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> Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical emp
by freyir 10y ago
> Blogger, Blogspot, Livejournal, Tumblr, Medium, they're all in this same space
So why does Twitter need 3,800 employees? Why does it need 1,500 technical employees?
Sure, it gets more traffic than any of those other sites, but growth has slowed and the traffic is more or less stable. The core product hasn't changed significantly. Their most ambitious innovation in recent years (Periscope) was an acquisition. What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? It seems like Twitter is optimally set up to burn money.
- intoverflow2 10y ago> What do the bulk of these engineers work on, day to day? Not the Mac app that's for sure.
- niftich 10y agoTwitter puts out a LOT of software, and open-sources a good portion. I don't know if this is smart in the sense of being overstaffed relative to their revenue, but they do it regardless. Some examples: [1] Fabric, an SDK for mobile apps - https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html https://docs.fabric.io/android/fabric/overview.html [2] Heron, a realtime, distributed, fault-tolerant stream processing engine - https://github.com/twitter/heron https://github.com/twitter/heron [3] Finagle, a fault tolerant, protocol-agnostic RPC system - https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ https://github.com/twitter/finagle/ [4] FlockDB, a distributed, fault-tolerant graph database - https://github.com/twitter/flockdb https://github.com/twitter/flockdb [5] Ruby implementation of the ICU (International Components for Unicode - https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb https://github.com/twitter/twitter-cldr-rb [6] Clockwork Raven, Human-Powered Data Analysis with Mechanical Turk - https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven https://github.com/twitter/clockworkraven [7] Gizzard, a flexible sharding framework for creating eventually-consistent distributed datastores - https://github.com/twitter/gizzard https://github.com/twitter/gizzard [8] Twemcache, a Twitter fork of Memcached - https://github.com/twitter/twemcache https://github.com/twitter/twemcache [9] Twemproxy, a fast, light-weight proxy for memcached and redis - https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy https://github.com/twitter/twemproxy [10] Iago, a webapp load tester - https://github.com/twitter/iago https://github.com/twitter/iago [11] Ospriet, a bestof/voting app - https://github.com/twitter/ospriet https://github.com/twitter/ospriet
- rpgmaker 10y agoI think Fabric does "help" their revenue ID'ing all those phones where Fabric-enabled apps are installed.
- jessaustin 10y agoGreat list! At some point, I think this would have included Bootstrap as well?
- freyir 10y agoThanks, I wasn't familiar with many of these projects. I'm still not sure whether all this output justifies the staff, or whether they're over-engineering the hell out of a microblogging service.