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I'm not going to pretend you can run Twitter on an DigitalOcean box for $40pm with one guy. But when I see things like $100m in losses - I can't help but feel
by laurencei 10y ago
I'm not going to pretend you can run Twitter on an DigitalOcean box for $40pm with one guy.
But when I see things like $100m in losses - I can't help but feel there is a real opportunity for Twitter to streamline its engineering and operational costs?
Is there a breakdown available of where/how they spend their money?
- onewaystreet 10y agoThey have 3,860 employees.
- rublev 10y agoDoing what? Holy shit.
- riprowan 10y agoDid you like this? [Yes / No]
- bluedino 10y agoSales, user engagement, quality control...
- wott 10y ago> quality control Weren't we talking about Twitter?
- _nedR 10y agoFwiw, this article was posted was just the other day on hn : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12626314
- ghaff 10y agoYep. And, frankly, even within large or large-ish profitable companies, it's not uncommon to hear people making complaints along the lines of "What on earth do all the people in $XYZ_GROUP even do?" Now, I have no doubt that there are indeed inefficiencies within many companies and those inefficiencies tend to increase with scale. But there probably aren't 4x the number of people in finance, for example, that there need to be.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ng12 10y agoTheir Boston office is almost entirely Fabric/Crashlytics. Almost nothing to do with Twitter proper.
- riprowan 10y agoI have the same belief. The business could easily be run with a fraction of its current overhead -- IF it was willing to accept a "small is beautiful" existence. The problem is, "small is beautiful" doesn't get you multibillion-dollar IPOs....
- ethbro 10y agoIf a company morphs into a non-profit, I can't imagine that would be good for existing holders of options (pointedly including upper management who would make the decision in the first place).
- chatterbeak 10y agoWe routinely run 5MM simultaneous TCP/IP connections on a single 12-core box (with Erlang!). There's no reason for Twitter to need all those employees and all that hardware. If someone can get it at a fire sale price, and reduce it to 100 employees, they can have a nice business.
- pessimizer 10y agoWhatsapp? edit: which had a ratio of 1 engineer to 16 million active users when acquired http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-architecture-facebook-bought-for-19-billion.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-archi...
- sosborn 10y agoHow big would your salesforce (and supporting components) be?
- mattmanser 10y agoTwitter's needs are several orders of magnitude greater than that, and those kind of problems have a habit of being exponential. It's not even the same kind of problem, they've got to tailor their response to every user. Finally, their investors simply cannot accept 'a nice little business'. They need Twitter to deliver serious ROI.
- komali2 10y agoIf Twitter only needed to serve the states, sure. But they need to sync servers globally and provide decent bandwidth to every corner of the developed world. That's a big $ technical problem.
- ghaff 10y agoAs a point of reference, even the Wikimedia Foundation had almost 300 staff and contractors as of 2015. This is admittedly a lot fewer than Twitter employs today. However, I suspect that even a minimalist Twitter without sales, etc. needs more employees and would have more of other types of costs than Wikimedia.
- bunderbunder 10y agoI don't know, but they do seem to need a lot of developers, and developers don't come cheap. Summingbird and Heron come to mind as quite-probably-very-expensive projects that seem to solve some very Twitter-specific problems. My completely uninformed, biased, pulled-out-of-thin-air suspicion is that said problems are largely self inflicted. It reminds me of Fog Creek's longtime insistence on using their own in house programming language.
- blackkettle 10y agoFogCreek uses their own in-house programming language? Is there more of a story there?
- bunderbunder 10y agohttps://blog.fogcreek.com/the-origin-of-wasabi/ https://blog.fogcreek.com/the-origin-of-wasabi/ https://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-1/ https://blog.fogcreek.com/killing-off-wasabi-part-1/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago> when I see things like $100m in losses Twitter lost $521MM in 2015, $578MM in 2014 and $645MM in 2013. Hundred million dollar losses would be a step forward at this point.
- logicallee 10y agothe problem is that by other metrics twitter is doing pretty well. There are very important people who will engage you in conversation (such as here) and ask you to DM them on twitter. That's insane.
- komali2 10y agoWhat do you think would happen if Twitter didn't exist? You'd probably just email them or something.
- logicallee 10y agohuh? If cell phones didn't exist, you would make an arrangement to go meet someone at a certain time and place, and if you both didn't show up, OH WELL. "stood up". That doesn't diminish from the value and buy-in of cell phones and is a bizarre argument to make regarding the value, if any, of twitter.
- sanderjd 10y agoI don't really get this analogy. Cell phones are a qualitative improvement in that situation. How is sending a DM an improvement over sending an email?
- logicallee 10y agoI guarantee you that every single person sending and receiving DM's has an email address, so you'll have to ask them.
- wott 10y ago