, and just generally running a company, that takes a lot of bodies if you want to do it effectively and not cut corners.
- mbesto 10y ago
  > Now we've got some HR staff, maybe a recruiter or two, finance team, people underneath the UX, editorial, data science and BD teams (let's generously assume 1-2 hires each), and we're over 40 people easily. We haven't even discussed marketing, a DBA, ops, or IT support. All which presumably can be filled by pre-existing Twitter people. In the M&A world these are called "synergies".
  - timcederman 10y ago
    Depends on how they're running the company. Post-acquisition at my last startup it was much easier to keep our startup intact within the larger company. Regardless, the point is whether 50 people is reasonable to run something like Vine.
- PeCaN 10y ago
  > I'm not going to explain the individual job functions of 50 people Good thing I didn't ask you to. > It says they had 3 product managers Seems like a lot of product managers for a company with one product which isn't especially complicated. Smells like a sign of hiring really fast to try to grow. > I would guess this means 8-10 engineers The fuck do they even do? You don't need that many people to make something like Vine. Unless I'm missing something and there's more to the service than the video-related social CRUD app? > You've then got a [bunch of dept heads] Eh, I can see those I guess. > Now we've got […snip handwaving about team sizes and numbers…] over 40 people easily. OK. > help centre and customer support Yeah pretty sure Vine doesn't have a custom support team. > ops [and] IT support If they're managing their own servers that would add a lot of overhead I suppose. If they're just running off EC2 or Linode or whatever then there's not a whole lot of staff there. > Does that all make sense now? No. > there are a lot of specialized roles to keep something with 25-30 million active users a month running smoothly I think it takes more people to work out a revenue model for Vine than to sustain 25-30 million active users. --- Basically, bullshit. In Vine's case, you really don't need a big engineering team, which means you don't need a lot of people to manage your engineering team. I find it much more likely that Vine hired a bunch of people (engineers and otherwise) with VC money when they were growing fast.
  - timcederman 10y ago
    If you think you can come run a team more leanly and successfully, I invite you to come do it - clearly, if there is a market inefficiency here you could reap the rewards.
    - bmon 10y ago
      This kind of reply isn't really that constructive, the guy raised some fair points... A lot of smaller companies and startups seem to do incredibly well with not even 10 employees, let alone 50. I understand there's more to running a company than meets the eye, but I really do wonder if all 50 people spend their days at vine being productive.
      - 10y ago
skybrian 10y ago
I don't know either but use your imagination. More traffic means more weird edge cases, more spam, more abuse, and more difficult policy decisions.
taternuts 10y ago
Video processing at that scale can't be that easy

rimantas 10y ago

Wasn't Reddit run by just a few just fine? Or am I imagining things.

ForHackernews 10y ago
Reddit is kind of a slow-burning tire fire. The site is down or responds with an error page frequently. They have no good revenue model, and they're too old to easily attract new VC funding. They're a small team because they don't have money to hire a bigger team. (Also, stuff like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2u7ddq/the_real_reason_ryan_charles_was_fired_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/2u7ddq/the_real_r...)

ForHackernews 10y ago

WhatsApp handles much more traffic than Vine (~1 billion users vs ~200 million) and they apparently do it with only about 50 engineers: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/ http://www.wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-use... I guess serving video is somewhat more complicated than delivering text messages (although texts need to be delivered in nearly real-time). Maybe staff size follows a logistic curve w/r/t traffic?

ladon86 10y ago
So WhatsApp had did have bigger team (you're comparing 50 engineers vs 50 employees total), and now it's even bigger. There are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp. It seems to me that WhatsApp and Vine have a similar staff to user to ratio.
- g8oz 10y ago
  If there are hundreds of people working on WhatsApp I wonder why it's so difficult for them to continue supporting Blackberry 10. So what if it's not popular, they should aim for complete coverage of modern mobile OSes. Then again this is the same team that could not implement encryption without outside help.